I remember once seeing her teach a whole group of young queens who had recently come to Canada how to properly walk in heels. I also remember in the early days when she would personally be involved in choreographing and producing the pageants from top to bottom. I witnessed her yelling at drag queens who she felt did not put enough effort into their costumes. She believes in the importance of entertainment and would not tolerate shoddy performances. So Rico has had a drag show every single Friday at 1 a.m. She believed that if you have a successful formula, don’t change it. We are first to her.” - NICOLE BATISTA, MISS EL CONVENTO RICO 1992–’93 We are safe there because she didn’t let and doesn’t let anybody bother us. Maritza is a straight woman but she goes all the way in terms of helping us drag queens and making us feel at home. But not straight like Maritza is straight. It was a little bit sketchy, and they were using us. I got my start at another bar, La Pantera Rosa – The Pink Panther. I was crowned the very first Miss El Convento Rico, in 1992, and I still go there every Saturday.
Fridays and Saturdays they had the shows, then on Sundays they had dance classes and a free buffet to bring people in. People don’t go out to this kind of place on a weekday. But you know, it didn’t work on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday – no. We all went there and loved it – and it was busy. Then one of the big guys that we all know in the Spanish community talked to Maritza about trying out Convento Rico on Sundays. “In the beginning, Rico’s was a straight club, but it wasn’t working. At El Convento Rico, I’m Mother Superior.” - MARITZA YUMBLA, OWNER The nightlife industry is pretty much the opposite of a church, but I wanted to have a convent of my own. It might sound funny but I loved their habits: I just thought they were so elegant.
When I was a little girl, I always wanted to be a nun. I said of course, and it progressed slowly from there.Įl Convento means ‘the convent’ in Spanish. Then one day one of my performers asked if she could bring her family to watch one of the shows she was in. the gay community was facing a lot of discrimination, so at the beginning maybe we discriminated back a bit and said, ‘No straight people.’ That’s how it was for a while: You could only come in if you were gay. I opened El Convento Rico when I was 27 and I had to prove all those people wrong. Some even had families that didn’t know what they were doing.īeing a young Latina immigrant in the ’90s, I faced a lot of pushback myself: people saying I wouldn’t make it, and basically feeling like a second-class citizen. Most of our performers were performing secretly because people would give them trouble back then. “When we first opened, there was gay bashing.