Recognized as a leading figure in the fight for the rights of sexual diversity, through actions such as the founding of Laetus Vitae, the first home for LGBTQ+ seniors in Mexico, 92-year-old transgender activist Samantha Flores publishes her autobiography “Between Blue and Good Night”
This is a series of anecdotes in which — in collaboration with the researcher in Hispanic American Literature and Civilization, Antonie Rodríguez — Samantha recovers, in a colloquial and reader-friendly style, her life story, from the discovery of her own sexuality in her native Orizaba, Veracruz, and her work performance in Mexico City and the United States in the hotel industry, where she met relevant people, until the moment when she became an activist, after going through the most difficult moment of the HIV pandemic in our country.
“I had no desire to write a book like this because I didn’t want to look like a circus freak. But I finally decided to do it because I wanted to be, at my age, an example for my young trans sisters. I would like them to see that I lived until I was 92 years old without having to work on the street offering sex work, which many of them continue to do because they are not accepted,” says Samantha Flores in an interview with The Sun of Mexico.
LOVE THE BODY
Aware of her “good fortune,” Samantha Flores comments that, as can be seen in the book, she has never felt singled out by those closest to her, despite the fact that they were educated in a traditional way, and that, if she ever felt any kind of discrimination at work, she had the support of people who valued her abilities. Something that, she believes, should be a common denominator for trans people and those who are part of the LGBTQ+ community, as has been happening in recent years.
“I think that now it has become much more normalized (to be part of the LGBTQ+ community), although there are criticisms against it, which have always existed. But there have been great advances, now there are more and more families that accept their gay relatives as part of them, and even, politically speaking, diversity is mentioned in official messages and by the president himself,” says the activist, who is asked what she would say to those trans women who do not have the same support network.
“Giving advice is very difficult because every life is different. The only thing I could tell my young trans sisters is to try to be happy, to identify with themselves and to love their bodies. I love my body, because I live in it, it is my home, it is my house and it is the most important thing, it is what I have worked for all this time and why I believe I have reached this age,” she adds.
AGAINST STIGMA
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Among the characteristics of this new publication, it can be said that it is an initiation story, in which Samantha recounts her first romantic relationships and the way in which she managed to achieve economic stability with her own skills and resources. But it also becomes a written document that attests to the plural form in which the transsexual community has existed in our country, whose discourse, according to specialist Antonie Rodríguez, has focused on the “stigma”, with stories in which the same trans women feel that they are in “bodies in which they should not have been born.”
“In this book, Samantha’s story is an alternative one, as it is the journey of a happy woman. I think that claiming to be a happy woman is a political act, a resistance to what is expected from a melodramatic story, as if trans people only had the right to happiness after a via crucis,” says Antonie Rodríguez, who assures that we still need to know more individual stories that have built the history of the LGBTQ+ community.