Queen of Coal: the story of Patagonias first woman miner lands on Netflix

Film director Agustina Macri believes things happen for a reason. That includes the timing of her latest film Queen of Coal, a biographical drama about the first trans woman to work as a coal miner in Patagonia. The film premiered in theaters earlier this year and, as of today, is available on Netflix. Queen of Coal is based on the remarkable true story of Carla “Carlita” Rodríguez, a trans woman who struggled through a life of discrimination and violence to become the first female coal miner in the town of Río Turbio, Santa Cruz, in 2011. Starring Chilean-U.S. trans actress Lux Pascal, the film chronicles Carlita’s battle to enter a male-dominated industry long bound by an 80-year-old superstition that women underground brought bad luck. Mining culture in Rio Turbio, Macri explains to the Herald, goes far beyond people’s wages. “It runs through the people in every way, their routines, their daily life. The mining company employs about half the town,” she says. Most of the people in the film are locals, a choice she made to reflect that culture more accurately. When casting the role of Carlita, though, Macri says the first choice was always actress and model Lux Pascal, the L.A.-based sister of Hollywood star Pedro Pascal. Lux, who had recently transitioned, took the part as her first leading role, a decision Macri describes as “very brave.”Even though Carlita met Lux during the first part of the shooting in Spain, the goal was not to thoroughly recreate the original Carlita, a decision Macri and screenwriter Erika Halvorsen made to deliver “a film that would be mostly luminous.”“You don’t need to be so explicit about everything she went through, especially the violence. I thought we could tell that story in a more poetic, sweeter way, if you wish. Because I feel we all want stories that embrace us a bit more, rather than dramas that boost our own everyday dramas.”  Bringing down an 80-year-old myth The starting point for Queen of Coal was a news article on Carlita by writer and showrunner Halvorsen, who later adapted the story into a film script. When Carlita found out her life was being turned into a Netflix film, she viewed it as a gift from life after “so much struggle on my shoulders, an acknowledgement I had never had.” Carlita identifies as a travesti, a gender identity in Argentina with deep political roots that is worn with pride. Halvorsen, who grew up in Río Turbio, found it fabulous that a travesti had been able to hack the system, break the structure from within, and usher in change to let women work alongside men. When she was in her 20s, Carlita pulled up her hair, removed her makeup, and used her ID issued under her male name, to get hired. She was assigned to work down the mine with the rest of the applicants — all men.  After Argentina’s Gender Identity Law was passed in 2012, Carlita was able to legally change the gender on her ID a couple of years later. Paradoxically, this was when the old discriminatory superstition kicked in: now that she was “officially” a woman, she was reassigned to a desk job on the surface. It was her male coworkers who fought to get her back into the mine with them. Months later, she returned. A taste for system challengers  The daughter of Argentina’s right-wing former President Mauricio Macri, Agustina says she has an instinctive attraction to strong, outcast women who clash with the society that excludes them, something she defines as “a mixture of genuine interest with a very strong emotional element.”  Her previous film, Soledad, was based on the true story of Soledad Rosas, a young Argentine woman who became an anarchist in Italy in 1997 and was arrested in 1998 on eco-terrorism charges, only to die by suicide while under house arrest that year.  “I guess I am more interested in people who come to challenge the system rather than the ones inside the system,” she says.  “The film will spark whatever it has to, for better or for worse, but I believe it’s necessary, especially in times like these, to remember that trans women deserve their rights and freedoms just like everyone else,” says Macri. Lux Pascal in Queen of Coal Since taking office in December 2023, President Javier Milei’s government (which Macri senior has supported) has rolled back LGBTQ protections, dismantling key agencies like the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity. The president has used inflammatory rhetoric linking “gender ideology” to abuse, drawing criticism for his hostile comments about gay and trans people. On a call with the Herald, Carlita agrees with Macri. “I see so much hate everywhere in Latin America, in presidents and in how they enable society to keep exercising discriminatory actions and violence,” she says. “We really need to change that.” Carlita has certainly done her part. Since being allowed back down the mine, she has kept fighting the system. The mine, which employed about 2,000 people, didn’t have a gender or diversity department. She began by designing a strategy to implement that perspective into the company, an effort that took years of promoting debate in the workplace to slowly bring down years of sexism.  “We started to get women together and tell them ,‘Girls, you have a right.’ We did a ‘pilot test’ and brought four women coworkers down into the underground mining area,” she recalls.  “And just like that, we brought down 80 years of myth.”