Where transgender Latinas share nightmares, dreams
Chapters across L.A. County give strength to often isolated members
Brenda Del Rio González scurried into the room, trailing her signature sound — the click-click-click of stilettos on tile. She stood silently in the doorway, waiting for the other women in the support group to spot her.
“¡Hermanita!” a woman shouted, hopping up for a hug.
“¡Hola, reina!” Del Rio said, pointing invitingly at a steaming pot of chile con carne on a table against the wall.
No, thank you, the woman said, I’m on a diet. Del Rio rolled her eyes playfully, promising that a little meat never wrecked anyone’s figure. Across the room, decorated with motivational mottos like “Sí, se puede” (Yes, we can) and “You’re a star,” another woman swiveled in her chair and clipped the top of a plastic foam cup with her foot, sending a cascade of coffee across the tile.
“It’s the hormones!” the woman squealed. “I blame the hormones!”
“¡Ayyyy, Diooooooos!” Del Rio trilled, drawing out each syllable with vibrato.
It was 4:15 p.m. on a latewinter day, time for another meeting of the Long Beach chapter of Transgéneros Unidas, a Spanish-language support group for transgender women.
For two hours every Thursday, the women, who range in age from early 20s to mid-60s, gather in a lowslung office building wedged between a seafood market and a piñata shop. Inside the pink-walled room, the women unravel old, painful memories of police abuse and parental rejection. They swap gossip and confide secrets
amid the fellowship of those whose traumas remind them of their own. “This place is like a church,” said Samantha Becerra, 45, who grew up in Guadalajara.
The meetings provide a needed refuge — a once-aweek respite from the toolong stares of strangers and the heaviness of hyper-vigilance. Transgender women are disproportionately targeted as the victims of hate crimes in L.A. County.
Most of the group members, including Del Rio and Becerra, emigrated from Mexico, where transgender women face pervasive violence from relatives, drug cartels and the police, according to a report from the Transgender Law Center and Cornell University Law School. A few women in the group are undocumented, Del Rio said, but in recent years most of them have been granted asylum or another form of relief called a “withholding of removal,” which allows them to stay in the U.S. but doesn’t provide a path to permanent legal status.
To win asylum, an exceedingly rare feat for people fleeing Mexico, transgender immigrants must prove they’ve been persecuted or have a well-founded fear of persecution.
Over the last decade, asylum officers and immigration judges seem to have become more knowledgeable about transgender people and more willing to grant them asylum, Del Rio said, but she worries that will change as President Trump vows to scale back asylum for all immigrants.
Brooklyn Law School professor Susan Hazeldean, who represents LGBTQ people in immigration proceedings, says despite legal challenges and the risks that transgender people face when seeking asylum in the U.S., including reports of abuse while in detention, she expects that large numbers of transgender migrants will continue to seek refuge.
“People are fleeing desperate violence,” said Hazeldean, who co-wrote the report about transgender people in Mexico.
Del Rio, 51, the group’s beloved leader, who pulls her auburn hair into a bun and wears a stack of bangles on her wrist, starts every meeting with a pep talk. She tells the group that she knows the lies in their minds — that they’re ugly and unworthy, that nobody could ever love them or want them for anything other than sex. She’s had those thoughts too, she tells them, but they’re lies.
She rocks gently in her seat, locked in eye contact, as new members open up, sharing memories of the uncle who molested them or the police officer who punched them in the nose. She leaves space for digressions and for jokes, knowing that laughter is a key part of therapy. But she isn’t afraid to gently challenge flawed thinking.
“Muchachas! Muchachas!” Del Rio shouted at the start of a recent meeting, her way of asking the group to quiet down.
The women walked to chairs arranged in a circle, and Del Rio gave them the week’s theme: hate crimes and suicide in the transgender community. It was the same topic used that week by other chapters of Transgéneros Unidas in Hollywood, El Monte, South L.A. and the San Fernando Valley, all run by Bienestar, a nonprofit focused on health issues affecting Latinos and the LGBTQ community. The support groups — which began in Hollywood in 1997 and now have about 100 regular members in all — each set their own agendas and priorities.
After Del Rio explained the theme and opened the discussion, the conversation quickly strayed.
The first group member griped that she found the gruff, loud voice of a transgender woman she knew in Mexico disrespectful — you’re a transgender woman, the group member said, act like it.
“I know women who sound like Pedro Infante,” Del Rio said, referring to the legendary Mexican ranchera singer.
Across the circle, Leslie Salas — a 35-year-old Lyft driver who grew up in Ciudad Juárez and now lives in Long Beach with her husband — raised her hand.
“Go ahead, Leslie,” said Del Rio, who moderates the group as part of her job at Bienestar.
Stroking her curly blond hair, Salas told the group she’d gone outside for a smoke the other day and noticed her neighbor’s friend staring at her.
“Oh, you’re a man?” he asked.
Her English isn’t great, Salas said, and she hadn’t fully grasped what was going on, but something in her gut told her to leave. Back inside, she stewed, frustrated with her just-ignore-him impulse. Why hadn’t she yelled at him? But the more she thought about it, the more she liked her response.
Becerra nodded, saying that yelling could have escalated into violence. “You didn’t fall into the fire,” she said. “It’s good you’ve been coming to these groups.”
At the meeting the following week, Del Rio discussed cultural differences she’d noticed within the transgender community.
Many transgender Latinas, she said, transition young and have as many surgeries as they can afford, dreaming of a slender nose, big breasts, a curvy body. They love glamour, she said, because that was the image of femininity they saw as children. American women sometimes run errands in slippers, Del Rio said, but growing up in Mexico, she rarely, if ever, spotted women in public without a pair of heels and lipstick.
Many transgender Americans she knows, particularly white women, transitioned in their 50s or 60s, having spent their younger years studying, working and raising families, Del Rio explained. When they transitioned, she said, they had accumulated wealth, putting them higher on the socioeconomic ladder.
“Oh, like Caitlyn Jenner,” a young group member said.
As transgender immigrants living in the U.S., the women face dual barriers. Beyond the gnawing fear of hate crimes and of whatever Trump might do next, many of the women feel burdened by their uncertain English.
Without a command of the language, they say, it’s hard to find good work. And it’s even harder for undocumented group members, who dream of, but don’t dare risk, trying to get an ID with their chosen name and appropriate gender marker.
At a recent meeting, Del Rio asked the group if, despite the struggles, they thought life was easier in the U.S.
“Definitely,” said Adriana Devechie, 51, who grew up in the Mexican state of Jalisco. “Things are a bit more open here, more tolerant.”
Growing up in Ciudad Juárez, Salas said, cops often targeted her and other transgender women, detaining them without cause and demanding oral sex and money. Rosalinda Cortez, 46, recalled that when she was 17, policemen in Tijuana pulled over the car she was riding in for having a burned-out taillight. One officer told Cortez he recognized her, spewing slurs as he forced her into his patrol car. The officer and his partner drove her from station to station, inviting other officers to taunt her.
“Look, she’s so hot!” they said, chortling. “Come look!”
But they’ve experienced police harassment in the U.S. too, several group members said. And they’ve started to see encouraging cracks in the power of machismo back home.
One member’s relatives, who long insisted on speaking to her using male pronouns, have come around to calling her Jenny, and on a recent trip to Mexico, another member noticed that nobody tried to touch her in public. It felt so different, she said, from her memories of men throwing rocks and trying to pull down her skirt.
Risking everything
Del Rio’s life — especially the difficult parts — makes her uniquely suited for her job.
She grew up the youngest of 16 siblings in a village surrounded by strawberry fields in the Mexican state of Michoacán. Her father was a farmer, a serious and hardworking man, and her mother was a small-town girl with an open mind.
She never doubted her parents’ love, and her brothers and sisters defended her.
As a teenager, during what Del Rio calls her “boy look” — she felt like a woman but identified publicly as a gay man — a series of boyfriends beat her, disgusted by her dream of one day taking hormones.
She moved to Guadalajara for college and studied business administration but traveled home at 23. She needed to talk to her mother.
“Mom,” she said. “I’m a transgender woman.”
Her mother knew. Even as a child, she said, Del Rio had played and dreamed like a girl. Your father and I accept you, she said, we love you.
Two years later, Del Rio started her physical transition, taking hormones and having an operation on her nose. One day, during a bleak time punctuated by another abusive partner, Del Rio’s friend came to her with a proposal.
“Grab your suitcases!” she said. They were moving to Hollywood.
She knew the city, and its stars, from postcards, and she craved adventure, so Del Rio told her mother she was planning to move. Her mother offered a blessing before she left.
“Que te vaya bien, Brenda. Que te vaya bien, mi hijo,” she said, slipping into calling her “my son,” which didn’t bother Del Rio, as she wished her well. “It’s time for you to fly.”
She was 27 and planned to stay for a year, long enough, she figured, to save $5,000 — $1,000 for breast implants and $4,000 to open a beauty salon when she returned to Mexico. But she loved Los Angeles and adored the food and the weather — the way everything felt rich and sexy.
“I was living my American dream,” she says.
She discovered Transgéneros Unidas and began volunteering for Bienestar. At night, she staked out spots outside clubs or in alleys, handing out condoms and ham sandwiches to transgender women who did sex work.
“My God,” she remembers thinking, “my community needs me.”
On June 3, 1998 — a date she knows by heart — she started working part time as a health counselor at Bienestar. It was time to give up her old job as an escort, she realized, wanting the women to look to her for professional advice, not to worry about competing for clients.
Shortly before Christmas in 2007, Del Rio’s father was dying from cancer. She didn’t have legal status in the U.S. and knew it would be risky, but she needed to see him. She wanted to ask for his forgiveness if she’d ever hurt him.
“I told him, ‘Thank you and I love you,’ ” she recalled. “We hugged and cried and said goodbye.”
After a week, she left Michoacán and headed north to the San Ysidro Port of Entry with a green card with a fake name she had bought from a coyote.
The customs officer asked to look inside her purse, found her passport and detained her.
She told officials her story — about the policemen in Guadalajara who demanded oral sex and took humiliating photos before leaking them to a local newspaper — and asked for asylum.
After five months in detention in San Diego, she won her case, and in 2015, she says proudly, she became a citizen.
“I cried tears of excitement,” she said. “Everything I fought for has been worth it.”
‘I’m suffering’
Back in the pink room on another Thursday, the women scooped pollo encacahuatado onto plates and settled into a circle.
“How much would it cost to get my nose done?” one of the newer members asked.
“Between $4,500 and $7,000,” Del Rio said, adding that it would cost $1,500 in Mexico. Another woman mentioned that she knew a good doctor in the state of Jalisco.
Del Rio announced that Bienestar had health counselor job openings in Panorama City and Pomona. It’d be hard work, she said, but they could do it if they were passionate and ready for a change, just as she had been years ago.
“Back then I told myself, ‘I’m going to give up being a Hollywood ballerina,’ ” she said, cupping her hand over her mouth, as if telling a secret.
“A prostitute,” she said, feigning a whisper.
An infectious laugh crawled around the circle, but then the room fell quiet, as if they’d all just remembered the same thing: Del Rio’s retirement. It’s still three years away — by then, Del Rio says, it will be her 25th year at the job and time for a break — but group members already worry about it. Who will understand them like she does, a woman asked?
Del Rio waved off the attention.
For several minutes, the conversation turned to more concrete topics — how to improve your credit score, how to find an affordable house. (“Move to Rialto!” one woman shouted.)
A few minutes later, a growing clack-clack-clack across the room began to sound like feverish typing at a keyboard. It was the right shoe, a gray Nike sneaker, of group member Evelyn Rodriguez, tapping the tile.
“I want to say something,” she said, her voice shaking. “It’s not easy to be here with you all, because, obviously, you are beautiful, so pretty.”
“You’re very beautiful!” someone said from across the circle.
“Well, I’m beautiful, but that’s something different,” she said, rubbing the stubble of her shaved-off eyebrows. “I’m trying to understand myself, do you know what I mean?” They nodded. “I’m suffering,” she said. “I’m in process. I’m trying to trust my process.”
“You will return as a butterfly,” Becerra told her.
The room roared with applause, and a shy smile stretched across Rodriguez’s face.