Houston Drag Queen Adriana LaRue up for Spot on Mexican Reality Show

Local drag phenom Adriana LaRue is throwing her hat in the ring as a potential contestant on the Mexican reality show

La Más Draga. The show has been broadcast since 2018, and this is LaRue’s third time competing to get on the show.

“I auditioned the past two years, and I didn’t make it,” she says. “It’s been three years in the making—auditioning, creating content, and recording all of my Houston performances to be able to showcase what I can do. So it’s been three years of, like, preparing for this moment.”

La Más Draga is a Mexican drag reality competition show streaming on YouTube and produced by La Gran Diabla Producciones. Based on the format of RuPaul’s Drag Race but adapted to Mexican pop culture, the show aims to find the best drag artists of Mexico, Latin America and the rest of the Hispanosphere.

Unlike RuPaul’s Drag Race, though, La Más Draga has live auditions to pick the season’s contestants. Out of the 1,806 people who submitted a video package last year, LaRue was one of 33 chosen to go to Mexico City for the live auditions.

A fan of the show since it first aired, it was the first season’s finale that truly clenched her love of the show.

“During the Season One finale, one of the girls pulled out this massive painting from her back, and that solidified that this show is different,” she says. “This is art. This is Mexican art that needs to be showcased in Texas. That solidified my entire love and admiration for this specific franchise.”

Previously, the show featured only Mexican performers, but the producers have since opened it to Hispanic people from many nations.

“With all this other art that’s being showcased from around the world of Latin artists like myself,” says LaRue, ”we get to showcase our Mexican culture. They saw that there was a window of opportunity to bring in different sorts of Mexican culture from various US states into their show, and make the show bigger than what it already was.”

LaRue, who was born and raised in Houston by parents born in Mexico, says, “Being able to show my Mexican Tejano culture from here and bring it to Mexico is just one of those feelings that is unexplainable. It just feels so good to be able to represent more than just Texas drag. We can represent Mexican Tejano culture in drag in Mexico.”LaRue comes from a family of drag queens known as the LaRue Legacy. One of her sisters, Reign LaRue, has been instrumental in helping her prepare for the auditions.

“She is one of the best in Houston,” says LaRue about her sister, “so she’s the one who is helping me with everything: getting my mind in the right place and keeping me humbled and grounded, and stuff like that. My whole drag family is very excited about this opportunity.”

LaRue has been performing since 2015, when her friends took her to see a drag show at the now-razed Meteor.

“I instantly fell in love with drag, and then they threw me on the stage,” she recalls. “Ever since then, I’ve never gotten off the stage. Fast-forward to nine years later, and it is still truly what I love to do.”

Catch LaRue on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at JR’s, every other Wednesday at South Beach, the third Wednesday of the month at Ripcord, Saturdays at Tony’s Corner Pocket, alternate Sundays at either Rich’s or Boheme, and Sunday evenings at JR’s.

Follow Adriana on @adrianaxox2, on TiKTok @adrianaxox2 and at facebook.com/adriana.larue.9.