☆ CARIBBEAN MERMAIDS ☆
This new edition of Balam, titled No. 12: Caribbean Mermaids, is a photographic archive that seeks to open space for the histories, visualities, archives, geographies, and cultural moments that shape and redefine the social, artistic, and political imaginaries of the Caribbean and its diaspora, in dialogue with its queer/cuir, Afro-Caribbean, and Indigenous communities.

Featuring the participation of over 20 contributors and photographers, this issue builds a wandering, provocative, and vindictive gaze that demands a radical shift in perspective from Caribbean history: it is not about reconstructing a single, linear narrative, but about embracing what Édouard Glissant terms “Relation“—a poetics founded on multiplicity, creolization, and the unpredictable archipelago of identities.

From this vantage point, Balam becomes collective, oceanic, and polyphonic. Here, the consciousness of LGBTIQ+ dissidents strives to destabilize imposed subjectivities and generate ways of performing, theorizing, and mapping knowledge on their own terms. This enables the retrieval of a “forgotten memory” that transcends the isolation enforced by colonial fragmentation, allowing archives articulated through transfeminist and decolonial lenses to rewrite the past around communities claiming their infinite truths and dignities.

In this light, the works gathered here and their creators function for Balam as medium figures: corporal bodies that transcend binarisms and insist on new ways of inhabiting the territory. Through them, an alternative way of imagining the region takes shape, both from within and from without. Sirenas del Caribe thus gains coherence through these practices: it becomes a mode of thought that engages in dialogue with Caribbean Afro-Indigenous liberation theologies through politically “incorrect” figures. These figures are capable of carving out space for a proud, irreverent, and unapologetic subjectivity that refuses to be contained within a single category. Their voices pave the way toward a Caribbean modernity rooted in spirituality, eroticism, fluidity, and ancestral excess.