‘I Can’t Be Myself Here’: At the Border, Transgender Women Navigate 2 Worlds

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/us/transgender-women-border-mexico.html

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MEXICALI, Mexico — In the pictures, Jess Enriquez Taylor wears artful makeup and her hair is carefully styled. But her face was bare as she rode the bus toward the international border one recent afternoon, and her long black hair was tucked under a hat.

One of her hands was painted with glittering nail polish, but she kept it folded and out of sight. She used the hand with no polish to point to the images on her cellphone.

“This is me, this is who I really am. When I get out of here, I transform,” she said of the photos, taken on the other side of the border, in the United States.

Crossing between Mexico and the United States is an everyday practice for people living in the border towns of the Southwest. But for transgender women like Ms. Taylor, who is Mexican but grew up in the United States, crossing between countries also requires her to move uncomfortably between genders.

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Ms. Taylor, 39, cannot afford an apartment in California, but her family and neighbors in Mexicali demand that she live essentially as a man. She has not told her family she is preparing to undergo hormone replacement therapy, and going home to her brother’s house means wiping her face clean of cosmetics, changing her hair and, when outsiders are present, avoiding the feminine adjectives that women use in Spanish. Her family in Mexico makes her use separate dishes for fear she carries sexually transmitted diseases, a common and bigoted misconception about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

Rather than go back to Mexico regularly, she chooses to be homeless in America, sleeping on friends’ couches or sometimes in someone’s garage.

“It’s easier to not know where I’m going to end up than to come to Mexicali. I can’t be myself here,” she said as the bus made its way toward the international border crossing at Calexico, Calif. If she wants to be safe in Mexico, she said, “this is how I have to be.”

Intolerance toward homosexuality and nontraditional gender identities are woven into the culture in parts of Mexico, where the Catholic Church, a powerful force, describes such orientations as sinful. Mexicali, a large city of one million, is not ultraconservative: The city has several gay and lesbian nightclubs, for instance. But even as cities across Mexico become more tolerant — with big gay and lesbian communities emerging in Mexico City and Oaxaca — transgender women are still treated with derision. Physical attacks are not uncommon, and they often go unpunished.

In California’s agrarian Imperial Valley, transgender women, many of whose extended families are just across the border in Mexicali, say they feel greater safety from physical violence and harassment because of American laws and cultural norms. Yet the question of simply moving to the United States is not a simple one, even for those, like Ms. Taylor, who have green cards. Life can be prohibitively more expensive compared with the cost of living in Mexico. And the Imperial Valley, one of the most fertile farm regions in the United States, can be rather quiet because it is so rural.

“It’s kind of like a double-edged sword,” Ms. Taylor said. “Mexico is really old-fashioned and there’s a lot of machismo. In Mexicali you get discrimination, but yet you can party. In Imperial Valley you don’t get discrimination, but you have few places to go.”

And so they navigate two worlds.

In the valley today, there is a growing network of services for gay, lesbian and transgender people, drawing Mexicans and Americans alike.

Rosa Diaz, 58, founded the Imperial Valley L.G.B.T. Resource Center four years ago, shortly after she came out as a lesbian and was shunned by her church community. The center, the first and only one of its kind in the region, has become a gathering spot for members of the L.G.B.T. community from both sides of the border. It is a place that offers support and community, as well as practical help with such services as therapy, legal advice, H.I.V. counseling and consultations with endocrinologists, who administer hormone therapy for people who are transitioning gender. It also provides a Spanish-language support group.

Ms. Diaz remembers one transgender woman from Mexico bringing her mother in so Ms. Diaz could help explain what “transgender” meant.

The center has been a lifeline for people like Sonia Coronado, 65, who for years led a largely traditional life on both sides of the border before joining the small transgender community.

Born and raised in Mexico, Ms. Coronado went to work at a slaughterhouse in 1972 in the California town of Brawley, while continuing to live in Mexicali. After more than a decade, she and her wife relocated to a small farm community in the United States. They raised six children together.

“I tried to live like a man,” she said. “I lived with the responsibilities of a man, working and supporting my family. I did the best I could. I felt so much confusion.”

Ms. Coronado came out as transgender to her children and siblings three years ago, following her wife’s death after 40 years of marriage. The only person who knew about her gender identity had been her wife, who accepted it and provided immense emotional support; when she passed, Ms. Coronado felt very alone, especially because she does not speak English, she said.

Like Ms. Taylor, she must dig out men’s clothing and pretend to be “Manuel” when she goes back to visit her family in Mexico.

“I still haven’t made that step to go back there dressed as a woman,” Ms. Coronado said. “I’m afraid. I’m afraid about how people are over there.

“The laws in California protect you a lot more,” she said.

Still, there are a few gay- and lesbian-friendly clubs in Mexicali where groups of transgender women sometimes gather for drinks and dancing. Those places do not provide a replacement for day-to-day social or professional acceptance, but they help, said Sofia Gonzalez, a life insurance agent in the Imperial Valley. A little more than two years ago, she started performing drag shows in Mexicali — where, with her family, she was still living at the time as Raul Gonzalez.

“I created a persona, Sofia Kahlo, and I lived through my character, doing drag and doing shows,” said Ms. Gonzalez, 25, who now spends time on both sides of the border. “And little by little I grew stronger, like the character.”

Transitioning to living openly as a woman in Mexico, she said, still means daily insults and humiliations. On stage, “You’re like a celebrity, everyone wants a picture. But as a transgender woman in everyday life, you’re seen in a completely different light. They stare at you. They talk about you.”

“I still get anxiety when I have to go to a big public place or a meeting,” Ms. Gonzalez said.

Of course, life in the United States comes with its own challenges. Ms. Taylor pretends not to notice them: The friend who tells her child that Ms. Taylor is “pretending” when she’s wearing makeup; the man at the recycling center who says, “Bye, man,” when she leaves.

On a recent afternoon, the only time Ms. Taylor betrayed any emotion was at the pharmacy, when she was asked her full legal name.

A long pause followed.

“Jesus Enriquez Taylor,” she said finally.

“I didn’t catch that, can you repeat that?”

“Jesus Enriquez Taylor.”

It’s better than in Mexico, she said, where storekeepers often refuse to serve her at all.

Ms. Taylor’s mother lives in subsidized housing for the elderly in Calexico, and while she has largely embraced her new gender identity (“She still thinks of it as ‘dress-up,’” Ms Taylor said), the building’s rules prevent Ms. Taylor from living there. She often stays on a friend’s couch, but she has avoided reaching out lately after a minor disagreement over her hormone replacement therapy. Another friend she typically has stayed with was out of town. With such uncertainty about where she’s staying, she is ready to be either Jess or Jesus at any time: The large backpack she carries with her everywhere contains some clothing along with piles of cosmetics — blush, brushes, lipstick — and wigs, which she keeps safe in repurposed stockings.

“I always have to be two people at once,” she said. “And I always want to be ready to be myself.”

She’s looking for a job on the American side of the border so she won’t have to worry about where she’s going to sleep — and won’t have to let go of the things that make her Jess. But there is little work in the valley these days, and she earns her living mostly through occasional jobs as a freelance makeup artist and by fixing iPhone screens.

For now, she calls herself “a queen on a budget.”

“I’ll figure it out,” she said, her voice soothing, as if she were consoling someone else.