National Hispanic Heritage Month is celebrated in the United States Sept. 15-Oct. 15 and recognizes the many contributions, diverse cultures and extensive histories of the American Latinx community.
The celebration first began in 1968 as Hispanic Heritage Week and expanded to a full month in 1988. Along with recognizing the important contributions of the Hispanic and Latin American communities, National Hispanic Heritage Month celebrates the independence days of several Latin American countries including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua on Sept. 15, Mexico on Sept. 16 and Chile on Sept. 18.
“We recognize that Hispanic heritage is American heritage,” said President Joe Biden last year as he issued a presidential proclamation for National Hispanic Heritage Month. “We see it in every aspect of our national life: on our television and movie screens, in the music that moves our feet, and in the foods we enjoy. We benefit from the many contributions of Hispanic scientists working in labs across the country to help us fight COVID-19 and the doctors and the nurses on the front lines caring for people’s health.
“Our nation is represented by Hispanic diplomats who share our values in countries all over the world and strengthened by military members and their families who serve and sacrifice for the United States,” he continued. “Our communities are represented by Hispanic elected officials and our children are taught by Hispanic teachers. Our future will be shaped by Hispanic engineers who are working to develop new technology that will help us grasp our clean energy future and by the skilled union workers who are going to build it.”
The local LGBTQ community is filled with Hispanic and Latinx leaders and activists who have championed for change and made Central Florida and Tampa Bay a more caring, accepting and diverse place to live, working and leading organizations such as Tatiana Quiroga at Come Out With Pride, Felipe Sousa-Lazaballet and Andrea Montanez at Hope CommUnity Center, Marco Antonio Quiroga with Contigo Fund and many, many more.
To kick off this year’s National Hispanic Heritage Month, we highlight a few LGBTQ leaders and activists who are not always in the spotlight but who are still doing amazing work in the community with a beautiful photo series from Watermark photographer Dylan Todd.
Perla Pascual Vargas (she/her/ella)
42, Clearwater
Originally from: Mexico
Perla Pascual Vargas has been living in the Tampa Bay area for more than 20 years, coming to the U.S. from Mexico.
“I walked in the desert for three days from the border,” she says. “I came as a minor, alone. My father came a couple of years later.”
Vargas, who is a transgender woman, says that since coming to the U.S. she has dealt with discrimination both for being an immigrant and for being trans, especially within the health care system, but has seen support grow throughout her years in Florida.
She says that support from the LGBTQ community has “changed my life” and makes her feel “alive and happy.”
Vargas is also working with Hope CommUnity Center’s advocacy manager Andrea Montanez on a program called Queer Trans Immigrants, or QTIs (pronounced cuties), which creates safe spaces for individuals at the intersection of the LGBTQ and immigrant communities, empowering them to advocate for change.
Hope CommUnity Center is a nonprofit organization established in the early 1970s by Catholic nuns Sisters Cathy Gorman, Gail Grimes and Ann Kendrick to fight for immigrant rights. The organization is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
Vargas says the greatest gift that she can give to the community is sharing her story.
“I want the community to know where I came from, a little indigenous town from Mexico,” she says. “My journey was not easy, was full of hate and they thought I was a sinner. Now I feel privileged because I can be the real me, a proud indigenous trans woman.”
Daniel Fernandez de Castro (he/him/el)
25, Winter Park
Originally from: Peru
Daniel Fernandez de Castro came to Florida from Lima, Peru at a precarious time.
“I arrived in West Palm Beach three weeks before the pandemic started,” Fernandez de Castro says. “I was working for Marriott and then three weeks after the pandemic started my job was closed.”
Fernandez de Castro moved to Orlando to stay with family friends and began looking into ways he could meet other LGBTQ people.
“I left everything behind, first in Peru and then in South Florida, and was finding it hard to meet people and was feeling depressed,” he says. “So I thought it would be a great idea to start volunteering at an LGBTQ organization.”
Fernandez de Castro found the LGBT+ Center in August 2021, first working the front desk at both The Center’s Orlando and Kissimmee locations, and then helping with HIV outreach. He now facilitates the LGBT+ Center Orlando HIV support group HI-fiVe!, which has launched a new HIV educational workshop that will run twice a year, and will soon take over as the HIV Coordinator for The Center Orlando.
“I think it is important with the rising HIV numbers, that people, especially young people, know about the history of this virus, prevention and what resources are out there for them,” Fernandez de Castro says.
While he is not sure where the future will take him, Fernandez de Castro says for now he is enjoying exploring activism within the LGBTQ and HIV communities.
“It has been difficult for me coming here but I have found a lot of joy and acceptance in advocacy work,” he says. “I have found that being an activist for the community means being able to speak for those who aren’t able to speak for themselves and love that I’m able to be out here helping people. There is a lot of support in this community.”
Razi Mel Chable Lara (she/her/hers)
27, Apopka
Originally from: Mexico
Razi Mel Chable Lara was 10 years old when she and her family spent three days and four nights crossing the Mexican desert to come to the U.S.
“My parents wanted to bring me here to get a better life and for a better education,” Chable Lara says. “It was the second week of February so it was cold and rainy. I remember the mud was up to my knees and you have to go fast because there was a car waiting for us. It is not an easy way to come to the U.S.”
Chable Lara settled in Apopka with her family and began going to school.
“When I came here I didn’t know the language, I was in a place where I didn’t know anyone and it was hard,” Chable Lara says. “We weren’t able to afford a computer, so I would have to use dictionaries to translate my homework.”
Over the next seven years, Chable Lara was able to learn English, graduated from Apopka High School and applied for DACA, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a federal program that protects immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. She also discovered an organization that has been lifechanging for her.
“I have been a part of the Hope CommUnity Center since I was 17,” she says. “It is like a second home to me. Hope was my introduction to being an activist because I know what it is like to go through that and to work hard for your family.”
Chable Lara worked with helping immigrants get their paperwork organized and walking them through the U.S. immigration process. She also worked with voter registration and advocating for people in the community to have their voices heard.
Chable Lara came out as gay when she was 18 but says that she still didn’t feel like that was who she was. Then after the 2016 Pulse tragedy, Chable Lara began working with Contingo Fund and started to discover the transgender community.
“Until that time I didn’t know what that was,” she says. “Then I joined Contigo Fund and I heard from trans people and when they started sharing their stories I was like ‘wait, I’m able to do that?’”
Chable Lara says she started asking questions about what it means to be transgender.
“I started little by little, because I was shy and I didn’t know what questions I could or couldn’t ask,” she says.
Chable Lara came out as transgender, first to her siblings and friends at Hope, then to her parents.
“It was a process for my mother to come around to my new name and pronouns,” she says. “My dad never did come around. He passed away four months ago, and it is difficult not having that acceptance but I had told him this is my decision and I have to be who I am and be happy.”
Chable Lara is also working with Andrea Montanez on QTIs, expanding her ever-growing work as an activist.
“Being a advocate helps show you how important your family is,” Chable Lara says, “and not just your blood family but your chosen family. Working within the immigration community and the LGBTQ community, you realize you have so much chosen family who support you and believe in you.”
Nadia Garzón (she/ella)
42, Orlando
Originally from: Colombia
Nadia Garzón has been in the performing arts for more than two decades. She is a director, writer, actor, voice over artist and more.
“I have even worked with puppets,” she says laughing. “Anything that has to do with theatre, I am involved in it.”
Garzón is the founder and executive director for Descolonizarte Teatro, a theatre organization focused on performances about the Latin American experience.
“We launched in 2019 with this idea that I have had for a long time of providing a platform for us to tell our own stories,” Garzón says. “So I gathered a group of people from the community that I had worked with, people who I admired, people who I knew would support my idea, and told them what I wanted to create. We chose the name Descolonizarte, which is the word for decolonizing you or decolonizing self, and it comes from this desire of reframing and retelling the stories about ourselves, our history and our knowledge.”
Garzón, who is originally from Colombia, says she experienced quite a shock when she came to the U.S. in 1999.
“During that time I had a much thicker accent so people were not interested in having me on stage,” she says. “It wasn’t like I could go on auditions for a Shakespearean play because they would never take me. There just wasn’t a lot of need for Latinx actresses, in particular immigrants, so it was hard for me. Eventually I was able to find my niche. The real places where I could actually fit, where I felt welcome, where my work was valued, so I built my career from there.”
Garzón says becoming an immigrant in the U.S. opened her up firsthand to an oppression that she did not experience in Colombia.
“When I’m in Colombia I pretty much have privilege,” she says. “I’m the ‘white person,’ I have the privilege of having lighter skin tone. When I came to the United States, I instantly became a person of color. That is quite a shocking experience. Suddenly I am a minority, I’m the one being discriminated against.”
This raised Garzón’s interest in stories of immigrants which led to her briefly working for an immigration attorney.
“I came to the U.S. on an airplane and was waiting on my paperwork while I worked there and I met immigrants who had come across the dessert,” she says. “It was mind blowing what they had to go through to get here, and that was something that led me to look for a way, through my art, to address some of these issues.”
That was the early beginnings of Garzón’s merging performance art and activism.
“I started working with an organization called Theatre of the Oppressed,” she says. “It is the idea that we can make change through theatre but also create change within the person in these spaces. I started to combine in nonviolent communication and began to realize I could facilitate spaces of connection. Theatre wasn’t just for show, it could be powerful and do so many things for people: healing, connection, decolonization.”
Building that space for marginalized groups to share their stories was slow at first.
“I mean it was like nobody cared if we had theatre in Spanish or not, or if we had space for Latinx people to express themselves or not,” Garzón says. “Then around 2017, I was invited by Seminole State College to direct their first full-length play in Spanish, which they also did in English, so I directed both versions. I realized that something had changed. At that moment, I thought something has changed because we suddenly had a lot of support and spaces were starting to talk about diversity.”
Garzón, who identifies as queer (“I love the word queer,” she says. “To me that word means loving people and that is where I feel the most comfortable.”), says that as the years passed she has become more and more aware of her intersectionality as someone who is LGBTQ, Latinx and an immigrant.
“The idea of decolonization is super relevant for LGBTQ individuals, for our community,” she says. “We have been told how to feel about ourselves, what to think about ourselves. We have so much internal hate toward ourselves and our community and you can see that in many places. You can see it in the way the trans community is treated within the LGBTQ community. Decolonization is at the core of what we need for healing. That’s also the group that I have, the team that I have. They are at that intersectionality and for us it is important to work within that intersection and to be able to find these spaces for decolonization and to provide spaces for healing, for connection, for community around the work that we’re doing.”
Elizabeth Tomanguilla (she/her/hers)
37, Tampa
Originally from: Peru
Elizabeth Tomanguilla advocates for the community differently than many other activists.
“I’m not necessarily marching in the streets but I am helping by bringing equality into the corporate world,” she says.
Tomanguilla has worked for JP Morgan Chase for the last 10 years, and for the last five has been involved in recruitment for the Fortune 500 company.
“A lot of what I do involves connecting LGBTQ folks, especially gender diverse folks, to the right hiring managers,” she says.
Working for JP Morgan Chase is what Tomanguilla calls her day job. Her other job is as a public speaker.
“It’s something I’ve started in the last few years,” she says. “I’ve always participated in conversations and dialogues and panels but it wasn’t until 2020 that I started doing it as a second job. I am invited by Fortune 500 companies and nonprofits organizations to speak about my experiences as a Latinx trans woman in corporate America.”
Tomanguilla says she is able to be a public speaker who speaks on a variety of topics because she sits at the intersection of many different communities. She also credits the larger platform that working at JP Morgan Chase affords her.
“I’ve met so many trans people through my work from all over the world; from Brazil, from England, from the Philippines, that lets me not only meet trans people from all over the world but people who are gender diverse with different lived experiences with different perspectives.”
Tomanguilla came to the U.S. with her brother in 2004 when she was 20 years old.
“I grew up in Lima and went to an all-boys Catholic school in Peru,” Tomanguilla recalls. “Then I went to college for a few years in Peru studying to be an architect.”
She came to visit her mother, who had moved to the U.S. after falling in love, and found that when she and her brother got here there was an independence that they did not have back home.
“In Peru, we were very family orientated, which was great because I love my family, but here my brother and I just had more freedom and there was a different dynamic,” she says.
Tomanguilla began going to school in the Tampa Bay area, switching her studies from architecture to business. Something else she found here was a more active LGBTQ community.
“I grew up in a primarily Catholic environment so any discussion of LGBTQ was a sin,” she says. “My parents’ position has evolved to where we have a great relationship now but, growing up in Peru, I didn’t even know the term transgender. I met my first trans person when I first moved here and it really opened my eyes to what it means to transition.”
Tomanguilla began her transition in her late 20’s and says that the conversation even just a decade ago was very different then it is now.
“Back then when I transitioned in many cases I was the only trans person among my colleagues and my friends so it put a weight on my shoulders, having to be the educator, having to always explain who I am,” she says. “Now we can be found in politics and in the media. There is a lot more discussion and empathy for the most part today.”
Something else Tomanguilla is passionate about is mentoring today’s youth.
“I started volunteering before the pandemic as a youth mentor,” she says. “I would go twice a week and hang out with kids 13-17 providing guidance, talk to them about my experiences. I’ve always been driven toward mentorship because maybe I felt like I didn’t have that when I was a kid. Both of my parents are medical doctors and worked a lot, so we were raised mostly by our grandparents.”
As it did with most things, the pandemic drove the program online.
“It all went to Zoom mentorships and as you can guess kids 13-17 are not as engaged during a Zoom meeting so we paused the program,” Tomanguilla says, and while it started back up at the beginning of this year, her schedule has not allowed her to go back yet.
Additionally, Tomanguilla donates her time to Metro Inclusive Health, working career fairs, helping write resumes and improve interview skills.
“If I did not work for JP Morgan Chase I would not have access to these opportunities to advocate for all the communities I am a part of,” she says. “I just want to be able to use my resources to help as many people as I can.”
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