©2009 NWSA Journal, Vol. 21 No. 3 (Fall) El Ambiente According to Her: Gender, Class, Mexicanidad, and the Cosmopolitan in Queer Mexico City ANAHI RUSSO GARRIDO El ambiente in Mexico City has been examined as a queer masculine space or subculture. In this article, I relect on el ambiente analyzing the perspective of young women who take part in it. El ambiente is here understood as an affective network of individuals that congregate in tem- porary and more established spaces. I argue that el ambiente in Mexico City should not only be understood as a space where queer gender and sexualities are produced, but also as a space deeply marked by class and symbolic global hierarchies. Based on ethnographic work, I explore a differently situated “gendered” perspective of el ambiente and its intersections with age, class, and ethnicity in post–NAFTA Mexico City. Keywords: queer / space / gay / lesbian / gender / women / sexuality / class / ethnicity / nationalism / Mexico / ambiente It was April 30, 1998, I’ll never forget. I arrived dressed as a boy, in fact at the entrance they sent me to the men’s line for security check . . . I was looking at a very beautiful woman and next to her a very beautiful woman. Or a very muscular guy, with a similar man. Ha. Ha. How bizarre! I never had seen this, and I thought that it was very strange. —Xia, interviewee On April 30, 1998, Xia rode the bus from her home in Estado de México to visit a popular queer club located in the Zona Rosa, a central neighborhood in Mexico City. A friend had explained to her where the club was located. That night she decided to explore el ambiente otherwise known as queer Mexico City. Nonetheless, this club was only a small part of the so-called ambiente. In the following months, Xia would make some friends in el ambiente that would introduce her to diverse facets of it: Crowded upscale clubs, empty cantinas with loud jukeboxes, lesbian support groups, burger and quesadillas at the lesbian cafés, the house of new friends and their extended families that gathered on Sundays, new Web sites to ind over the Internet, and so on. El ambiente in Mexico City has been predominantly represented as a space of male same-sex sexuality. The purpose of this essay is to examine el ambiente in Mexico City from an unexplored perspective: The perspec- tive of young women who take part in it, and from this viewpoint, uncover the dynamics of gender, class, and cosmopolitan identiication that are at play in el ambiente. I argue that not only are particular gender and