CHAPTER FOUR
A QUESTION OF HONOR
Alberto B. Mendoza, forty-six
Ensenada, Baja California/Los Angeles, California
ONE OF THE MOST infamous scandals to hit turn-of-the-century high society in Mexico City happened on November 18, 1901, during President Porfirio Diaz’s reign. That night, police raided a party at a private home and arrested forty-one gay men, nineteen of them dressed in drag. Officers violently burst into the house, and to publicly humiliate the partygoers, forced them to march through the streets. They were called bums, thieves, and faggots, and once in jail, they had to pay steep fines to be released. Those who could not afford the fines were taken to the state of Yucatán to work off the debt laboring on public works projects.
The notorious episode was widely covered in the press, and was dubbed “The Dance of the Forty-One.” Later it was discovered that one of the guests at the party had escaped arrest. Rumor had it he was the son-in-law of President Díaz and had been quietly let go. To this day, in Mexico the term “forty-one” is still used to refer to homosexuality.
Eight decades later, in the early 1980s, Alberto Mendoza, twelve or thirteen years old at the time, was riding in a car with his father. It was a hot summer day, and they were waiting to drive through the border checkpoint from Tijuana into San Diego, California. A commercial promoting San Diego’s upcoming gay pride parade came on the radio. Alberto’s father seethed, “They should set off a bomb and kill all those fags!” The comment deeply upset Alberto, who did not then openly identify as gay.
Twenty years after that, in 2013, Alberto decided to start an organization to claim his identity, for himself and for everyone else like him who had faced discrimination and bigotry because of their sexual orientation. He named it Honor 41.
Alberto Bartolomeo Mendoza was born in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico. When he was less than a year old, his father, a salesman for Kirby vacuum cleaners, a popular brand at the time, was promoted and transferred to work in the company’s Caribbean market, headquartered in Puerto Rico. For Alberto’s father, who had grown up poor in a large family, this meant going from having practically nothing to suddenly entering a world of opportunity for his children. For almost ten years, the family lived in Puerto Rico, where Alberto’s two younger brothers were born. Alberto was an outgoing, confident boy. Then the family relocated again, to the greater San Diego area in California.
“We lived three exits away from the border, but we went to Tijuana almost every day. My grandmother and aunts and uncles were there, and that’s where I had my life. I decided I was a Mexican who slept in the United States. I grew up thinking my future could be in either country.”
But the move did affect him, since Alberto’s native language was Spanish and he could not talk easily in English with the other kids. This, coupled with the transition through puberty, made him more introverted and timid.
A few months after they moved, Alberto—tall, dark, and good-looking with a bright movie-star smile—found a way to make friends: there was a pool at his house, so he began inviting boys from school over. Happy to have friends, Alberto became a part of the group, and one of the boys started calling him “forty-one.”
“I didn’t know what it meant. To me, having a nickname meant I was one of them, because everybody had one—‘Gordo,’ ‘Baldy,’ whatever. I was really happy. But one day when we were all at my house, my dad came in and heard them calling me ‘forty-one.’ He called me out to the garage and asked me why they were calling me that. I told him it was my nickname. He said, ‘They’re calling you a faggot. Are you a faggot?’
“At that moment, I realized it was obvious to everyone. I knew I was different. I was more attracted to men than to women, and I had some feminine qualities. I wasn’t necessarily a queen, but I wasn’t typically masculine; it just wasn’t me. I looked at my dad, and I told him no, I wasn’t a faggot. He left the garage, kicked everyone out of the house, and told me I couldn’t have them over anymore. After that, the other kids started taunting me, calling me ‘forty-one’ to make fun of me.”
In spite of that painful incident, Alberto still didn’t know why the number forty-one had anything to do with homosexuality. He reasoned that maybe in Mexico, if you still had not married and had children by the time you were forty-one years old, it was because you were gay. Satisfied with that explanation, he managed to push the matter aside.
When Alberto started tenth grade, he decided to run for vice president of his high school’s student council. He spoke English very well by then, and wanted to find a way to fit in with the other kids. With a good instinct for human nature, he figured he would not win that year, but that through his campaign, the students would know his name and learn about his ideas. And that is what happened: he lost that year but entered the race again as a junior, and won.
Having a position of power at school opened up some other doors too. That is when Alberto’s passion for activism began. He noticed that even though Latinos made up a majority of the student body, they were underrepresented in the school’s extracurricular activities. Seventy percent of the students were Latino—half of them crossed the border from Mexico every day—and 20 percent were Filipino, but the latter group held most positions on the student council, on the cheerleading squad, on the baseball team, on the yearbook staff, on the student paper. With so many Mexican students, why don’t we have anyone representing us? Alberto wondered. Then he had an idea: to get more Latino kids involved, information on extracurricular activities should be available in English and in Spanish. Just a few weeks after joining the student council, Alberto proposed the creation of a Spanish-language student newspaper, La Voz Azteca.
Just as he began to feel secure socially again, another painful incident left a deep impression. At a monthly school assembly, while Alberto made a presentation, one of the students shouted “Cuarenta y uno!” (Forty-one!). Then other students joined in: “Cuarenta y uno, cuarenta y uno, cuarenta y uno!”
“I wanted to die. I wanted to disappear. Some kids knew what it meant, some didn’t. To the teachers, it seemed like I was popular, but they were bullying me in front of everyone and I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could.”
In an effort to leave the painful memory behind, Alberto transferred to another school the following year. He joined a fraternity, and when he was nineteen and fully aware of his homosexual identity, he went to a gay bar for the first time. He came out to his brothers at around the same time, and they were very understanding. Then he came out to his parents. To his surprise, his mother did not take it well, and that was hurtful to Alberto. It took a year before they were close again. His father’s reaction surprised him too. He shook his son’s hand and said, “Okay. I just hope you know how to defend yourself.”
Even though he had come out to his family and felt comfortable with himself, the pain would return sometimes when he heard somebody say “forty-one,” or when he heard derogatory comments about gay people.
“I didn’t have any role models, a positive example to follow. At the time, the typical image of a gay person was Juan Gabriel or the drag queens, or hairdressers in feather boas, or men who you knew had sex with other men but they were married and stayed with their wives. There was no one in between who talked about being gay in a positive way. They were always criticized, made fun of, ‘that fag.’ When I started going out to the clubs in West Hollywood, there weren’t any examples for me of what it meant to be a gay Latino man. As a gay man, the only role models were white men, even though I was a Latino man in my everyday life. I couldn’t combine the two worlds. And when you met a Latino guy, he wasn’t Marco anymore, he was Mark. Latinos had Americanized themselves because there weren’t any other options.”
Alberto believes that because of the lack of role models and his personal and professional development during those years, he became “adaptable, but also invisible.” He learned how to look as good as any white man in a suit and tie, and how to show that he was well educated—he studied sociology and political science in college—with a large vocabulary, and he spoke without an accent. He learned how to be a Latino man who could fit in anywhere. But even so, there was no space where he could project himself as a successful gay man, because on top of the prevailing stereotypes, another stigma came along in the late eighties and early nineties for the gay community: the HIV and AIDS epidemic. Suddenly, any discussion of homosexuality quickly began to revolve around that issue.
HIV infection among the Latino community has especially concerned health-care officials because rates of infection have remained higher than in other ethnic or racial minority group ever since the disease was first discovered.
Although new diagnoses in the Latino community dropped by 4 percent between 2005 and 2014, diagnoses among gay and bisexual men in general rose by 24 percent, and diagnoses of young Latino gay and bisexual men between the ages of thirteen and twenty-four rose by 87 percent. In 2014, Latinos accounted for one-quarter of new HIV diagnoses (approximately 11,000 out of 45,000 new cases), even though Latinos only make up 17 percent of the general population in the United States. Seven of every ten Latinos diagnosed with the virus were gay or bisexual men, or had had sex with another man.1
The Centers for Disease Control at the US Department of Health has found there are cultural factors to explain the high numbers of Latinos infected with the virus, such as avoiding getting tested, seeking help, and getting treatment for fear of being discriminated against for being Latino. Machismo and the stigma around homosexuality in the Latino community play roles as do social factors such as poverty, migration patterns, low levels of education, a lack of access to health services, and language barriers. Immigration status can also be a consideration in seeking medical help: many undocumented Latino immigrants think that could result in the discovery of their immigration status, putting them at risk of deportation.
After graduating from college, Alberto worked at the Stop AIDS Project, an organization in San Francisco, as the coordinator of their Latino program. After that, he worked for a similar organization in Los Angeles, the AIDS Project, and got involved in other activist projects championing civil rights and environmental justice. Along the way he met many other Latino men, and found that they were always dealing with some kind of personal conflict: hiding their HIV-positive status, or hiding their sexual orientation from their parents or their employers. Alberto realized this put them at risk, with many of his friends turning to drugs or alcohol to ease the stress of hiding who they were; and at a certain point, that was no longer any fun.
In 2008, when Proposition 8, prohibiting same-sex marriage, was passed in California, Alberto once again wondered, “Where are the leaders in our community? Why are we not getting funding, why aren’t we in positions of power? Where are the role models for young gay Latinos?”
Alberto would not start to find a way to answer those ever-present questions until 2012. Early that year, while talking with a close activist friend, Roland Palencia, Alberto mentioned that his birthday was coming up. He would turn forty-one, the number he hated so much because it had been used to bully him when he was in high school. Roland told him the story of the Dance of the Forty-One, and Alberto was stunned. He had never heard of it, and only then did he finally understand what that number really represented.
“The story made a huge impression on me, I could see myself in it. It made me so angry. For so long it had made me feel vulnerable, like it was a punishment. But now I know it wasn’t a punishment. It was still in my consciousness because it was a part of my mission, and I had to understand it when I was ready to understand it, and open to doing what I had to do.”
In the days following that revelatory conversation, Alberto remembers thinking about what he should do with the information he now had in his hands. He realized he did not want to start just another organization. He had to focus on what his community needed. He thought about how white men, when they come out of the closet, usually leave their families and move away to a city on the other side of the country, and start a whole new life, visiting their parents once or twice a year. Latinos don’t do that. It’s in their nature to be close to their families, talk to their parents, see how they’re doing, and live near their siblings. Even so, it was hard for a family to accept a gay son. As Alberto saw it, this was a vicious circle: it’s hard to share your own story when there aren’t any other stories out there in the public sphere. He thought a change was not going to happen just because he wanted it to; he had to do something to make it happen.
“We have to celebrate ourselves in a different way, and I decided to do it through the story of the Forty-One, to honor those forty-one people who lost their lives by telling our stories: how we came out, our experiences with acceptance and rejection, how we deal with our families. Was it a fight? If not, how did they do it?”
Alberto started his project: he would publish a list of forty-one Latino people in the LGBTQ community with inspiring stories of struggle and perseverance. After coming up with the list, which included journalists, activists, politicians, artists, and business leaders, he produced short video biographies of each person to upload to the project’s website. Honor 41 was born.
“I chose the name Honor 41, which you can say in English and Spanish, because for me this project is a reclaiming; it’s a way to educate through the story,” Alberto explains, four years after he first began publishing the annual list. “It says who we are and where we are. It’s celebrating who we are and doing the best we can to help other young people who are having a hard time because of this.”
On June 3, 2013, the day before his birthday and the last day he was forty-one, Alberto finished editing the last video of his first Honor 41 list.
Barack Obama is irritated. He had barely begun to deliver his prepared speech—eloquent and carefully worded, as usual—when a voice from the back of the room interrupts him, yelling, “President Obama! President Obama!” The shouts are heard off-camera. Obama, devoid of patience, raises his voice to cut off the unwelcome interruption.
“No! No, no, no, no, no! Listen, you’re in my house. And you know what? It’s a lack of respect when you’re invited to someone’s house . . .”2
The voice keeps shouting. Words can be heard alluding to undocumented immigrants, torture, and detention centers.
“You’re not going to get a good answer if you interrupt me like this,” Obama continues. “I’m sorry . . . no, no. You should be ashamed.”
An exasperated Obama orders security to remove the interrupter from the room. He stops his speech celebrating LGBT Pride Month. It’s Wednesday, June 24, 2015, at the annual gathering of leaders and activists of the LGBT community at the White House. This year, there is a special reason to celebrate: in just a few hours the Supreme Court will announce a historic ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. While the shouts continue, Obama tries to maintain his composure, but his expression is steely. He urges security to hurry up and escort the vocal protester from the East Wing of the White House.
Jennicet Gutiérrez, the protester in question, breaks out in an incredulous, mischievous smile as she recalls the episode. As an activist and a representative of the transgender community, she managed to get an invitation to the White House event and decided to take advantage of the opportunity to get out her message: immigration detention centers violate the rights of people like her. A week after the White House security team showed her the door, her life took a dramatic turn. She received many messages of support and solidarity, and some hateful ones too. But Jennicet, then twenty-nine and originally from Jalisco, Mexico, tried to focus on the positive ones, ignoring the negative. Today, sitting at a small table in the apartment she shares with a roommate in Van Nuys, an unremarkable neighborhood in northern Los Angeles, Jennicet gets emotional as she relives that special moment.
“I felt a strength inside me; it was fate. The White House has very strict access rules, so it was very meaningful that they gave that access to me, an undocumented, Mexican, transgender woman. I brought all the experiences I’ve lived through with me, and all my friends’ pain, and listening to the president’s speech, talking about all the progress the LGBTQ community has made, making everything sound so great, I snapped. I wasn’t questioning that progress. I just wanted to point out a reality that my own community doesn’t even want to see—the discrimination, the abuse my people are experiencing in the detention centers.”3
Jennicet shouted at Obama that there cannot be progress for the LGBTQ community if one part of it—undocumented transgender women—continue to suffer discrimination. She yelled because she wanted to share the story of the seventy-five transgender people who sleep in detention centers every night, who are applying for political asylum, who are victims of violence. Ninety percent of them are women. But more than anything, Jennicet yelled at the president to reaffirm her own dignity as a woman.
“My name is Jennicet Gutiérrez. I am a proud undocumented transgender Latina,” she announces in her profile video for Honor 41 in 2015. Jennicet has straight black hair, olive skin, and lively brown eyes. She explains, “My gender did not connect with my brain, so I started my process.”
Getting to the point where she could proudly wear those three labels—Latina, trans, undocumented—has not been easy. Jennicet came to the United States fifteen years ago with her family. Of her siblings, she is the only one who is still undocumented. She has some happy memories from her childhood in Mexico, but she also remembers struggling to accept herself as she was. Migrating did not make things any easier. Being undocumented, not speaking the language, and the culture shock all made it hard to adapt to her new country. Jennicet tells me it took her ten years to find her voice.
It would not have been possible without the support of her family and the community that embraced her. She met Bambi Salcedo, a well-known transgender activist in Southern California and the president of the TransLatina Coalition. In 2014, Jennicet left her job at a hospital to work full-time as an activist for the group Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement.
According to that organization, the vulnerability of the transgender community in the United States remains an unresolved issue in the fight for LGBTQ rights. A study from the think tank Center for American Progress found that one of every three transgender people is a member of a racial minority group. But for undocumented transgender people, the figure is 98 percent.
“I want to show there is a violence connecting the minorities in this country, and a lot of people don’t want to see those connections. They think since that person is African American, or gay, or transgender, it doesn’t affect them,” Jennicet explains. “I want people to see that connection, how the system keeps us divided.”
Jennicet does not want to share the name on her birth certificate with me. “I think I have found that voice, and a lot of people identify with it,” she says. “That’s why I had the courage to go to the White House and confront the most powerful man in the world. I found the strength and courage to publicly denounce what my transgender sisters are going through. It was a big deal for me to say, ‘I’m ready and I’m going to fight for my rights.’”
When Jennicet decided to spar with Obama, it wasn’t an isolated impulse. A long history of allegations led up to her loud protest, which unintentionally turned into a battle cry covered by the media, with unexpected consequences. In November 2014, the investigation team at the Fusion television network, with funding from the Ford Foundation, published a report with statistics and personal stories from transgender women who had been victims of sexual abuse at immigration detention centers.4 One out of every five hundred people detained in those centers is transgender. But one in five allegations of sexual abuse is from a transgender person. In these centers, detainees are housed in areas according to the information found in their personal identification. The problem is that many of these undocumented transgender women, fleeing violence in Central America and Mexico, have forms of identification that do not reflect their present gender identity.
The lack of documentation, therefore, becomes a problem that goes beyond the issue of migration: it reflects a lack of recognition of their true identity. Transgender women are housed with men, in settings where they are victims of physical, psychological, and sexual violence, and even torture.
“If you are undocumented, you can’t finish the process of constructing your identity; it’s all part of the same problem,” Jennicet explains. “To change your name in the US, you have to have a Social Security number. If you’re undocumented, you don’t have one. Then you can’t change your name. The only identification you have has the identity you were born with, which is not the one you identify with now. This causes legal and security problems. You can’t identify yourself as the person you are trying to be.”
One day, after the incident at the White House, a group of thirty-five Democratic congressional representatives sent a letter to Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson demanding the release of transgender women immigrants held in detention centers for men, because “these individuals are extremely vulnerable to abuse, including sexual assault, while they are in custody.” Three days later, on June 29, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released a memorandum with new guidelines establishing that, among other rules, people who identified as transgender would be housed in detention installations that correspond to their gender identity.
This was no doubt a nice, small victory for Jennicet and the LGBTQ movement, but no one let their guard down. If there is one thing activist groups have learned with Trump’s rise to power, it is that things can always get worse. On November 15, 2017, a week after his presidential victory, three organizations led by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network met in Los Angeles to start working on a strategy of resistance to the new administration. Jennicet was one of the speakers at the event. Later, at a press conference, she was clear: no matter who was in office, she would have done what she did, even though her four “labels”—undocumented, transgender, woman, Latina—made her vulnerable to the discrimination fomented by Trump’s own rhetoric.
“Yes, I am scared. Yes, I am concerned. But fear is not going to hold me back,” she said to a reporter from the Advocate, a magazine covering LGBTQ issues.5 “If the media wasn’t paying any attention to the issue of trans-women in detention centers, they definitely started to see it after the event with Obama. But with Trump in office, there will be many other issues needing our activism.”
In 2015, the year Jennicet interrupted Obama, twenty-one transgender women were killed in the US.6 In 2016, that figure rose to twenty-six.7 Projections for the years to come are not at all optimistic.
Alberto smiles proudly when we talk about Jennicet. He also mentions Bamby Salcedo, founder of the TransLatin@ Coalition, who appeared on the Honor 41 list in 2013. The issue of representing diversity even within the LGBTQ movement was important to Alberto from day one—he did not want a list made up only of gay men.
“Most of them have had to come out twice, first as gay or lesbian and then as trans,” Alberto explains. “They’re at the bottom of the barrel, and I decided to include them from the beginning. I knew enough trans people to know their journey was harder than mine. The fact that sometimes they’re forced to sell sex to survive, [that] they’re more openly rejected, forces them into different closets.”
The theme of two different closets also comes up when Alberto talks about “undocuqueers,” part of the movement that developed in the fight to pass the DREAM Act, undocumented youth who found an opportunity to proudly claim their LGBTQ identity within the pro-immigrant cause, or vice versa. Alberto found that when he interviewed both trans people and Dreamers and asked them where they wanted to be in five years, it was hard for them to answer because of their uncertain immigration status. And some of the trans people even responded that they didn’t know if they would be alive in five years.
Alberto also tried to include age diversity in Honor 41. He tried to find people from different walks of life: students, administrative assistants, activists, a senator, a judge. Thirty-five percent of the people who have been included on the list are HIV-positive, although some do not mention this in their interview. The hardest form of diversity to represent from a financial standpoint, because it would necessitate travel, was geographic. Alberto did not want to try to find corporate sponsors, which would imply some kind of obligation to them, so he decided to seek public donations. He applied for and received nonprofit status for his organization and included on the web page a request to donate $41 or more to the project. He produced the first video interviews with a digital camera, with somewhat crude sound quality. The first five people interviewed were activists David Damian Figueroa and Mario Guerrero; Alberto’s friend, community leader Roland Palencia; actress and transgender activist Maria Roman; and police officer Candice Cobarrubias.8 Of the 164 people interviewed for the project so far, 64 percent are of Mexican origin.
Imelda Plascencia and Claudia Iveth Ramirez share a video on the first Honor 41 list, and identify as queer and fluid. Imelda describes this as “looking beyond those binaries, not wanting to feel limited . . . wanting to just explore myself, and learn about others and the world that we live in in that process.” They both work for the Collective of Immigrant Resilience through Community Led Empowerment (CIRCLE) Project and the Queer Dream Summer at UCLA’s Dream Resource Center. Their work consists of creating spaces of healing justice for queer undocumented immigrants.
“We have conversations about our lives, about our families, about our experiences; we’re very intentional about talking about why we’re undocumented, why we continue to be undocumented, and you can’t do that without talking about privilege, without talking about power dynamics, without talking about our society as a whole, and how it impacts us on a very personal and daily level,” Imelda explains. “When you ask undocumented people where they’re going to be in ten years, it brings up a lot of difficult feelings, difficult thoughts, because you’re not guaranteed so many things, there’s so much uncertainty. It’s difficult to picture, even when you have something, it’s difficult to enjoy because it can be taken away.”
For Claudia, being undocumented and queer has been painful. She seeks to heal her own pain and help heal the pain of others through this project.
“My advice for anyone that’s coming out is, find your community. Find people like you, people that will help you a lot, people that will uplift you. Oftentimes, it’s really difficult to find a community, a queer community that’s going to help you be a better person and help you move forward and heal. Oftentimes when we come out, you have to fit a role all the time. But you don’t have to fit a role. Just be yourself.”
Alberto goes on, “This project celebrates who we are, so that we can serve as role models, models that younger generations can follow, because I never had one. When I’ve invited people to participate, they’re really enthusiastic. They just say yes right away without even seeing [the video]. It’s strange for me to see that, now, people consider it an honor to be on the list. Now we’ve taken away the stigma and oppressive power associated with the number forty-one. These people live their lives outside of the closet and honor themselves, their families, and our community.”