March 31, 2023 • 57 mins
When pioneering trans activist Lorena Borjas first arrived in the U.S. in late May of 1981, she found both community and an epidemic. Through her experiences on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, NY, Lorena developed a personal approach to connect trans Latinas and trans sex workers to critical medical and legal resources. Decades later, it would be another massive health crisis—COVID-19—that would take the life of this beloved community leader, putting into stark relief her vast legacy. Now, her closest friends paint an intergenerational portrait of Lorena, as a trailblazer, a mentor, and a mother.
This award-winning episode originally aired in May 2021.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ola Migrido. Listener, here's an award winning episode from our archios.
It's called Lorena's Alcanse.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Lorena's phone was always on and she was the one
that will go to hate you out of Jaila keeping
me safe.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
She became like a mother.
Speaker 4 (00:20):
Her ability to help people escape trafficking situations, abusive situations,
unsafe situations with the police. I've never seen anyone like
that before, and I doubt I will ever see anyone again.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
From Futro Media and p RX, It's Latino Usa. I'm
Maria Rosa. Today, three years after her passing, we remember
the life and explore the legacy of Lorena Borgaz. She's
known as the mother of the trans Latina community in Queens,
New York. Originally from a small town in the coastal
(01:08):
state of Veracruz, Mexico, Lorena arrived in the United States
in May of nineteen eighty one, just a few days
before her twenty first birthday. Less than a month later,
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the first
recorded case of a new and lethal virus spreading in
(01:29):
the United States.
Speaker 5 (01:31):
Which shows as a lifestyle of some male homosexuals has
triggered an epidemic of a rare form of cancer.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
This newscast from nineteen eighty one and the media at
large portrayed HIV and AIDS as the gay illness, some
reporters even calling it gay cancer. But even as the
deathol from AIDS grew in the following years, little was
being done to provide much needed treatment.
Speaker 6 (02:01):
Is right.
Speaker 5 (02:02):
The demonstration was carefully choreographed by act UP, a two
year old coalition of gay groups set up to fight
what they called the government's in action and silence on aid.
Speaker 7 (02:13):
We have to let people know that there's an edge crisis,
that people are dying, that we need money, that we
need healthcare.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
While the AIDS epidemic is recognized as a catalyst for
organizing in the LGBTQ community, trans immigrant women are often
left out of the narrative. In nineteen ninety five, at
the peak of the epidemic, Dorena, who had become HIV positive,
began what she called her Alcanse, or her outreach. She
(02:45):
was distributing condoms to trans immigrant sex workers in Queens,
New York. It was a means of not only addressing
the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, but also a way
of connecting trans immigrants to critical medical and legal services.
After decades of work building networks of mutual aid, it
(03:06):
would be another massive health crisis, COVID nineteen that would
finally take the life of this beloved community leader. Today
on our show, The Story of Lorenaz Alcanse. It's an
intergenerational portrait of a pioneering activist, and we're going to
see her life through the eyes of the women who
(03:28):
knew her as a mother and as a sister in
their struggle. To tell this story, here's producer Julia Rocha.
Speaker 8 (03:39):
It's March a, twenty eighteen International Women's Day. Lorena sits
at a Duncan Donuts on Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights.
Queen's the neighborhood that she's lived and worked in for
forty years.
Speaker 9 (03:53):
Oh so you Noelina, trans get you le Fla.
Speaker 8 (04:03):
Lorena calls herself a survivor, a trans Latina who's overcome
many obstacles in her life. It's almost nine pm. She
looks tired after a full day of work, but her
day is far from over. The backseat of her car
is full of boxes with condoms that she'll soon hand
out to sex workers in the neighborhood. She's talking to
(04:25):
Sophia Serre Campero, one of the producers of this story.
Speaker 10 (04:35):
Kia Luma.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Chardo.
Speaker 8 (04:45):
Lorena remembers growing up in Cosama. At twelve years old,
she was learning to put on makeup and loved to
secretly try on her sister's clothes. Her family often called
her a hoto, which is a derogatory term for gay.
One day, they caught her in her sister's clothes and
beat her. At just fourteen, she moved to Mexico City
(05:08):
on her own, where she would meet her first trans friends.
Speaker 10 (05:11):
Makoian Lucca.
Speaker 8 (05:13):
Lorena says that her friends used to call her Luca,
and while she found community in Mexico City, she also
found danger and discrimination.
Speaker 9 (05:25):
The Onficiala in Nomcho cam mahem mipuer Vas Peola Criminaco.
Speaker 8 (05:34):
Lorena says that one day five men forced her to
the top of a building and threatened to throw her
off the rooftop. She still hadn't transitioned and was terrified
that the violence would only get worse when her body changed.
In nineteen eighty one, some of her friends had come
to the US to access gender affirming medical treatment, and
(05:56):
they encouraged Lorena to do the same. Just a few
days before turning twenty one, Lorena across the border.
Speaker 9 (06:06):
Ermite tomas Americasi.
Speaker 8 (06:09):
I feel more American than those who were born here,
says Lorena.
Speaker 10 (06:13):
Aqui baisefer a del.
Speaker 9 (06:19):
Usi a chapel d alfargoro, lucap in sect on the
filmin alcolica inober for a paseaqi in America tapahive.
Speaker 8 (06:31):
Lorena says that in the US she became strong. It
was in the US that she learned about sex, work, drugs, alcoholism,
So she says, if she went through all of that here,
then this is her country. Lorna's first job as an
undocumented immigrant was assembling furniture at a factory. She made
(06:54):
just enough to rent a room in Queens and buy
subway tokens. Then, in November of nineteen eighty six, a
stroke of.
Speaker 11 (07:01):
Luck, This bill, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of
nineteen eighty six, that I was signed in a few
minutes is the most comprehensive reform of our immigration law
since nineteen fifty two.
Speaker 8 (07:14):
Lorena secured legal residency in the US through Ronald Reagan's
immigration amnesty. With her new papers in hand, she applied
to Medicaid and began her hormone treatment. She was able
to get a legal work permit, a new job at
a belt factory, and eventually a scholarship to Turo College,
where she studied accounting. After school, Lorena would hang out
(07:36):
at Port Authority bus terminal.
Speaker 12 (07:41):
Back then, you know, we didn't really have a lot
of places to hang out.
Speaker 8 (07:46):
That's Christina Herrera. She's an immigrant from mel Salvador and
one of Lorena's oldest friends. Aside from being one of
the country's busiest bus terminals, Gristina remembers Port Authority felt
like a mercalo, fast paced, lively gathering place and one
of the few places where trans people didn't feel as
(08:06):
targeted by the police. It was Import Authority that a
friend introduced her to Lorena in nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 12 (08:13):
She had a big smile on her face, she had
a pile of books on her hands, a big bag,
you know, hanging from her shoulder, and she had a
pencil on her ear, very like schoolgirl.
Speaker 8 (08:25):
Christina was fifteen years old, and Lorena's schoolgirl look stood
out to her. At the time, higher education, a career.
All felt out of grasp.
Speaker 12 (08:35):
Back then, like our reality was okay, so you're here
in New York, You're gonna do sex work in order
to begin your transition for the hormones and surgeries.
Speaker 8 (08:47):
It was a reality. She started noticing around Port Authority.
Speaker 12 (08:52):
Every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night, like around ten pm,
you would see this tall, slim Caribbean trans women walking
down talleras mohernas.
Speaker 8 (09:05):
From Port Authority. They would catch the seven train to
Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens.
Speaker 12 (09:12):
One night, I'm like, so where are you going and
stepping and they're like, are we going to work?
Speaker 8 (09:16):
Roosevelt Avenue had become a hub for sex work.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
When you look up and Roosevelt Avenue, you don't see
the moon and the start, you see the seventh train.
Speaker 8 (09:27):
That's Cecilia and Tilly, who will hear more from later.
She's describing the elevated train tracks the tower above Roosevelt Avenue.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
And it's very very very known.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
You see a lot of taxis and a lot of
black cars, food cars with tackles and banadas, and a
lot of people very very drunk because they are coming
out of so many little bars. When doors open from
the you hear music, and as the door is closing,
(10:05):
that music goes away. So it's a beautiful chaos.
Speaker 8 (10:13):
As Lorena began to transition, she felt less and less
accepted at her place of employment, and in nineteen eighty nine,
she decided to leave the belt factory. With a meager
unemployment check, Lorena found herself two months behind on rent.
A woman that she knew offered to help get her
money doing sex work. The woman began arranging clients for
(10:35):
her in exchange for a cut of her profits. Lorena
say she was coerced to meet with ten clients a
night and had no idea how much money was being
cut from her earnings. Blindley Edges, the legal director at
(10:55):
Transgender Law Center and an attorney who would represent Lorena
years later, says that these kind of situations were common.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
With the combination of discrimination, inability to access employment, inability
to access housing, inability to access safety. In general, it
creates a higher likelihood of being victimized, whether it's in
an abusive romantic relationship, familial relationship, or what I have
seen extensively becoming a victim of human trafficking.
Speaker 8 (11:23):
During this time, Lorena was also a victim to abusive
partnerships where she was forced to do sex work.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
Trans people are very rarely identified as victims of human trafficking,
even when the information is right there in front of
law enforcement, social service providers, and attorneys.
Speaker 8 (11:38):
Her friends say it would be years before Lorena recognized
herself as a survivor of human trafficking victor are.
Speaker 13 (11:46):
You for.
Speaker 11 (11:48):
For a f.
Speaker 8 (11:54):
Lorena says. It was then that she began to use drugs,
many times provided by her clients who would pay a
extra for Lorena to use substances with them. Here's Christina again.
Speaker 12 (12:04):
We saw additch NASA basic reality. It was like a
copy mechanism that our community was using just to kind
of like survive.
Speaker 8 (12:13):
But as Lorena began using drugs, the US also ramped
up its criminalization of drugs and the expansion of policing
and communities of color. Then, in March of nineteen ninety four,
New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's administration implemented what was known
as quality of life policing, which aimed to quote unquote
clean up the city by allowing broader officer discretion to
(12:36):
stop question frisk and arrest for minor offenses. Arrests in
the trans community became more and more common.
Speaker 12 (12:46):
One day, I was eating a chuso an asura, like
at nine o'clock at night, and they'd like drop it.
I'm like, why am I going to drop it? I
just bought it right now, and they're like, drop it.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
You're coming in.
Speaker 8 (12:58):
The loose language of quality of life policing made it
so that simply carrying condoms on you could be used
as evidence of prostitution. On top of that, New York's
anti loitering statutes, colloquially known as the Walking while trans Band,
gave police the discretion to detain anyone they presumed to
be loitering for the purposes of prostitution. While the statute
(13:28):
was finally repealed this past February, data cided by the
New York State Senate shows that as recent as twenty eighteen,
ninety one percent of people arrested under this regulation were
black and LATINX, with eighty percent identifying as women. Lorena
says her encounters with the police were always violent and humiliating.
Speaker 9 (13:51):
Irato's date PASAA is defont t the u La te Conason.
Speaker 8 (13:58):
Base Lorena would face several charges for prostitution, according to Linley,
all a direct result of human trafficking. Although Lorena hoped
to apply for naturalization and had even studied for the test,
her convictions made her ineligible to renew her green card
or applied to become a US citizen. In her last arrest,
(14:21):
the judge gave her a warning. One more arrest and
she would be sent back to Mexico. Carrying condoms was
increasingly putting trans women of color at higher risk of
arrest and deportation. While HIV infection in the trans community
(14:45):
continued to rise.
Speaker 12 (14:46):
We were saying more of our peers become HIV positive.
Always knew is that people were dying all the time
and getting really stick. The messages that we were getting
from media was that it was a gay illness, ending
one that was like a part of the LGBT community
was going to die of ads.
Speaker 8 (15:04):
In the mid nineties, Lorena herself became HIV positive.
Speaker 12 (15:08):
Back then, disclosing about being HIV positive was like a
really big deal. We were just afraid of rejection. So
I don't know if she was able to speak about it.
Early in the beginning of her illness.
Speaker 8 (15:23):
The crucial early stages of the epidemic were met with
a complete lack of government response. Although cases of death
and infection from HIV rose dramatically since the virus was
first discovered in the US in nineteen eighty one, President
Reagan did not publicly acknowledge the AIDS crisis until nineteen
eighty five. For years there was no treatment, and even
(15:45):
when it became available, it came at a steep cost.
Speaker 7 (15:49):
It's the only government approved AIDS drug in America at
ten thousand dollars a year cost per patient. It's prohibitively
expensive for most and not widely available.
Speaker 8 (16:00):
In nineteen ninety three, the CDC reported that black and
LATINX people accounted for fifty five percent of the over
one hundred thousand AIDS cases reported in the United States
that year. Trans people faced added barriers when trying to
access care.
Speaker 12 (16:16):
I don't believe that there were any trans led organizations.
So a lot of times that services were like for
gay men, a lot of times we were misgendered. They
wouldn't allow us to use her prefer name, and a
lot of it was geared towards people who were non immigrants,
so people that spoke English people that had documentation. In
(16:37):
a way, we felt like that was some of our reality.
You engage in sex work, like you make that your career,
and then you get AIDS and then you die. We
wanted more than that.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Coming up on Latino US, Lorena decides that if her
community isn't getting the services they need, she'll bring the
resources to them her alganse her outreach begins, stay with us, Yes, Hey,
(17:57):
We're back. And before the break, we'd been listening to
the story of the pioneering trans Latina activist Lorena Borgaz.
In the mid nineteen nineties, at the height of the
AIDS epidemic, Lorena would develop a personal approach in order
to connect trans immigrants and sex workers to the critical
medical and legal resources they needed. Back Now. To producer
(18:21):
Julia Rocha, it.
Speaker 8 (18:28):
Was on Roosevelt Avenue in the heart of Queens that
Lorena was witnessing her community grapple with a crisis that
the world didn't want to acknowledge.
Speaker 9 (18:41):
Jeg Avan facilmente, mila bor jego are partillo borge potat crescendo,
moues trances a young vextando sevan moriendo.
Speaker 8 (18:52):
Lorena remembers that by the mid nineties, a condom was
a lot more than a piece of rubber. Due to
criminalization of sex work, condoms could be used as evidence
for prostitution charges. At the same time, trans women were
facing high rates of HIV infection. In nineteen ninety five, Lorena,
who herself had become HIV positive, started to volunteer at
(19:16):
a hospital of eight patients. Realizing that the condoms weren't
getting to those who needed them most, she began taking
condoms from local clinics to distribute to sex workers on
Roosevelt Avenue. In the early years of her work, Lorena's
office was the wheelie bag that she carried with her everywhere.
Speaker 12 (19:38):
Lorena loved to always carry like a little senior City
Saint shopping cart. She would tuck in there like a
lot of her olders with resources, so she would really
like pack a lot of stuff in there. I don't
know how she would even carry it up the train
station because some trains didn't have elevators back then. And
I'll be like, Lorena, how do you do this?
Speaker 8 (20:00):
Walking down Roosevelt Avenue with her Carrito, Lorena got to
know people, and everyone got to know Lorena.
Speaker 12 (20:08):
She would remember everybody's name. She would walk down Roosevelt
Avenue like stopping people and being like, you know you
want this information or do you need any condoms? She
always had like a Walth Resources.
Speaker 9 (20:22):
Labors AA GESU informata.
Speaker 8 (20:26):
As she met people on Roosevelt Avenue, Lorena would connect
them to medical and legal services. She was building a
network and encouraging others to take on this organizing work.
By the mid nineties, Lorena and Christina, who had just
gotten a degree in human services, wanted to create the
support networks they wish they had had when they first
(20:49):
arrived in New York.
Speaker 12 (20:50):
We were seeing some community members that were nearly diagnosed
and they didn't know where to live and stuff. So
I would take them in similar to you know, it's
like Latino culture on the cave ds. You know, even
if it's a little studio, ten of us can fit here.
Speaker 8 (21:09):
Lorena felt there were no spaces specifically for trans Latinas,
transsex workers and HIV positive trans women, so she created
those spaces in her own apartment, known as La Caajai
Los Rios. The Matchbox Lorena Studio became a welcome center
for transwomen who would find themselves without a place to go.
(21:31):
If they fled violence and discrimination in Latin America, if
they were evicted, if they were released from prison, if
they were ostracized from their families, they would all find
refuge and a home with Lorena.
Speaker 12 (21:45):
Back in the mid nineties, there were central for this
is controlled HIV intervention which was like a safety net party.
And like a safety net party was that you gather
a group of friends and you invite them to your
house and you provide them with HIV prevention, education and condoms.
(22:05):
If an agency wanted to provide HIV testing, you would
invite into your house and they would do the testing
in the bathroom. And so Lorena I used to love
to do those groups at her house.
Speaker 8 (22:17):
Most of this would be unpaid work and the costs
would come out of her own pocket from the money
she would get cleaning houses and from sex work.
Speaker 12 (22:25):
A little by little bit, her mission to really save
lives also helped her propel herself to at different place
where she saved herself. She got cleaned from drugs, she
stopped drinking, She was in recovery for many many years.
Speaker 8 (22:42):
Lorena would go on to host the first transcenered HIV
support groups at the Eighth Center of Queen's County, but
even as she partnered with local organizations, she never left
behind her outreach on Roosevelt Avenue. It was through her
alganse one night in two thousand and five that Lorena
met Cecilia and Tilly. Cecilia, who had fled gender discrimination
(23:06):
in Argentina, had moved to New York in two thousand
and four, and she was making good money as an escort.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
I was invited to go to a club call Atlantis
at the time, which later became Evolution.
Speaker 8 (23:23):
When she arrived at the club pounding with loud music,
Lorena was at the front door giving out condoms.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
And when she saw me, I could see the excitement
in her and I remember she saying like, oh you
brokeet pra Oh you're very beautiful where you come from?
Speaker 3 (23:41):
And she asked me a couple of questions.
Speaker 8 (23:43):
Cecilia asked what she was doing, and Lorena explained.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
I remember she called it I can't say. I used
to ask HER's like, what is I can say, what
does that mean? And she said I can't say it
Like when you go to the people, you go to
the Street, and I thought her she was a little
bit too invasive for me. And I was living and
feeling and doing fabulous, you know, at the same time,
I was also using a lot of drugs.
Speaker 8 (24:14):
Life would reunite Lorena and Cecilia a few years later
at a different moment in Cecilia's life.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Because of that specific addiction, I lost my apartment and
I became homeless, and I started getting arrested and going
back to do street sex work. And one of those
days I ended up going to work on roosewellt Avenue
(24:40):
and there she was again offering me condoms like she
did years before, and this time I needed it.
Speaker 8 (24:52):
Cecilia remembers how Lorena approached her with the same warmth
as the first time they met. Lorena offered Cecilia about
to eat and advice about staying safe on Roosevelt Avenue.
Cecilia would soon find herself in a trafficking situation, and
when one of the houses that she was working at
was raided, she too experienced the criminal justice deportation pipeline,
(25:15):
going from Rikers Island to an iced detention center until
she was finally released with an inkle bracelet and was
able to access long term substance treatment. Her case manager
recommended Cecilia support services at the LGBTQ Center.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
I started going to meetings in Jackson Heights that where
in Spanish, and guess who was there, Lorena war Has Again.
Speaker 8 (25:40):
Cecilia began to look at Lorena's work differently.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
I wanted to give, like you know that person that
it was myself a couple of years ago who was
like using drugs, working in the street, access to healthcare.
So I asked Lorena, you have to connect me with
the girls, and she says, like, no, I'm not going
to connect you with the girls. If you want, you
can with me and do our reach like what she
told me the first time, I can say.
Speaker 8 (26:05):
Lorena invited Cecilia to walk with her as she distributed
condoms on Roosevelt Avenue.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
The first time, I made a terrible mistake of going
on high heels and looking like professional. I had to
leave right away because I couldn't talk on his She says, like,
no girl to dinner Kevin in Chang class.
Speaker 8 (26:23):
Next time Cecilia joined Lorena, she got to see more
of her strategy. Word on the street was that having
three condoms or more would get you in trouble with
the police.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
So Lorena walk up and down Roosevelt Avenue and she
always want the girls to have two condoms with them.
Every time that you use one day co Lorena and
Lorena would run and give them another one. So they
always have two condoms, but they never have three condoms.
But they always have condoms. But the problem was these
(26:57):
that while all these girls were walking Roosevelt Avenue with
two condoms, Lorena was working Roosevelt Avenue with hundreds of condoms.
And she said, the police know me, They're not going
to stop me, you know, and if they do, they do,
(27:17):
somebody has to do it.
Speaker 8 (27:24):
As Lorena saw more and more of her community getting
arrested with charges of loitering for the purpose of prostitution,
she began mobilizing, knocking on the doors of nonprofits to
get money to pay for the bail, transportation, and fees
of trans people who would get picked up by the police.
Lorena's lawyer, Linley, describes how they first met because Lorena
(27:46):
was always at the courthouse.
Speaker 4 (27:48):
I was representing one young transwoman who is in jail
on felony assault charges, and I needed her birth certificate
somehow in walks this woman and she said, I hear
you need someone's birth certificate.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
And I was like, who are you?
Speaker 4 (28:05):
And she just looks at me. She's like, I'm Lorena.
So she digs into her bag, which I later called
her Mary Poppins bag, and out pops this original birth
certificate for this young person I'm representing in Rikers and
I'm just like what. I was like, how do you
have this? She's just like, I'm Lorena, and I'm like okay.
Speaker 8 (28:22):
While doing this kind of work, Lorena entered the Sylvia
rivera Law project as a client. She began to learn
more about the criminal justice system and its overlap with
the immigration system. She started to connect other women in
her network with legal advisors and ultimately help them file
for asylum petitions. Here, she met Chase Strangio, a lawyer
(28:43):
and trans writs advocate. Together, in April of twenty twelve,
they officially launched the Lorena Vojaz Community Fund to provide
bail and bond assistance to trans people. At the launch,
the crowd cheers as Rena cuts a ribbon held by
Christina and some of Lorena's friends and colleagues. Two months
(29:07):
after the launch of the Lorena a Boaz Community Fund.
Lorena attended a conference in Philadelphia where she met Liam Winslett. Liam,
who at the time was twenty three, was a guest
speaker at a panel about the persecution she faced as
a trans woman in.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Ecuador gan A Tobasala.
Speaker 8 (29:31):
Lorena approached Liam after her presentation and gave her a hug,
thanking her for what she shared. In the following days,
Liam opened up to Lorena and told her she was
hoping she could stay in the US and then migrate
to Canada to seek political asylum. Liam wanted to start
her transition and knew she couldn't do it in Ecuador.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Do you any who Iotada?
Speaker 8 (29:56):
Lorena told Liam to come to New York, promising to
help get settled. A couple of days later, Liam arrived
in Port Authority. She remembers she was nervous. She didn't
know how to get around or what train to take,
but she managed to get to Queen's which was celebrating
the Pride Day parade.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Il Contre Club Evolution Kerasa.
Speaker 8 (30:22):
She found Lorena sitting outside Club Evolution, Lorena's second home,
as they gave out condoms to bypassers. Lorena would tell
Liam about the lawyers, doctors, and therapists that she would
connect Liam with doom In Lolvida, Lorena told Liam, you
(30:49):
can't be without papers in this country. Not having your
paperwork would mean to stay in the shadows forgotten. You'll
fight and I'll fight with you, and she didnt.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
Katya malonaa.
Speaker 8 (31:14):
In Lia remembers sitting at that table on Roosevelt Avenue
with Lorena, feeling loved valued heard for the first time.
From that moment on, Liam and Lorena were inseparable. In
the following weeks and months, Lorena would walk with Liam
to make sure that she made it to her medical
(31:36):
and legal appointments, and Liam remembers that arriving with Lorena
always made a difference. Providers knew her and she felt
that they treated her with respect.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
Oh just sacking it to significa the Lokysona.
Speaker 8 (31:58):
Liam, who had been doing community outreach in organizing since
she was twelve, started to work alongside Lorena. Yes, Lorena
would tell Liam, you know a lot. Liam in turn
would often tell Lorena, your work has power. Lorena, however,
would brush it off. A Lorena began getting recognition and
(32:24):
awards for her decades of community work, but at the
same time, Liam recalls Lorena feeling insecure about her language skills,
thinking this was a reason that some people may disregard
her woldo to Liam, Cristina, Cecilia, and many others in
(32:45):
her community encouraged Lorena to create her own organization, but
when Lorena sought out the help of established organizations and
institutions around the city, she soon found doors shut. Liam
recalls how they were often encouraged to continued to do outreach,
but to stay away from leading a whole organization.
Speaker 12 (33:10):
Lorena, you know, she had built a huge network up
like lawyers, medical provider, she had developed relationships with, like
the court system in Queens.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
She dared to dream to have her own organization. And
that's where, like, you know, she was like Cecilia, you know,
how can we get money?
Speaker 8 (33:30):
It became a Saturday virtual Lorena would go over to
Cecilia's and the two would fill out grant applications.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
A lot of my work was interpreting emails, but then
she was learning some English and she was very proud.
I remember one time she called me and she said,
I want you to call me back, and I was like,
why can you talk right now? And she's like, because
I want you to call me back, I need to
(34:00):
hang up and call me back. So I hang up
and called her back and it went to her voice mail,
and her voice mail was in English, and she was
so proud.
Speaker 8 (34:23):
After months of saturdays at Cecilia's, they were able to
secure funding, and in twenty fifteen, Lorena became the founder
and executive director of the Collectivo Intercultural Transgrediendo. The organization
rented a small office in the basement of a building
on their bustling and beloved Roosevelt Avenue.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
Collectivo Yet.
Speaker 8 (34:50):
Liam remembers Lorena's beaming face. The day they opened the space,
Lorena looked around and said, Liam, just how far.
Speaker 12 (35:00):
Will we go?
Speaker 8 (35:12):
Even as she was building an entire organization to advocate
for trans women fleeing gender violence and discrimination in Latin America,
Lorena was still at risk of being deported due to
her pending criminal charges.
Speaker 12 (35:26):
She needed to move on from being in that place
where she had of those convictions that were giving her
problems to become a US citizen.
Speaker 8 (35:35):
Although Lorena was reluctant at first, her lawyer, Linley, proposed
that they file for a governor's pardon. The application that
Linley put together was hundreds of pages long, with letters
of support from organizations, elected officials, and most importantly, all
of the people like Liam that Lorena had helped. Here's
(35:57):
Linley again, But.
Speaker 4 (35:59):
I remember her looking at those letters and her crying
because it was the first time I think she had
taken a moment to acknowledge how much she's done.
Speaker 8 (36:09):
In twenty seventeen, Lorena received a call from Governor Cuomo himself.
He issued her a pardon, making it possible for Lorena
to apply for naturalization. Liam remembers that the momentum of
the past few years felt like a snowball growing bigger
and bigger.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
Nico looking at lomil qin se for Tomado for In the.
Speaker 8 (36:41):
Spring of twenty eighteen, Sophia met Lorena again, this time
with Cindina and Gladis, another producer for this.
Speaker 9 (36:48):
Story You think Strado and mivasettivas que buc serbizios.
Speaker 8 (36:58):
Lorena shared with them she had built a database of
over four hundred and ninety trans women doing sex work
in Queens and she was helping to connect them to legal,
immigration and health services.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
In twenty twenty, she saw a possibility to materialize her
dreams for Collectivo. I think she finally had the pride
to say, like, yeah, you know, I'm a trans Latina,
my English is not the best, and I am an
(37:32):
executive director, and I deserve money for my girls.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
I think she was ready, and she was like like
a rye papaya.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
Coming up on Latino usay. A moment of hope interrupted.
Lorena and the trans immigrant community in Queens find themselves
at the very epicenter of an unforeseen public health crisis.
Stay with us notes, Hey, we're back. We've been telling
(38:51):
the story of Lorena Borjaz, whose activism grew out of
a moment of crisis, the AIDS epidemic and its impact
on trans Latinas in New York City. After decades of
movement building, the community Lorena had helped to forge would
face another unexpected health crisis in twenty twenty. Producer Julia
(39:14):
Rocha picks up the story from here.
Speaker 6 (39:20):
The number of confirmed coronavirus infections continues to grow worldwide.
There are now at least eighty nine cases in the US,
with New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Florida reporting new infections.
Very few tests have been done.
Speaker 8 (39:39):
It was early March of twenty twenty and the first
cases of COVID nineteen were all over the news, but
the government continued to downplay the severity of the situation
and little was known about how to stay safe. Liam
remembers the trans community got together after Alexander grond Luciano,
a transwoman, was killed in Puerto Rico.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Toler Mundo.
Speaker 8 (40:12):
Lorena arrived with her usual warmth, giving everyone hugs and kisses.
They had no way of knowing this would be Lorena's
last public appearance, that this greeting would actually be there goodbye.
Speaker 12 (40:25):
I did try to tell her to minimize interactions with people,
but it was hard for her because you know, she
she loved to work with people, so she was hard
for her to limit herself to stay home.
Speaker 8 (40:38):
On March fourteenth, Cecilia got a call from Lorena. They
had made plans to see each other, but Lorena told
her she couldn't make it. After battling HIV for decades,
Lorena's health was precarious and she wasn't feeling well.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
And I said, Lorena, can you taste food? And she
said no, no, really, And so Loreena, I think you
are COVID and they said, like, you prefer if you
go to a doctor, and she said, no, trance people
will have a long history of mistressed with medical providers. Right,
(41:12):
she was going to go and see a doctor that
woun't know her, that doesn't know that she's trends, that
may misgender her. Most likely it's not going to speak Spanish.
So you know, when you have all those things, of
course you don't want to go to a doctor.
Speaker 8 (41:26):
Cecilia called an ambulance that would take Lorena to the
er at Elmhurst Hospital and.
Speaker 3 (41:31):
She said, no, no, don't do that.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
Don't do that. Don't want to go to the hospital
and see Lorena. If I could, I'd be with you,
but you're not going to let me.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
You have to go by yourself.
Speaker 8 (41:42):
The hospital, less than a mile away from Lorena's apartment,
was already overflowing with COVID nineteen patients. At the time. Queens,
which has the highest rate of residents born outside the
US in New York City, accounted for thirty two percent
of the city's confirmed career onnavirus cases all. He is
(42:03):
the epicenter of the epicenter of the cold crisis that
were going through.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
There are over five hundred beds here and all of
those beds are filled.
Speaker 8 (42:15):
Lorena was tested for COVID, but the results would take
two days to come back. Hours later, when she got hungry,
she texted Liam that there was no food in the hospital.
Liam brought her Mexican food from one of her favorite
restaurants on Roosevelt Avenue, chicken with rice and beans, just
as she liked it.
Speaker 3 (42:38):
Hell Gomla.
Speaker 11 (42:40):
Went.
Speaker 8 (42:44):
Liam brought the food to the hospital. She wasn't allowed
to go in the room, but since the window of
Lorena's hospital room faced the street, she saw Lorena one
last time through the window and they talked on the
phone and.
Speaker 3 (43:02):
Comunia, so yeah, Maria eleven.
Speaker 8 (43:10):
Even in the hospital, all Lorena could think about was
her girls, her bajadas as she called them. She told
Liam they had to raise funds for the community. Liam
agreed and waved goodbye through the window. Early in the pandemic,
the protocol was to send stable patients to recover at home.
(43:31):
So on March fifteenth, the hospital discharged Lorena.
Speaker 2 (43:35):
And when she went home, she had really really bad,
really really sick, and that's where she stopped tearing.
Speaker 8 (43:44):
My phone calls one day later, Lorna's test results came back.
She was positive for COVID nineteen.
Speaker 12 (43:53):
I went to take them girls series, but she couldn't
really talk or anything. She was like really sick Loadina's.
Speaker 8 (43:59):
Health was declining quickly. She could no longer talk or
swallow again. Cecilia called an ambulance. Lorena was taken back
to Elmhurst, but they weren't taking new patients. She was
moved around looking for an open bed. She had her
phone on her and the only way Liam could find
(44:20):
her location was through the Find My iPhone app.
Speaker 3 (44:23):
They sent her to Corney Island Hospital.
Speaker 8 (44:27):
That's a hospital on the other side of the city, and.
Speaker 3 (44:30):
She was there where she was intubated.
Speaker 8 (44:32):
Lorena was induced into a coma and according to Liam,
the doctor said that if her heart stopped, they would
not try to revive her. On March thirtieth, at five
point twenty two in the morning, the hospital called Cecilia.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
I missed that call in when I woke up, I
called back the NMBER because I knew that it was
an hospital and they told me that Lurna had that.
It was just this same incredible feeling of emptiness.
Speaker 8 (45:15):
Lorena was fifty nine years old.
Speaker 12 (45:22):
This all happened when Lorena was on top of the world,
like she had just become an unnaturalized citizen. She had
bought herself a new car the year before. She was
driveling into Europe to Mexico, like things were going really
good for her. And I think that in her last
few days a song, because it's like she probably knew
(45:47):
that she was really sick, seriously sick. She survived HIV
for so many years and then this virus come along
and took her.
Speaker 8 (46:02):
With all in person gatherings halted due to the virus,
the process of grieving would take on a new and
unfamiliar shape. Lorena's loved ones organized a memorial over zoom.
Speaker 3 (46:15):
It was beautiful.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
It was so many people, hundreds of people in a
virtual vigil, and all these people who are very private
and very shy, just saying I want to say something,
I want to say something.
Speaker 8 (46:30):
Over two hundred and fifty people from across the US,
Puerto Rico, and Mexico joined the call. Over and over
people spoke about Lorena as.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
Their mother, but a sonata logoa, so then God tres mamas.
Speaker 8 (46:50):
A friend describes Lorena as their third mother. After Lavin Wall,
Lupe and their birth mother. With Lorena's passing, Liam became
the execus kitive director of the Collectivo Intercurtural Transcerrindo, the
organization that she had pushed Lorena at a start.
Speaker 13 (47:07):
Your no kiro ser Lorena jocquiro recordari quiro manes leal
ipone in practicatolo keja mi signo.
Speaker 8 (47:16):
I don't want to be Lorena, Liam says, I want
to keep her legacy alive and put into practice all
that she taught me. And it's not only Liam who
carries the legacy of Lorena's lifelong work. Cristina Herrera leads
the trans LATINX Network, an organization she founded in two
thousand and seven to help trans and gender nonconforming folks
(47:39):
access legal and immigration services, as well as health and
mental health support. Cecilia Hentili started Transgender Equity Consulting at
the beginning of twenty nineteen after serving for three years
as the Director of Policy at GMHC, the world's first
provider of HIV AIDS prevention, care and advocacy, and many
(48:01):
of the people Lorena helped and organized with are now
involved in her organization. Others work closely with LGBTQ organizations
across the city, including the movement to decriminalize sex work.
After witnessing how government indifference during the AIDS epidemic led
(48:21):
to disproportionate infection in black and brown communities. In her
final days, Lorena had predicted that the COVID nineteen crisis
would hit her community hard. Many in the transsex worker
community have faced lack of work and access to any
kind of government aid during the pandemic. Many have been evicted,
(48:42):
putting them further at risk of becoming infected with COVID nineteen.
At a protest on July seventeenth, twenty twenty, Liam and
the members of franz Geradiendo march in the streets as
sex workers. As undocumented workers, they've been excluded from stimulus
(49:06):
checks and access to unemployment.
Speaker 13 (49:08):
Benefits Valentia Para or Communa Napole Salajara.
Speaker 8 (49:25):
During their last conversation through the hospital window, Lorena asked
Liam to start a fund to support their community through
the pandemic. Liam set up a gofund me after Lorna's passing,
and to date, the fund has collected close to sixty
thousand dollars that they've been able to use to create
mutual aid programs.
Speaker 3 (49:46):
Lena maybea.
Speaker 8 (49:52):
On a hot summer day in twenty twenty, Liam and
the volunteers hand out fresh fruits and vegetables at their
mergarit Osalidario trans a food distribution mutual aid program that
they created in April of twenty twenty, just a month
after Lorena's passing, with donations from local farmers' markets and
the money from the fund that Lorena asked Liam to make.
(50:15):
Despite the moment of pain and loss that they're living,
the volunteers laugh and dance to the music blaring out
of car speakers.
Speaker 13 (50:24):
Avanzi Zakiya, Ruthvel.
Speaker 8 (50:31):
And on weekend nights on Roosevelt Avenue, Liam and the
Transgredienda volunteers are still there to hand out condoms. On
October of twenty twenty, one of Lorena's most ambitious dreams
for the organization would come true. El Colectio expanded beyond
their tiny one room office and was able to secure
(50:52):
a whole floor with rooms for offices, meetings, community gatherings.
As she walks around the half furnished space, Liam imagines
all that the organization will do in each room an
(51:15):
area for legal services, an area for their syringe exchange,
a desk for all of their employees, a space for
people to come and relax.
Speaker 3 (51:25):
Lorena says, until the contained that.
Speaker 8 (51:29):
Via Standing next to Lorena's old desk, Liam says she
can still feel Lorena's support. She consents how proud she
must be knowing that her work continues. Liam says that
their next step is working to found the Lorena Borjas
Shelter in Queens to provide safe housing for the trans community.
(51:52):
On March thirtieth, twenty twenty one, a year after Lorena's death,
people from the community, neighbors, and politicians representing the district
gather on Roosevelt Avenue and Baxter Street. Lorena Liam speaks
(52:15):
into the mic, Lorena is here, plcente in a ceremony
that would unveil the new name of the intersection, Lorena
bore has a way, you.
Speaker 3 (52:27):
Know, we can say in Queens it's.
Speaker 14 (52:28):
A street that has the name of her, or you know,
with so much pride, it's a street that has the
name of a drug addict. We did all of these together,
but I'm also like a little.
Speaker 3 (52:47):
Bit mixed feelings to have a name in your street.
Speaker 14 (52:53):
If it's girls how they are, they don't have anything
to eat. If the girls how they are that they
can't pay the rent.
Speaker 3 (52:59):
If it's girl is that with the ear that.
Speaker 14 (53:01):
They don't have a doctor. Only in tears don't mean nothing.
If we don't have a commitment to do better for
the community, that's the only.
Speaker 3 (53:12):
Thing that doesn't make her happy.
Speaker 8 (53:14):
At the event Jenny Rivera's Mariposa Barrio, a song about
embracing hardships is playing from a speaker, almost drowned out
by the Seven Trains.
Speaker 6 (53:34):
Thanks.
Speaker 8 (53:39):
Liam remembers that when the song would play, Lorena would
stop everything and sing until the.
Speaker 3 (53:45):
Very end, you're crooky, yeah, like we we can know.
Speaker 8 (53:54):
Liam says, Lorena was that butterfly, the one who, as
the lyrics say, turns pain into color. On April first
of twenty twenty one, Lorena's ashes were taken by her
closest friends to a crypt at a local cemetery. Now
(54:19):
in prayer, they were once again united by the woman
guilasal Canso who saved their lives, the same woman who
found in them her motor a reason to.
Speaker 2 (54:32):
Live, yo.
Speaker 10 (54:36):
Afom Parabi and motor de vida.
Speaker 1 (54:44):
On May twenty ninth of twenty twenty three. If she
was alive, Lorena Bodas would have turned sixty three years old.
(55:14):
This episode was produced by Julia Rocha, Sofia Serdra Campero
and Cindy Nanclaris. He was edited by Andrea Lopez Grusado.
Fact checking for this episode by Any tardev Our Latino
USA team includes Mike Sargent, Taisy Contreras, Marta Martinez, Victoria Strada,
Rinaldo Leanos Junior, Patrisa Subran, with help from Sofia Sanchez.
(55:36):
Special thanks to Cristina Errera, Cecilia Gentili, Liam Winslet, Lindley
Edges and all of the people who shared their stories
and memories of Lorina Borgas. We also want to give
special thanks to Collectivo Intercutural Transgrediendo for documenting the trans
Latina movement in Queens and for sharing their archive with us.
(55:57):
Our editorial director is Fernandes Santos. Our director of Engineering
is Stephanie Lebau. Our senior engineer is Julia Grusso. Our
associate engineers are Gabriel Lebias and JJ Krubin. Our marketing
manager is Luis Unatt. Our new York Women's Foundation fellow
is Elizabeth Lowenthal Torres. Our theme music was composed by
saying Itt Rowinos, I'm your host, and executive producer Mariango Hoos,
(56:18):
I remember to join us on our next episode. In
the meantime, look for us on social media and acquer
that day.
Speaker 3 (56:24):
Yes Choo.
Speaker 15 (56:30):
Latino USA is made possible in part by New York
Women's Foundation, The New York Women's Foundation funding women leaders
that build solutions in their communities and celebrating thirty years
of radical generosity, and the Ford Foundation working with visionaries
on the front lines of social change worldwide. Funding for
(56:53):
Latino USA is coverage of a culture of health is
made possible in part by a grant from the Robert
Wood Johnson Founderation.
Speaker 3 (57:04):
Come On, come on in that and I says to
least Macha Tasso
Ola Migrido. Listener, here's an award winning episode from our archios.
It's called Lorena's Alcanse.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Lorena's phone was always on and she was the one
that will go to hate you out of Jaila keeping
me safe.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
She became like a mother.
Speaker 4 (00:20):
Her ability to help people escape trafficking situations, abusive situations,
unsafe situations with the police. I've never seen anyone like
that before, and I doubt I will ever see anyone again.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
From Futro Media and p RX, It's Latino Usa. I'm
Maria Rosa. Today, three years after her passing, we remember
the life and explore the legacy of Lorena Borgaz. She's
known as the mother of the trans Latina community in Queens,
New York. Originally from a small town in the coastal
(01:08):
state of Veracruz, Mexico, Lorena arrived in the United States
in May of nineteen eighty one, just a few days
before her twenty first birthday. Less than a month later,
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the first
recorded case of a new and lethal virus spreading in
(01:29):
the United States.
Speaker 5 (01:31):
Which shows as a lifestyle of some male homosexuals has
triggered an epidemic of a rare form of cancer.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
This newscast from nineteen eighty one and the media at
large portrayed HIV and AIDS as the gay illness, some
reporters even calling it gay cancer. But even as the
deathol from AIDS grew in the following years, little was
being done to provide much needed treatment.
Speaker 6 (02:01):
Is right.
Speaker 5 (02:02):
The demonstration was carefully choreographed by act UP, a two
year old coalition of gay groups set up to fight
what they called the government's in action and silence on aid.
Speaker 7 (02:13):
We have to let people know that there's an edge crisis,
that people are dying, that we need money, that we
need healthcare.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
While the AIDS epidemic is recognized as a catalyst for
organizing in the LGBTQ community, trans immigrant women are often
left out of the narrative. In nineteen ninety five, at
the peak of the epidemic, Dorena, who had become HIV positive,
began what she called her Alcanse, or her outreach. She
(02:45):
was distributing condoms to trans immigrant sex workers in Queens,
New York. It was a means of not only addressing
the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, but also a way
of connecting trans immigrants to critical medical and legal services.
After decades of work building networks of mutual aid, it
(03:06):
would be another massive health crisis, COVID nineteen that would
finally take the life of this beloved community leader. Today
on our show, The Story of Lorenaz Alcanse. It's an
intergenerational portrait of a pioneering activist, and we're going to
see her life through the eyes of the women who
(03:28):
knew her as a mother and as a sister in
their struggle. To tell this story, here's producer Julia Rocha.
Speaker 8 (03:39):
It's March a, twenty eighteen International Women's Day. Lorena sits
at a Duncan Donuts on Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights.
Queen's the neighborhood that she's lived and worked in for
forty years.
Speaker 9 (03:53):
Oh so you Noelina, trans get you le Fla.
Speaker 8 (04:03):
Lorena calls herself a survivor, a trans Latina who's overcome
many obstacles in her life. It's almost nine pm. She
looks tired after a full day of work, but her
day is far from over. The backseat of her car
is full of boxes with condoms that she'll soon hand
out to sex workers in the neighborhood. She's talking to
(04:25):
Sophia Serre Campero, one of the producers of this story.
Speaker 10 (04:35):
Kia Luma.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Chardo.
Speaker 8 (04:45):
Lorena remembers growing up in Cosama. At twelve years old,
she was learning to put on makeup and loved to
secretly try on her sister's clothes. Her family often called
her a hoto, which is a derogatory term for gay.
One day, they caught her in her sister's clothes and
beat her. At just fourteen, she moved to Mexico City
(05:08):
on her own, where she would meet her first trans friends.
Speaker 10 (05:11):
Makoian Lucca.
Speaker 8 (05:13):
Lorena says that her friends used to call her Luca,
and while she found community in Mexico City, she also
found danger and discrimination.
Speaker 9 (05:25):
The Onficiala in Nomcho cam mahem mipuer Vas Peola Criminaco.
Speaker 8 (05:34):
Lorena says that one day five men forced her to
the top of a building and threatened to throw her
off the rooftop. She still hadn't transitioned and was terrified
that the violence would only get worse when her body changed.
In nineteen eighty one, some of her friends had come
to the US to access gender affirming medical treatment, and
(05:56):
they encouraged Lorena to do the same. Just a few
days before turning twenty one, Lorena across the border.
Speaker 9 (06:06):
Ermite tomas Americasi.
Speaker 8 (06:09):
I feel more American than those who were born here,
says Lorena.
Speaker 10 (06:13):
Aqui baisefer a del.
Speaker 9 (06:19):
Usi a chapel d alfargoro, lucap in sect on the
filmin alcolica inober for a paseaqi in America tapahive.
Speaker 8 (06:31):
Lorena says that in the US she became strong. It
was in the US that she learned about sex, work, drugs, alcoholism,
So she says, if she went through all of that here,
then this is her country. Lorna's first job as an
undocumented immigrant was assembling furniture at a factory. She made
(06:54):
just enough to rent a room in Queens and buy
subway tokens. Then, in November of nineteen eighty six, a
stroke of.
Speaker 11 (07:01):
Luck, This bill, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of
nineteen eighty six, that I was signed in a few
minutes is the most comprehensive reform of our immigration law
since nineteen fifty two.
Speaker 8 (07:14):
Lorena secured legal residency in the US through Ronald Reagan's
immigration amnesty. With her new papers in hand, she applied
to Medicaid and began her hormone treatment. She was able
to get a legal work permit, a new job at
a belt factory, and eventually a scholarship to Turo College,
where she studied accounting. After school, Lorena would hang out
(07:36):
at Port Authority bus terminal.
Speaker 12 (07:41):
Back then, you know, we didn't really have a lot
of places to hang out.
Speaker 8 (07:46):
That's Christina Herrera. She's an immigrant from mel Salvador and
one of Lorena's oldest friends. Aside from being one of
the country's busiest bus terminals, Gristina remembers Port Authority felt
like a mercalo, fast paced, lively gathering place and one
of the few places where trans people didn't feel as
(08:06):
targeted by the police. It was Import Authority that a
friend introduced her to Lorena in nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 12 (08:13):
She had a big smile on her face, she had
a pile of books on her hands, a big bag,
you know, hanging from her shoulder, and she had a
pencil on her ear, very like schoolgirl.
Speaker 8 (08:25):
Christina was fifteen years old, and Lorena's schoolgirl look stood
out to her. At the time, higher education, a career.
All felt out of grasp.
Speaker 12 (08:35):
Back then, like our reality was okay, so you're here
in New York, You're gonna do sex work in order
to begin your transition for the hormones and surgeries.
Speaker 8 (08:47):
It was a reality. She started noticing around Port Authority.
Speaker 12 (08:52):
Every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night, like around ten pm,
you would see this tall, slim Caribbean trans women walking
down talleras mohernas.
Speaker 8 (09:05):
From Port Authority. They would catch the seven train to
Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens.
Speaker 12 (09:12):
One night, I'm like, so where are you going and
stepping and they're like, are we going to work?
Speaker 8 (09:16):
Roosevelt Avenue had become a hub for sex work.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
When you look up and Roosevelt Avenue, you don't see
the moon and the start, you see the seventh train.
Speaker 8 (09:27):
That's Cecilia and Tilly, who will hear more from later.
She's describing the elevated train tracks the tower above Roosevelt Avenue.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
And it's very very very known.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
You see a lot of taxis and a lot of
black cars, food cars with tackles and banadas, and a
lot of people very very drunk because they are coming
out of so many little bars. When doors open from
the you hear music, and as the door is closing,
(10:05):
that music goes away. So it's a beautiful chaos.
Speaker 8 (10:13):
As Lorena began to transition, she felt less and less
accepted at her place of employment, and in nineteen eighty nine,
she decided to leave the belt factory. With a meager
unemployment check, Lorena found herself two months behind on rent.
A woman that she knew offered to help get her
money doing sex work. The woman began arranging clients for
(10:35):
her in exchange for a cut of her profits. Lorena
say she was coerced to meet with ten clients a
night and had no idea how much money was being
cut from her earnings. Blindley Edges, the legal director at
(10:55):
Transgender Law Center and an attorney who would represent Lorena
years later, says that these kind of situations were common.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
With the combination of discrimination, inability to access employment, inability
to access housing, inability to access safety. In general, it
creates a higher likelihood of being victimized, whether it's in
an abusive romantic relationship, familial relationship, or what I have
seen extensively becoming a victim of human trafficking.
Speaker 8 (11:23):
During this time, Lorena was also a victim to abusive
partnerships where she was forced to do sex work.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
Trans people are very rarely identified as victims of human trafficking,
even when the information is right there in front of
law enforcement, social service providers, and attorneys.
Speaker 8 (11:38):
Her friends say it would be years before Lorena recognized
herself as a survivor of human trafficking victor are.
Speaker 13 (11:46):
You for.
Speaker 11 (11:48):
For a f.
Speaker 8 (11:54):
Lorena says. It was then that she began to use drugs,
many times provided by her clients who would pay a
extra for Lorena to use substances with them. Here's Christina again.
Speaker 12 (12:04):
We saw additch NASA basic reality. It was like a
copy mechanism that our community was using just to kind
of like survive.
Speaker 8 (12:13):
But as Lorena began using drugs, the US also ramped
up its criminalization of drugs and the expansion of policing
and communities of color. Then, in March of nineteen ninety four,
New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's administration implemented what was known
as quality of life policing, which aimed to quote unquote
clean up the city by allowing broader officer discretion to
(12:36):
stop question frisk and arrest for minor offenses. Arrests in
the trans community became more and more common.
Speaker 12 (12:46):
One day, I was eating a chuso an asura, like
at nine o'clock at night, and they'd like drop it.
I'm like, why am I going to drop it? I
just bought it right now, and they're like, drop it.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
You're coming in.
Speaker 8 (12:58):
The loose language of quality of life policing made it
so that simply carrying condoms on you could be used
as evidence of prostitution. On top of that, New York's
anti loitering statutes, colloquially known as the Walking while trans Band,
gave police the discretion to detain anyone they presumed to
be loitering for the purposes of prostitution. While the statute
(13:28):
was finally repealed this past February, data cided by the
New York State Senate shows that as recent as twenty eighteen,
ninety one percent of people arrested under this regulation were
black and LATINX, with eighty percent identifying as women. Lorena
says her encounters with the police were always violent and humiliating.
Speaker 9 (13:51):
Irato's date PASAA is defont t the u La te Conason.
Speaker 8 (13:58):
Base Lorena would face several charges for prostitution, according to Linley,
all a direct result of human trafficking. Although Lorena hoped
to apply for naturalization and had even studied for the test,
her convictions made her ineligible to renew her green card
or applied to become a US citizen. In her last arrest,
(14:21):
the judge gave her a warning. One more arrest and
she would be sent back to Mexico. Carrying condoms was
increasingly putting trans women of color at higher risk of
arrest and deportation. While HIV infection in the trans community
(14:45):
continued to rise.
Speaker 12 (14:46):
We were saying more of our peers become HIV positive.
Always knew is that people were dying all the time
and getting really stick. The messages that we were getting
from media was that it was a gay illness, ending
one that was like a part of the LGBT community
was going to die of ads.
Speaker 8 (15:04):
In the mid nineties, Lorena herself became HIV positive.
Speaker 12 (15:08):
Back then, disclosing about being HIV positive was like a
really big deal. We were just afraid of rejection. So
I don't know if she was able to speak about it.
Early in the beginning of her illness.
Speaker 8 (15:23):
The crucial early stages of the epidemic were met with
a complete lack of government response. Although cases of death
and infection from HIV rose dramatically since the virus was
first discovered in the US in nineteen eighty one, President
Reagan did not publicly acknowledge the AIDS crisis until nineteen
eighty five. For years there was no treatment, and even
(15:45):
when it became available, it came at a steep cost.
Speaker 7 (15:49):
It's the only government approved AIDS drug in America at
ten thousand dollars a year cost per patient. It's prohibitively
expensive for most and not widely available.
Speaker 8 (16:00):
In nineteen ninety three, the CDC reported that black and
LATINX people accounted for fifty five percent of the over
one hundred thousand AIDS cases reported in the United States
that year. Trans people faced added barriers when trying to
access care.
Speaker 12 (16:16):
I don't believe that there were any trans led organizations.
So a lot of times that services were like for
gay men, a lot of times we were misgendered. They
wouldn't allow us to use her prefer name, and a
lot of it was geared towards people who were non immigrants,
so people that spoke English people that had documentation. In
(16:37):
a way, we felt like that was some of our reality.
You engage in sex work, like you make that your career,
and then you get AIDS and then you die. We
wanted more than that.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Coming up on Latino US, Lorena decides that if her
community isn't getting the services they need, she'll bring the
resources to them her alganse her outreach begins, stay with us, Yes, Hey,
(17:57):
We're back. And before the break, we'd been listening to
the story of the pioneering trans Latina activist Lorena Borgaz.
In the mid nineteen nineties, at the height of the
AIDS epidemic, Lorena would develop a personal approach in order
to connect trans immigrants and sex workers to the critical
medical and legal resources they needed. Back Now. To producer
(18:21):
Julia Rocha, it.
Speaker 8 (18:28):
Was on Roosevelt Avenue in the heart of Queens that
Lorena was witnessing her community grapple with a crisis that
the world didn't want to acknowledge.
Speaker 9 (18:41):
Jeg Avan facilmente, mila bor jego are partillo borge potat crescendo,
moues trances a young vextando sevan moriendo.
Speaker 8 (18:52):
Lorena remembers that by the mid nineties, a condom was
a lot more than a piece of rubber. Due to
criminalization of sex work, condoms could be used as evidence
for prostitution charges. At the same time, trans women were
facing high rates of HIV infection. In nineteen ninety five, Lorena,
who herself had become HIV positive, started to volunteer at
(19:16):
a hospital of eight patients. Realizing that the condoms weren't
getting to those who needed them most, she began taking
condoms from local clinics to distribute to sex workers on
Roosevelt Avenue. In the early years of her work, Lorena's
office was the wheelie bag that she carried with her everywhere.
Speaker 12 (19:38):
Lorena loved to always carry like a little senior City
Saint shopping cart. She would tuck in there like a
lot of her olders with resources, so she would really
like pack a lot of stuff in there. I don't
know how she would even carry it up the train
station because some trains didn't have elevators back then. And
I'll be like, Lorena, how do you do this?
Speaker 8 (20:00):
Walking down Roosevelt Avenue with her Carrito, Lorena got to
know people, and everyone got to know Lorena.
Speaker 12 (20:08):
She would remember everybody's name. She would walk down Roosevelt
Avenue like stopping people and being like, you know you
want this information or do you need any condoms? She
always had like a Walth Resources.
Speaker 9 (20:22):
Labors AA GESU informata.
Speaker 8 (20:26):
As she met people on Roosevelt Avenue, Lorena would connect
them to medical and legal services. She was building a
network and encouraging others to take on this organizing work.
By the mid nineties, Lorena and Christina, who had just
gotten a degree in human services, wanted to create the
support networks they wish they had had when they first
(20:49):
arrived in New York.
Speaker 12 (20:50):
We were seeing some community members that were nearly diagnosed
and they didn't know where to live and stuff. So
I would take them in similar to you know, it's
like Latino culture on the cave ds. You know, even
if it's a little studio, ten of us can fit here.
Speaker 8 (21:09):
Lorena felt there were no spaces specifically for trans Latinas,
transsex workers and HIV positive trans women, so she created
those spaces in her own apartment, known as La Caajai
Los Rios. The Matchbox Lorena Studio became a welcome center
for transwomen who would find themselves without a place to go.
(21:31):
If they fled violence and discrimination in Latin America, if
they were evicted, if they were released from prison, if
they were ostracized from their families, they would all find
refuge and a home with Lorena.
Speaker 12 (21:45):
Back in the mid nineties, there were central for this
is controlled HIV intervention which was like a safety net party.
And like a safety net party was that you gather
a group of friends and you invite them to your
house and you provide them with HIV prevention, education and condoms.
(22:05):
If an agency wanted to provide HIV testing, you would
invite into your house and they would do the testing
in the bathroom. And so Lorena I used to love
to do those groups at her house.
Speaker 8 (22:17):
Most of this would be unpaid work and the costs
would come out of her own pocket from the money
she would get cleaning houses and from sex work.
Speaker 12 (22:25):
A little by little bit, her mission to really save
lives also helped her propel herself to at different place
where she saved herself. She got cleaned from drugs, she
stopped drinking, She was in recovery for many many years.
Speaker 8 (22:42):
Lorena would go on to host the first transcenered HIV
support groups at the Eighth Center of Queen's County, but
even as she partnered with local organizations, she never left
behind her outreach on Roosevelt Avenue. It was through her
alganse one night in two thousand and five that Lorena
met Cecilia and Tilly. Cecilia, who had fled gender discrimination
(23:06):
in Argentina, had moved to New York in two thousand
and four, and she was making good money as an escort.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
I was invited to go to a club call Atlantis
at the time, which later became Evolution.
Speaker 8 (23:23):
When she arrived at the club pounding with loud music,
Lorena was at the front door giving out condoms.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
And when she saw me, I could see the excitement
in her and I remember she saying like, oh you
brokeet pra Oh you're very beautiful where you come from?
Speaker 3 (23:41):
And she asked me a couple of questions.
Speaker 8 (23:43):
Cecilia asked what she was doing, and Lorena explained.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
I remember she called it I can't say. I used
to ask HER's like, what is I can say, what
does that mean? And she said I can't say it
Like when you go to the people, you go to
the Street, and I thought her she was a little
bit too invasive for me. And I was living and
feeling and doing fabulous, you know, at the same time,
I was also using a lot of drugs.
Speaker 8 (24:14):
Life would reunite Lorena and Cecilia a few years later
at a different moment in Cecilia's life.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Because of that specific addiction, I lost my apartment and
I became homeless, and I started getting arrested and going
back to do street sex work. And one of those
days I ended up going to work on roosewellt Avenue
(24:40):
and there she was again offering me condoms like she
did years before, and this time I needed it.
Speaker 8 (24:52):
Cecilia remembers how Lorena approached her with the same warmth
as the first time they met. Lorena offered Cecilia about
to eat and advice about staying safe on Roosevelt Avenue.
Cecilia would soon find herself in a trafficking situation, and
when one of the houses that she was working at
was raided, she too experienced the criminal justice deportation pipeline,
(25:15):
going from Rikers Island to an iced detention center until
she was finally released with an inkle bracelet and was
able to access long term substance treatment. Her case manager
recommended Cecilia support services at the LGBTQ Center.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
I started going to meetings in Jackson Heights that where
in Spanish, and guess who was there, Lorena war Has Again.
Speaker 8 (25:40):
Cecilia began to look at Lorena's work differently.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
I wanted to give, like you know that person that
it was myself a couple of years ago who was
like using drugs, working in the street, access to healthcare.
So I asked Lorena, you have to connect me with
the girls, and she says, like, no, I'm not going
to connect you with the girls. If you want, you
can with me and do our reach like what she
told me the first time, I can say.
Speaker 8 (26:05):
Lorena invited Cecilia to walk with her as she distributed
condoms on Roosevelt Avenue.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
The first time, I made a terrible mistake of going
on high heels and looking like professional. I had to
leave right away because I couldn't talk on his She says, like,
no girl to dinner Kevin in Chang class.
Speaker 8 (26:23):
Next time Cecilia joined Lorena, she got to see more
of her strategy. Word on the street was that having
three condoms or more would get you in trouble with
the police.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
So Lorena walk up and down Roosevelt Avenue and she
always want the girls to have two condoms with them.
Every time that you use one day co Lorena and
Lorena would run and give them another one. So they
always have two condoms, but they never have three condoms.
But they always have condoms. But the problem was these
(26:57):
that while all these girls were walking Roosevelt Avenue with
two condoms, Lorena was working Roosevelt Avenue with hundreds of condoms.
And she said, the police know me, They're not going
to stop me, you know, and if they do, they do,
(27:17):
somebody has to do it.
Speaker 8 (27:24):
As Lorena saw more and more of her community getting
arrested with charges of loitering for the purpose of prostitution,
she began mobilizing, knocking on the doors of nonprofits to
get money to pay for the bail, transportation, and fees
of trans people who would get picked up by the police.
Lorena's lawyer, Linley, describes how they first met because Lorena
(27:46):
was always at the courthouse.
Speaker 4 (27:48):
I was representing one young transwoman who is in jail
on felony assault charges, and I needed her birth certificate
somehow in walks this woman and she said, I hear
you need someone's birth certificate.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
And I was like, who are you?
Speaker 4 (28:05):
And she just looks at me. She's like, I'm Lorena.
So she digs into her bag, which I later called
her Mary Poppins bag, and out pops this original birth
certificate for this young person I'm representing in Rikers and
I'm just like what. I was like, how do you
have this? She's just like, I'm Lorena, and I'm like okay.
Speaker 8 (28:22):
While doing this kind of work, Lorena entered the Sylvia
rivera Law project as a client. She began to learn
more about the criminal justice system and its overlap with
the immigration system. She started to connect other women in
her network with legal advisors and ultimately help them file
for asylum petitions. Here, she met Chase Strangio, a lawyer
(28:43):
and trans writs advocate. Together, in April of twenty twelve,
they officially launched the Lorena Vojaz Community Fund to provide
bail and bond assistance to trans people. At the launch,
the crowd cheers as Rena cuts a ribbon held by
Christina and some of Lorena's friends and colleagues. Two months
(29:07):
after the launch of the Lorena a Boaz Community Fund.
Lorena attended a conference in Philadelphia where she met Liam Winslett. Liam,
who at the time was twenty three, was a guest
speaker at a panel about the persecution she faced as
a trans woman in.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Ecuador gan A Tobasala.
Speaker 8 (29:31):
Lorena approached Liam after her presentation and gave her a hug,
thanking her for what she shared. In the following days,
Liam opened up to Lorena and told her she was
hoping she could stay in the US and then migrate
to Canada to seek political asylum. Liam wanted to start
her transition and knew she couldn't do it in Ecuador.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Do you any who Iotada?
Speaker 8 (29:56):
Lorena told Liam to come to New York, promising to
help get settled. A couple of days later, Liam arrived
in Port Authority. She remembers she was nervous. She didn't
know how to get around or what train to take,
but she managed to get to Queen's which was celebrating
the Pride Day parade.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Il Contre Club Evolution Kerasa.
Speaker 8 (30:22):
She found Lorena sitting outside Club Evolution, Lorena's second home,
as they gave out condoms to bypassers. Lorena would tell
Liam about the lawyers, doctors, and therapists that she would
connect Liam with doom In Lolvida, Lorena told Liam, you
(30:49):
can't be without papers in this country. Not having your
paperwork would mean to stay in the shadows forgotten. You'll
fight and I'll fight with you, and she didnt.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
Katya malonaa.
Speaker 8 (31:14):
In Lia remembers sitting at that table on Roosevelt Avenue
with Lorena, feeling loved valued heard for the first time.
From that moment on, Liam and Lorena were inseparable. In
the following weeks and months, Lorena would walk with Liam
to make sure that she made it to her medical
(31:36):
and legal appointments, and Liam remembers that arriving with Lorena
always made a difference. Providers knew her and she felt
that they treated her with respect.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
Oh just sacking it to significa the Lokysona.
Speaker 8 (31:58):
Liam, who had been doing community outreach in organizing since
she was twelve, started to work alongside Lorena. Yes, Lorena
would tell Liam, you know a lot. Liam in turn
would often tell Lorena, your work has power. Lorena, however,
would brush it off. A Lorena began getting recognition and
(32:24):
awards for her decades of community work, but at the
same time, Liam recalls Lorena feeling insecure about her language skills,
thinking this was a reason that some people may disregard
her woldo to Liam, Cristina, Cecilia, and many others in
(32:45):
her community encouraged Lorena to create her own organization, but
when Lorena sought out the help of established organizations and
institutions around the city, she soon found doors shut. Liam
recalls how they were often encouraged to continued to do outreach,
but to stay away from leading a whole organization.
Speaker 12 (33:10):
Lorena, you know, she had built a huge network up
like lawyers, medical provider, she had developed relationships with, like
the court system in Queens.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
She dared to dream to have her own organization. And
that's where, like, you know, she was like Cecilia, you know,
how can we get money?
Speaker 8 (33:30):
It became a Saturday virtual Lorena would go over to
Cecilia's and the two would fill out grant applications.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
A lot of my work was interpreting emails, but then
she was learning some English and she was very proud.
I remember one time she called me and she said,
I want you to call me back, and I was like,
why can you talk right now? And she's like, because
I want you to call me back, I need to
(34:00):
hang up and call me back. So I hang up
and called her back and it went to her voice mail,
and her voice mail was in English, and she was
so proud.
Speaker 8 (34:23):
After months of saturdays at Cecilia's, they were able to
secure funding, and in twenty fifteen, Lorena became the founder
and executive director of the Collectivo Intercultural Transgrediendo. The organization
rented a small office in the basement of a building
on their bustling and beloved Roosevelt Avenue.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
Collectivo Yet.
Speaker 8 (34:50):
Liam remembers Lorena's beaming face. The day they opened the space,
Lorena looked around and said, Liam, just how far.
Speaker 12 (35:00):
Will we go?
Speaker 8 (35:12):
Even as she was building an entire organization to advocate
for trans women fleeing gender violence and discrimination in Latin America,
Lorena was still at risk of being deported due to
her pending criminal charges.
Speaker 12 (35:26):
She needed to move on from being in that place
where she had of those convictions that were giving her
problems to become a US citizen.
Speaker 8 (35:35):
Although Lorena was reluctant at first, her lawyer, Linley, proposed
that they file for a governor's pardon. The application that
Linley put together was hundreds of pages long, with letters
of support from organizations, elected officials, and most importantly, all
of the people like Liam that Lorena had helped. Here's
(35:57):
Linley again, But.
Speaker 4 (35:59):
I remember her looking at those letters and her crying
because it was the first time I think she had
taken a moment to acknowledge how much she's done.
Speaker 8 (36:09):
In twenty seventeen, Lorena received a call from Governor Cuomo himself.
He issued her a pardon, making it possible for Lorena
to apply for naturalization. Liam remembers that the momentum of
the past few years felt like a snowball growing bigger
and bigger.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
Nico looking at lomil qin se for Tomado for In the.
Speaker 8 (36:41):
Spring of twenty eighteen, Sophia met Lorena again, this time
with Cindina and Gladis, another producer for this.
Speaker 9 (36:48):
Story You think Strado and mivasettivas que buc serbizios.
Speaker 8 (36:58):
Lorena shared with them she had built a database of
over four hundred and ninety trans women doing sex work
in Queens and she was helping to connect them to legal,
immigration and health services.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
In twenty twenty, she saw a possibility to materialize her
dreams for Collectivo. I think she finally had the pride
to say, like, yeah, you know, I'm a trans Latina,
my English is not the best, and I am an
(37:32):
executive director, and I deserve money for my girls.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
I think she was ready, and she was like like
a rye papaya.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
Coming up on Latino usay. A moment of hope interrupted.
Lorena and the trans immigrant community in Queens find themselves
at the very epicenter of an unforeseen public health crisis.
Stay with us notes, Hey, we're back. We've been telling
(38:51):
the story of Lorena Borjaz, whose activism grew out of
a moment of crisis, the AIDS epidemic and its impact
on trans Latinas in New York City. After decades of
movement building, the community Lorena had helped to forge would
face another unexpected health crisis in twenty twenty. Producer Julia
(39:14):
Rocha picks up the story from here.
Speaker 6 (39:20):
The number of confirmed coronavirus infections continues to grow worldwide.
There are now at least eighty nine cases in the US,
with New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Florida reporting new infections.
Very few tests have been done.
Speaker 8 (39:39):
It was early March of twenty twenty and the first
cases of COVID nineteen were all over the news, but
the government continued to downplay the severity of the situation
and little was known about how to stay safe. Liam
remembers the trans community got together after Alexander grond Luciano,
a transwoman, was killed in Puerto Rico.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Toler Mundo.
Speaker 8 (40:12):
Lorena arrived with her usual warmth, giving everyone hugs and kisses.
They had no way of knowing this would be Lorena's
last public appearance, that this greeting would actually be there goodbye.
Speaker 12 (40:25):
I did try to tell her to minimize interactions with people,
but it was hard for her because you know, she
she loved to work with people, so she was hard
for her to limit herself to stay home.
Speaker 8 (40:38):
On March fourteenth, Cecilia got a call from Lorena. They
had made plans to see each other, but Lorena told
her she couldn't make it. After battling HIV for decades,
Lorena's health was precarious and she wasn't feeling well.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
And I said, Lorena, can you taste food? And she
said no, no, really, And so Loreena, I think you
are COVID and they said, like, you prefer if you
go to a doctor, and she said, no, trance people
will have a long history of mistressed with medical providers. Right,
(41:12):
she was going to go and see a doctor that
woun't know her, that doesn't know that she's trends, that
may misgender her. Most likely it's not going to speak Spanish.
So you know, when you have all those things, of
course you don't want to go to a doctor.
Speaker 8 (41:26):
Cecilia called an ambulance that would take Lorena to the
er at Elmhurst Hospital and.
Speaker 3 (41:31):
She said, no, no, don't do that.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
Don't do that. Don't want to go to the hospital
and see Lorena. If I could, I'd be with you,
but you're not going to let me.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
You have to go by yourself.
Speaker 8 (41:42):
The hospital, less than a mile away from Lorena's apartment,
was already overflowing with COVID nineteen patients. At the time. Queens,
which has the highest rate of residents born outside the
US in New York City, accounted for thirty two percent
of the city's confirmed career onnavirus cases all. He is
(42:03):
the epicenter of the epicenter of the cold crisis that
were going through.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
There are over five hundred beds here and all of
those beds are filled.
Speaker 8 (42:15):
Lorena was tested for COVID, but the results would take
two days to come back. Hours later, when she got hungry,
she texted Liam that there was no food in the hospital.
Liam brought her Mexican food from one of her favorite
restaurants on Roosevelt Avenue, chicken with rice and beans, just
as she liked it.
Speaker 3 (42:38):
Hell Gomla.
Speaker 11 (42:40):
Went.
Speaker 8 (42:44):
Liam brought the food to the hospital. She wasn't allowed
to go in the room, but since the window of
Lorena's hospital room faced the street, she saw Lorena one
last time through the window and they talked on the
phone and.
Speaker 3 (43:02):
Comunia, so yeah, Maria eleven.
Speaker 8 (43:10):
Even in the hospital, all Lorena could think about was
her girls, her bajadas as she called them. She told
Liam they had to raise funds for the community. Liam
agreed and waved goodbye through the window. Early in the pandemic,
the protocol was to send stable patients to recover at home.
(43:31):
So on March fifteenth, the hospital discharged Lorena.
Speaker 2 (43:35):
And when she went home, she had really really bad,
really really sick, and that's where she stopped tearing.
Speaker 8 (43:44):
My phone calls one day later, Lorna's test results came back.
She was positive for COVID nineteen.
Speaker 12 (43:53):
I went to take them girls series, but she couldn't
really talk or anything. She was like really sick Loadina's.
Speaker 8 (43:59):
Health was declining quickly. She could no longer talk or
swallow again. Cecilia called an ambulance. Lorena was taken back
to Elmhurst, but they weren't taking new patients. She was
moved around looking for an open bed. She had her
phone on her and the only way Liam could find
(44:20):
her location was through the Find My iPhone app.
Speaker 3 (44:23):
They sent her to Corney Island Hospital.
Speaker 8 (44:27):
That's a hospital on the other side of the city, and.
Speaker 3 (44:30):
She was there where she was intubated.
Speaker 8 (44:32):
Lorena was induced into a coma and according to Liam,
the doctor said that if her heart stopped, they would
not try to revive her. On March thirtieth, at five
point twenty two in the morning, the hospital called Cecilia.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
I missed that call in when I woke up, I
called back the NMBER because I knew that it was
an hospital and they told me that Lurna had that.
It was just this same incredible feeling of emptiness.
Speaker 8 (45:15):
Lorena was fifty nine years old.
Speaker 12 (45:22):
This all happened when Lorena was on top of the world,
like she had just become an unnaturalized citizen. She had
bought herself a new car the year before. She was
driveling into Europe to Mexico, like things were going really
good for her. And I think that in her last
few days a song, because it's like she probably knew
(45:47):
that she was really sick, seriously sick. She survived HIV
for so many years and then this virus come along
and took her.
Speaker 8 (46:02):
With all in person gatherings halted due to the virus,
the process of grieving would take on a new and
unfamiliar shape. Lorena's loved ones organized a memorial over zoom.
Speaker 3 (46:15):
It was beautiful.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
It was so many people, hundreds of people in a
virtual vigil, and all these people who are very private
and very shy, just saying I want to say something,
I want to say something.
Speaker 8 (46:30):
Over two hundred and fifty people from across the US,
Puerto Rico, and Mexico joined the call. Over and over
people spoke about Lorena as.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
Their mother, but a sonata logoa, so then God tres mamas.
Speaker 8 (46:50):
A friend describes Lorena as their third mother. After Lavin Wall,
Lupe and their birth mother. With Lorena's passing, Liam became
the execus kitive director of the Collectivo Intercurtural Transcerrindo, the
organization that she had pushed Lorena at a start.
Speaker 13 (47:07):
Your no kiro ser Lorena jocquiro recordari quiro manes leal
ipone in practicatolo keja mi signo.
Speaker 8 (47:16):
I don't want to be Lorena, Liam says, I want
to keep her legacy alive and put into practice all
that she taught me. And it's not only Liam who
carries the legacy of Lorena's lifelong work. Cristina Herrera leads
the trans LATINX Network, an organization she founded in two
thousand and seven to help trans and gender nonconforming folks
(47:39):
access legal and immigration services, as well as health and
mental health support. Cecilia Hentili started Transgender Equity Consulting at
the beginning of twenty nineteen after serving for three years
as the Director of Policy at GMHC, the world's first
provider of HIV AIDS prevention, care and advocacy, and many
(48:01):
of the people Lorena helped and organized with are now
involved in her organization. Others work closely with LGBTQ organizations
across the city, including the movement to decriminalize sex work.
After witnessing how government indifference during the AIDS epidemic led
(48:21):
to disproportionate infection in black and brown communities. In her
final days, Lorena had predicted that the COVID nineteen crisis
would hit her community hard. Many in the transsex worker
community have faced lack of work and access to any
kind of government aid during the pandemic. Many have been evicted,
(48:42):
putting them further at risk of becoming infected with COVID nineteen.
At a protest on July seventeenth, twenty twenty, Liam and
the members of franz Geradiendo march in the streets as
sex workers. As undocumented workers, they've been excluded from stimulus
(49:06):
checks and access to unemployment.
Speaker 13 (49:08):
Benefits Valentia Para or Communa Napole Salajara.
Speaker 8 (49:25):
During their last conversation through the hospital window, Lorena asked
Liam to start a fund to support their community through
the pandemic. Liam set up a gofund me after Lorna's passing,
and to date, the fund has collected close to sixty
thousand dollars that they've been able to use to create
mutual aid programs.
Speaker 3 (49:46):
Lena maybea.
Speaker 8 (49:52):
On a hot summer day in twenty twenty, Liam and
the volunteers hand out fresh fruits and vegetables at their
mergarit Osalidario trans a food distribution mutual aid program that
they created in April of twenty twenty, just a month
after Lorena's passing, with donations from local farmers' markets and
the money from the fund that Lorena asked Liam to make.
(50:15):
Despite the moment of pain and loss that they're living,
the volunteers laugh and dance to the music blaring out
of car speakers.
Speaker 13 (50:24):
Avanzi Zakiya, Ruthvel.
Speaker 8 (50:31):
And on weekend nights on Roosevelt Avenue, Liam and the
Transgredienda volunteers are still there to hand out condoms. On
October of twenty twenty, one of Lorena's most ambitious dreams
for the organization would come true. El Colectio expanded beyond
their tiny one room office and was able to secure
(50:52):
a whole floor with rooms for offices, meetings, community gatherings.
As she walks around the half furnished space, Liam imagines
all that the organization will do in each room an
(51:15):
area for legal services, an area for their syringe exchange,
a desk for all of their employees, a space for
people to come and relax.
Speaker 3 (51:25):
Lorena says, until the contained that.
Speaker 8 (51:29):
Via Standing next to Lorena's old desk, Liam says she
can still feel Lorena's support. She consents how proud she
must be knowing that her work continues. Liam says that
their next step is working to found the Lorena Borjas
Shelter in Queens to provide safe housing for the trans community.
(51:52):
On March thirtieth, twenty twenty one, a year after Lorena's death,
people from the community, neighbors, and politicians representing the district
gather on Roosevelt Avenue and Baxter Street. Lorena Liam speaks
(52:15):
into the mic, Lorena is here, plcente in a ceremony
that would unveil the new name of the intersection, Lorena
bore has a way, you.
Speaker 3 (52:27):
Know, we can say in Queens it's.
Speaker 14 (52:28):
A street that has the name of her, or you know,
with so much pride, it's a street that has the
name of a drug addict. We did all of these together,
but I'm also like a little.
Speaker 3 (52:47):
Bit mixed feelings to have a name in your street.
Speaker 14 (52:53):
If it's girls how they are, they don't have anything
to eat. If the girls how they are that they
can't pay the rent.
Speaker 3 (52:59):
If it's girl is that with the ear that.
Speaker 14 (53:01):
They don't have a doctor. Only in tears don't mean nothing.
If we don't have a commitment to do better for
the community, that's the only.
Speaker 3 (53:12):
Thing that doesn't make her happy.
Speaker 8 (53:14):
At the event Jenny Rivera's Mariposa Barrio, a song about
embracing hardships is playing from a speaker, almost drowned out
by the Seven Trains.
Speaker 6 (53:34):
Thanks.
Speaker 8 (53:39):
Liam remembers that when the song would play, Lorena would
stop everything and sing until the.
Speaker 3 (53:45):
Very end, you're crooky, yeah, like we we can know.
Speaker 8 (53:54):
Liam says, Lorena was that butterfly, the one who, as
the lyrics say, turns pain into color. On April first
of twenty twenty one, Lorena's ashes were taken by her
closest friends to a crypt at a local cemetery. Now
(54:19):
in prayer, they were once again united by the woman
guilasal Canso who saved their lives, the same woman who
found in them her motor a reason to.
Speaker 2 (54:32):
Live, yo.
Speaker 10 (54:36):
Afom Parabi and motor de vida.
Speaker 1 (54:44):
On May twenty ninth of twenty twenty three. If she
was alive, Lorena Bodas would have turned sixty three years old.
(55:14):
This episode was produced by Julia Rocha, Sofia Serdra Campero
and Cindy Nanclaris. He was edited by Andrea Lopez Grusado.
Fact checking for this episode by Any tardev Our Latino
USA team includes Mike Sargent, Taisy Contreras, Marta Martinez, Victoria Strada,
Rinaldo Leanos Junior, Patrisa Subran, with help from Sofia Sanchez.
(55:36):
Special thanks to Cristina Errera, Cecilia Gentili, Liam Winslet, Lindley
Edges and all of the people who shared their stories
and memories of Lorina Borgas. We also want to give
special thanks to Collectivo Intercutural Transgrediendo for documenting the trans
Latina movement in Queens and for sharing their archive with us.
(55:57):
Our editorial director is Fernandes Santos. Our director of Engineering
is Stephanie Lebau. Our senior engineer is Julia Grusso. Our
associate engineers are Gabriel Lebias and JJ Krubin. Our marketing
manager is Luis Unatt. Our new York Women's Foundation fellow
is Elizabeth Lowenthal Torres. Our theme music was composed by
saying Itt Rowinos, I'm your host, and executive producer Mariango Hoos,
(56:18):
I remember to join us on our next episode. In
the meantime, look for us on social media and acquer
that day.
Speaker 3 (56:24):
Yes Choo.
Speaker 15 (56:30):
Latino USA is made possible in part by New York
Women's Foundation, The New York Women's Foundation funding women leaders
that build solutions in their communities and celebrating thirty years
of radical generosity, and the Ford Foundation working with visionaries
on the front lines of social change worldwide. Funding for
(56:53):
Latino USA is coverage of a culture of health is
made possible in part by a grant from the Robert
Wood Johnson Founderation.
Speaker 3 (57:04):
Come On, come on in that and I says to
least Macha Tasso
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