The path of The Transgender Spring, carried out on July 5th  2019, was devised to remember the trans people assassinated in the neighborhood. Ceramic plates were put up in the different stops of the march to evocate them.

Tomás thought the idea could be implemented in Bogota.  

Tomás returned to Bogota in 2018. He, Artúr and the members of the Network, carried out a month-long series of workshops. They met three times per week. During the workshops, the participants talked about the trans march, questioning why they marched, why the march was important to them, and what it was they hoped to achieve with it. They tried to agree on a symbol that would represent them, drawing flowers, cats, and penises, but also bodies. They spoke about their trans bodies and about the violence that was exercised against them in the Santa Fe neighborhood, and they created, as a collective, a black doll. They chose this color for a number of reasons: a black inflatable would stand out against the grey sky of Bogota; black is the color of our nation’s past, a past that erases and hides; black is the terrifying history of violence both hidden away and forgotten in this country; black is the color of the trans women hiding in the dark in the Santa Fe neighborhood; black is the color of mourning and of poverty; and because many of these trans women are also black women.      

Few trans men participated in this first experience. The majority of Network members and others involved in the workshops were women and for this reason they built a feminine trans body. Yoko Ruiz, the Network’s current director, was the model for this body. A mold was made and then altered, based on what the participants deemed necessary: they included larger breasts, a bigger ass, and a smaller waist. When the prototype was ready, they increased the scale eight times until they had a fifteen-meter inflatable.    

At first people didn’t understand, says Tomás. The figure just looked like a big black bag. They didn’t know how it was going to be inflated or they couldn’t picture what was going to happen to it. But afterwards, when they saw how it grew, something clicked in the neighborhood residents and in the members of the Network and they understood that the work of art was bringing them together. The process of making the inflatable had united them as friends and helped strengthen the community. 

So many people were interested and participated in the making of the doll –between thirty and forty people– that a decision was made to form committees: the first was the Transancocho committee, in charge of feeding and caring for the participants, which included inviting homeless people to eat; the social networks committee roused the community and created an Internet presence through videos that informed the public about the march and encouraged them to participate; the logistics committee organized the march and handled the permits; and the inflatables committee, led by Artur and Tomás, who taught the workshops. No one was forced or told what to do; people gladly did whatever they felt like doing. 

During the committee meetings and conversations, the slogan “Yo marcho trans” (“I’m Trans Marching”) was coined for the third march, scheduled to take place in 2018. Juan Pelos Ozico had been filming everything and out of the many hours of work came a documentary, directed by him and produced by the Trans Community Network. The people who participated in the process saw themselves reflected in it and those who hadn’t felt challenged and wanted to participate in the following year’s edition.

The Trans Spring –the name given to the trans march after it separated from the LGB march– is far removed from Bogota’s Gay Pride parade, the American story of Stonewall, and from those identities that have become regulatory and continue to exclude trans people, which, increasingly, make us forget our own identities and history. For this reason, a parade route was designed in 2019 that would commemorate a 30-year history of violence. A history narrated by the mothers –long-time residents trans women of the Santa Fe neighborhood–, that includes prostitution, grenade attacks, social cleansing, and murder. A true topography of terror—as Tomás defines it—that shuts down and takes hold of the neighborhood at its busiest, on a Friday night. This fourth march was an exercise in memory aimed at commemorating the deaths of trans people and dignifying the lives of the trans community in this part of the city, in its historical narratives, and within the community itself. At each stop along the route a ceramic plaque was to be placed to honor the murdered girls.

Yoko Ruiz, director of the Network, Ángel López, administrative assistant, and Johanna Pérez, Network member currently working on a degree in community education, spoke about the Trans Spring, the workshops that created the black and red inflatables, the history of the Trans Community Network, and the marches themselves.

Yoko Ruiz: We’re a community organization. Our main goal has been to learn to work together as a community. We’re a trans community, we’re here, and we’ve been sex workers all our lives. Before implementation of the [current] public policies there was a lot of violence against trans women in the different tolerance zones; in Siete de Agosto, Primero de Mayo, and here in the Santa Fe neighborhood. People would come here, they would kill us, beat us, discriminate against us. We were trapped in a constant cycle of poverty and vulnerability and there was no organization among us. We were whores and no one cared about us. We were poor sex workers and we’ve always been suppressed.

A stigma surrounds us: people say that we’re violent, terrible drunks, and addicted to all the substances. They say that we‘re crazy and that we attract violence against everyone. These beliefs keep us from accessing our basic rights to education, health, and housing. We have always been suppressed. They tell us that if you’re trans you can only live like this, if you’re trans you can only be a whore or a hairdresser. They tell us that this is our job and that we are meant to feel humiliated, because that’s what it means to be trans. This kind of prejudice has stopped us from organizing with other women who have other levels of education or from other parts of society. The truth is, not all trans women are poor, nor have they all been thrown out of their homes. Some of my colleagues have the support of their parents. I know trans women from the upper, middle, and lower classes.  

So we all tried to work together, to pool our knowledge in order to gain political access and reclaim our rights. And it was through art that we discovered each other. First, we heard about a program to help trans women put on some sort of artistic event, but we didn’t really see ourselves as “artistic”. We decided to form a folkloric dance group and we learned to belly dance. We were very coordinated, nearly fifteen girls on stage, all dressed in belly dancing costumes. This was the first time that people really saw us and it made us feel dignified and more included. People weren’t applauding because we were whores or trans but because we had put together a dance show and we had done it well. We were trans and doing a good job and it was an opportunity to integrate and say, “let’s make the costumes ourselves”, and to choose our music and find a teacher ourselves. 

This whole magical Network is the creation of Daniela Maldonado and Catalina Ángel. They founded the Trans Community Network with girls of different ages. Daniela said to us, “Let’s stand together and form an organization and learn from other organizations! Let’s look into the paperwork and get our own place!” It was all a dream; we rehearsed our show in a tiny room and this whole story has taken place here in the Santa Fe neighborhood, in a tolerance zone, inside a kind of citadel where trans girls are allowed to be. Here, you can go to the shops and your neighbors will treat you like a woman, and the children that live around here don’t act shocked and shout, “Look at that tranny!” Or if I go to the supermarket in my pajamas, like other people do, no one will criticize me or point a finger. Outside this neighborhood you get that type of discrimination, but it doesn’t happen here, which means that people have greater freedom of expression and can be themselves and display their gender identity and be respected as women.

We started by working with an organization that was running an HIV project sponsored by the World Health Organization. Different women in the city had been chosen to be a part of it, so we got the chance to meet other people with whom we’ve participated. The Network has been around for eight years now and many different girls have taken part in it. Some have moved away –because the dream for some was to go to Europe and live the European trans dream, some left for that reason–, others have gone away to study, others have gotten sick, and some have even died. There has been constant evolution within the Network and those here now have set up a new board of directors, with a new group of girls.

When we started looking at the LGBT public policies in effect, Daniela made us realize that they weren’t working. We realized that they were only for a few. When the subject of trans people came up, no one was consulting with us. Public policies focused on gay men and lesbian women and when trans issues were discussed the gays and lesbians spoke for the trans community. There had always been this discourse about “I’m here on behalf of my trans sisters”, but we questioned that. “Really? Are you a lesbian or a trans woman? Are you gay or a trans woman? Who are you talking about?” They wouldn’t let us speak for ourselves because they assumed that we were stupid. They wouldn’t let us express ourselves politically and we were always forced to go through a “translator”.

Through Catalina and Daniela we were able to communicate with the RedLacTrans (Latin-American and the Caribbean Network of Trans Persons), which was an opportunity for empowerment, to get to know more about the organization, human rights, a chance to travel and to learn to systematize the violence, all the murders of trans people that have taken place in Colombia. Violence in Colombia ebbs and flows[1].  When the government and administrations change, there’s always a rise in hate speech against us. No one thinks of us except at election time, and the first thing the right wingers say is that trans people are prostitutes, that we‘re an embarrassment, that we have to be eradicated, that we don’t have rights, and they start persecuting us. And the public is infected by what is basically a discourse of hatred and people become aggressive. On the other hand, we are a generation of women that has become empowered and has started to speak out and represent the trans community. Those of us who live here are sex workers; we work for a living, to have a place to live, to have a place to eat, to pay our bills, in other words, to survive in the midst of all this oppression, and to exercise our rights.

Our collaboration with RedLacTrans helped us to see that the same thing is going on in all Latin American countries, where trans women have a life expectancy of only 35. Fifty to sixty trans people are murdered every week, but wherever one is murdered five more spring up. People don’t want to see them, they have them murdered, but then even more spring up. And this is what inspired the Trans Spring; we are flowers that grew out of the undergrowth and resisted and fought and struggled. And we have always been this way: they kill us, but we continue to flower.

Yoko: There are trans women all over Latin America, working as hairdressers and sex workers, and we all experience the same cycle of poverty. Only a few manage to go to school or move to Europe or the United States to live in peace, enjoy more rights, and be more socially accepted. In Colombia, access to a decent life and decent housing is very difficult. Our whole life is about struggle, working, and it’s something that needs to be valued, respected by memory, because throughout the history of the movement trans people have always been erased. You look back and it’s as if we’re being erased, century after century, from history. And this is where the idea of the trans march came from. 

We thought about all the places in Santa Fe where girls have died. No one remembers. We saw the [gay pride] march as a rebellion, with the freedom to say, “This is my body, I am like this and my body is mine and I want to make it visible!” Everyone had their own way of expressing this, but it was important for us as a group to say, “they’re killing us and we‘ve had enough!” But the reaction of [the other Pride participants] towards us was, “Get out of the way, here comes the Theatron float!” that had lots of music and men in thongs showing their balls, flinging advertising into the crowd to get everyone to go to their club. But they don’t even let us into their club and we’re getting killed in Santa Fe. “You people are a pain!” they’d say, “You get drunk, come here, get naked and make a scene…” Their reaction was “Don’t be such a pain! There are other places to do that. This is the Gay Pride march.”

What is it they’re proud of? The fact that we’re getting killed and no one cares? So we got tired of it and decided to get organized here in the neighborhood and have our own march. Not an anti-march, but a march amongst ourselves, creating memory, walking through the neighborhood, visiting the places where girls have died, taking them flowers, remembering some of their names. In some of these places there have been several murders, four or five women have been killed at different times. Certain corners, according to some of the girls, are jinxed, unlucky, or cursed. We visited these places and commemorated and afterwards we joined the big LGBT march. Our first marches took place on the same date [as the LGBT march] and the group, the organization, those involved, decided to call it the Trans Spring, because the name reminded us of the story of spring.

Then Tomás came into our lives. We began talking about the art that he and Artur were making, about the inflatables they’d made in Germany, of their work and the performance they did in Berlin. They showed us their amazing inflatables and a group of people started coming around: artists, social communicators, photographers, models, and trans women from all over the city. People from other cities showed up and joined in and we thought, “Wow! We aren’t alone!” Then we started to talk about the march on social networks and we started organizing the Trans Spring. We wanted to create a bigger march, to make the trans movement grow.

We now have all kinds of alliances here at the Network and our own protocol. And our relationship with Tomás and Artur was such a great opportunity; they helped organize support for the Trans Community Network and the march. After they arrived we put out an official announcement to get people involved. We started to meet and make lunches and breakfasts; the idea was to use food as an excuse to get together, and we began to think about how we could represent and create memories of trans issues and our bodies. We talked about it, about the fact that no one really cares about us, that the public is offended when they see a trans girl and how people say, “Don’t look! That’s not a woman; it’s a man with his tits out!” They think it’s so scandalous, but at the beach, for example, there’s nothing scandalous in the body, everyone is wearing bikinis and thongs. But here in the city the body is an embarrassment, especially the trans body, and people would rather see us killed and they say things like, “It’s a good thing they got rid of them, all they do is show off their tits!”  

How to represent these bodies that no one cares about? During the search for materials and with everything that has happened we decided to make a black inflatable, an inflatable of memory, of mourning. I modeled for part of that body and it served to make us more visible. It was a great experience; we spent days and nights learning how to make this huge monument. No one, not even for the LGBT march, had ever made such a huge inflatable.

We’d show up at noon to this delicious smelling lunch. People kept coming and it was amazing how quickly the place filled up. Everyone would eat and when we had finished eating, we began cutting materials. We made a small model of the inflatable first, to practice and learn how to cut and handle the materials, to get the measurements for the legs and arms and attach them properly. Special machines were also brought in, presses that heated up and made the plastic stick together.

Ángel López: That was innovative. The workshop and creative processes have always been innovative, but this was the first one and nothing like it had ever been seen in the neighborhood. It was something new for the people who belong to this place and for those that came to the Community Network. This really strengthened the ties between team members. Yoko was our body model for the inflatable, which was going to be made to scale. We used her body to design the pieces and we all got together here to wrap her in cellophane, cut up the pieces, and cover her body in lotion to make sure she could breath. It was very special, like one big family. But it was Artur and Tomás who really brought this team together.

All this happened before Luchi, Daniela Maldonado and Máximo’s daughter, was born. So it was also a process of preparing for this person that was going to be born and to rally around and support Máximo in his pregnancy. It was very beautiful. This was when we started collaborating with other collectives as well, such as Diamantina, Sebastián, and Olimpo. It was like weaving an alliance around a political issue.

Yoko: Before, for our first marches, we went out into the neighborhood with our pink, blue, and white flag, flowers, and our Leo Kopp monument… Kopp is buried in the Central Cemetery and is like a saint for the prostitutes and for some of the trans girls in the neighborhood. But the Central Cemetery is the only one where you have to show an ID to get in, and since some trans girls don’t have an ID card they can’t get in. But some of them really believe in Leo Kopp and so Matilde Guerrero made us a Kopp sculpture so that the girls can whisper in his ear and ask him for favors.

We’d march around the neighborhood with our Leo Kopp and people would ask, “What are those gays up to?” They didn’t understand why we were screaming that we were “bad and could be worse”, or “we’re here and we’re moving ahead”, or “This is the Trans Spring! This is our neighborhood and we’re being threatened”. But people heard our cries and joined in, along with other people from the neighborhood, and yelled “bravo!” and came to their windows and showered us with flowers and applauded. But for our third march we took the black inflatable all over the city and it looked beautiful. 

Unfortunately, we couldn’t use our float in that march. We had saved money to pay for a car, but we had to change cars three times, because none of them passed the emissions and safety test. Not one of them passed. The last car we took met all the requirements; they inspected it and said that it was perfect, but they said no one could ride on it, only the DJ and the decorations. So we agreed and paid a million pesos to have a float in the parade. At least we finally had a float. It was going to be the first trans women’s float and it wasn’t the government or anyone else who paid for it. We did it all ourselves.

The day of the parade we looked for our float, which we wanted to appear alongside the inflatable, but we couldn’t find it. No one knew where it was so some of us went to look for it. When we eventually found it, up behind the Parque Nacional, they’d taken it apart. One of the tires on the float was worn so they wouldn’t let us use it. One out of its 18 tires was worn! It’s not like we’d have killed 100 people because of one worn tire! By the time we found it someone had dismantled the whole float and had thrown away the decorations. To top it off, the DJ equipment worth five million pesos had been stolen. El Mozo night club had paid for us to have a DJ.

We were furious and felt humiliated. What happened? No one could tell us, not the logistics team, or the police, or the organizing committee, nobody. Too bad, queens! They asked us not to speak to the media about it. According to them it was our fault; we were unorganized and hadn’t planned properly for an event like this, and we were just trying to show off. They said we had to learn to work with the organizers, the people in charge of logistics, and learn how things were done, to do things the “right” way. After we heard all that we understood and said “Never again!” We decided to distance ourselves, and for that reason this year our fourth trans march was separate from the LGBT march. 

Fotografía - Photograph: Tomás Espinoza

Johanna: And this year, although we didn’t attend, one of our coworkers, Laura Weinstein, did, and she was verbally abused. She was giving a speech in the Plaza de Bolívar on behalf of the trans community and the homosexual men started to chant, “Music, music, music!” Her speech was about all the things that are happening to us and it was very clear that we were not welcome at that march.

First the thing with the float, and then the thing with Laura, so who knows what might happen next year? What happened to Sylvia Rivera at Stonewall 50 years ago is happening here: they silence us, make us invisible, erase our history, and we’re still marginalized through stigmatization, violence, and discrimination at the hands of our peers. It was so obvious at all those events.

Two months after the DJ equipment was stolen, we organized the first trans party to raise five million pesos to pay for stolen gear. This year we’re organizing the Furia Trans Party on October 18. So it wasn’t all bad; some good came out of it. And we’re going to use the money we raise to pay for our trip to Mexico. 

Yoko: We’re going to take the inflatables and the documentary to support the march there, the Trans Day of Remembrance in Mexico.     

Ángel: Our inflatable deflated as the rain picked up on the way into the Plaza de Bolívar, but people stayed until the end, almost as if to protect it. The black sculpture looked so beautiful as it floated across the city and in the middle of the Plaza de Bolívar. It made it to the front of the stage, even though most of us barely did. People sort of appropriated it along the way.

The red inflatable created for the fourth march was very different from the black one. Thanks to what happened on the third trans march, the Network’s base had really grown and when the time came to create the inflatable for the fourth march, people came from a lot of very different groups, including the trans men’s groups, Las Alienadas and Los Atravesados. University students and people from this neighborhood came. And those who had learned to make the inflatable for the third march helped with the construction of this one. So the process had really taken off. People were more skilled now and everyone was more efficient at making inflatables and knew more about the technical aspects so instead of making only one in a month, we made three. Our production speed increased. 

Johanna: Instead of just one inflatable, there were four altogether: a masculine trans model that we made here; a feminine trans body that we also made here; an intersexual body that was made here by our colleagues from Cali; and the fourth inflatable, a heart, that was made in prison.

Yoko: We run a project called Cuerpos en prisión, mentes en acción (Bodies in prison, brains in action) and we worked with the girls [in prison] so they could contribute also. This is their memory too, they’re also resisting. Despite being imprisoned, they continue to collaborate with us, their only contact on the outside. They participated from in there and it was important for them to take part.

Ángel: Cuerpos en prisión, mentes en acción is Catalina Ángel’s project. She was in prison for a while and while she was in there she saw the need for a support group, to help solve problems but also to create community. In the Picota prison where we work, there’s a sense of community mostly among gay men and trans women. Given all the structural and physical violence that exists in prison, not to mention the machismo, its best for peers to stick together.   

This group started working four years ago to lend psychological support, legal and emotional assistance, and, above all, help with conflict resolution. We try to go every two weeks, but situations sometimes arise that are beyond our control. Tomás taught a workshop there, he went with us one day, and their inflatable grew out of that workshop. It was their idea and it was very simple. Because of the prison’s strict regulations –we couldn’t bring in any tape measures or any kind of motor– they chose a simple heart. We had to come up with resources to help them build their inflatable. We, in here, don’t forget about them in there.

Yoko: This year we scheduled our rally for July 5th and decided once and for all to not take part in the LGB march. We kept the T to ourselves and got a divorce. We posted messages like, “Hey, girl, it’s time you realized that the gays don’t like you, the lesbians ridicule you, the Pride parade is about their pride, so we’re better off getting divorced.” It all worked out really well: we managed to stand on our own and Artur and Tomás came back to Colombia, and we repeated the process with other people who came to participate. 

By the time of our fourth march we realized people were paying more attention to us. The neighborhood community was more aware, and even the lesbian, gay and bisexual community that is always so involved with politicians and all that, was listening to us. We kept working on rights issues and more and more people joined our cause. Lawyers and students from different law schools organized workshops for us and provided us with different tools to defend ourselves and enter the political world. So we’re on our way and some of us are now empowered in that area.

Johanna: This year the inflatables were blood red to represent all the blood that has been spilled, by the police who have killed us and because our sex work is not seen as dignified. And red is the color of love and prostitution. Shock magazine reported that more than 2,500 people attended the march.

Yoko: It was a unique experience for us because the people from the LGBT marches, which always drew incredible crowds, understood our message and decided to support us. At first we were a bit scared because we had decided to organize a major event. The neighbors hadn’t liked Sound System so this time we hired it even bigger and it moved around the entire neighborhood. House of Tupamaras was there, and a guy who did a fire show, as well as the Banda de Radamel, the Severa Flor collective from Neiva, and El Engaño, who helped us by making the ceramic plaques that we installed at places where girls had died.

And there was another very moving experience that brought together two families with very different stories related to trans life and memory that met while helping to organize the march. A mother had come from Neiva, Huila, seeking justice for the death of her daughter, who was murdered here in Bogota. The girl had been dead for a year and the man who killed her was in prison, but was about to be released. This mother is still seeking justice for the case, by the way. Trans cases are always seen as crimes of passion…

Fotografía - Photograph: Juan Pelos Ozico

Yoko: Every time a trans person is killed they say it’s because he or she was dangerous, an alcoholic, aggressive, because they live surrounded by weapons and thieves. Even lawyers deem these cases as failures from the beginning because of all the prejudice, the stigma attached to our lives.

We had decided to invite the new trans children we’d met to the march. We occasionally meet with trans children and their families, mothers and fathers with their daughters… Five or seven-year olds that already have their own identity and whose parents understand this. That day, a little trans girl was here and she sat down next to the mother seeking justice for the death of her trans daughter. The woman talked about how she regretted not supporting her seven year-old son when he told her he was a girl. The child had finished high school to please her mother, but as soon as she [turned 18 and] got her ID card she stole some money and ran away from home. This was her reward for having endured for so many years. She used the money to travel to Bogota where she got tits, made herself beautiful, and started working as a prostitute. She looked great and one day she met this incredible Italian who fell in love with her. He took her to Italy for a while, and gave her money to send home to her mother, a car and everything, to keep her with him in Italy. He paid for her travel and everything. But she was in love with a guy here in Colombia so she came home on vacation, to see her friends, and to see the guy. And the guy ended up killing her because he wanted her to take him to Europe, but he was into drugs and she told him that she couldn’t take him while he was on drugs and so he killed her.

And here was the girl’s mother telling us her story, discovering a new family. The woman never suspected that the little girl was trans. She told us that she regretted not giving her son the chance, because he really suffered. They boy’s father beat him, kicked him, insulted him, and humiliated him so much that the boy got fed up and left. We introduced the mother to the other family and the woman watched seven year-old Luna playing, entertaining herself at the blackboard, listening to music and dancing. This helped her to heal, and it helped the members of the little girl’s family feel even more supported.     

When people meet the girl and you tell them that she’s a trans girl they say, “Are you crazy? How could you do that to the girl? Was she raped?” All we know is that this is her gender identity. She knows nothing about sex or penetration yet. Nothing.

Johanna: She doesn’t even know what trans means. All she knows is that she’s a girl.

Yoko: That’s her identity. And for us to witness all those interactions was super magical. And it’s all thanks to the Trans Spring. The woman, the mother of the dead girl, came to the march and hung a plaque in the place where her daughter was murdered. All of us were there too. I was anxious at first, because it rained a lot and there weren’t many people. I thought it would be embarrassing and that we’d have to go out all alone, but then San Juan “lowered his finger” and it stopped raining and our fourth march began at the appointed time, with our four gigantic red inflatables.