About this Project

This digital archive is part of Euge Stumm’s Ph.D. dissertation on gender and sexual dissident language assemblages in Latin America. The development of the corpus data was supervised by Professor Steven Butterman and the implementation of this website was supervised by Professor Susanna Allés-Torrent. We are currently working on a bilingual version (in Portuguese) of this project, expected for the Spring of 2026.

This project aims at providing scholars and general audiences with:

• 1) a departure point for understanding and learning Pajubá
• 2) a historical and geographical visualization of the language, tracing its differences and similarities through space and time
• 3) a resource in English for scholarly research on the cryptolect

What is Pajubá

Pajubá is a cryptolect (a secret language) originally developed by Brazilian travestis and trans women, and eventually adopted by a broader community of gender and sexual dissidents in Brazil. As Gabriela Araujo highlights, Pajubá’s vocabulary includes significant influence of Western African languages (e.g. Yoruba) and European languages (e.g. Italian and French). The use of Pajubá serves as both a form of cultural expression and a means of protection, allowing speakers to communicate safely in hostile environments and marking membership and belonging to each other.

How to Use This Archive

• For Researchers
  • Browse by region, time period, author and genre, or lexicon
  • Download full metadata for analysis
  • Access full methodological documentation
  • Browse both primary and secondary sources
• For Students and General Public
  • Explore an interactive map** showcasing regional variations
  • Listen to audio samples (with translations and/or transcriptions, when available)
  • Read historical documents and Pajubá samples

How This Project Was Made

For further information on data collection, encoding, and methodological procedures, check the section “Method.”

Funding and Sustainability

This project received a grant of $1000 dollars from the Digital Humanities Fellowship of the University of Miami. Stemming from a Minimal Computing philosophy, the website is hosted in the form of a static Jekyll webpage through GitHub Pages and the database is hosted by Google Spreadsheets.

Acknowledgments

We extend profound gratitude to the Pajubá speakers, LGBTQIAPN+ activists, and community organizations who developed, preserved, and shared cultural expressions in Pajubá. We also thank the University of Miami’s Center for the Humanities and Digital Humanities for providing funding for this project.

Contact

For collaborations, inquiries, and technical assistance, please contact Euge Stumm, estumm@miami.edu.

Pajubá Digital Archive Utilizes CollectionBuilder Framework

Special thanks to @gbventura and colleagues for their implementation of a bilingual version of CollectionBuilder. This bilingual edition forks the technology they developed.