[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Hello, a warning before we begin: this series contains sensitive content including violence, drugs, and sexual language. We recommend discretion.
Alexa was 28 years old. She lived on the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico. She used to wander through the neighborhoods of the capital with a mirror in her hand. It was said she used it to make sure no one was following her.
Not much was known about her. Some believed her family had kicked her out of the house and that she suffered from some type of mental illness.
On the afternoon of Sunday, February 23, 2020, she went into a women’s restroom at a McDonald’s in San Juan. Some people took photos of her.
On social media, a rumor spread that a man dressed as a woman was using a mirror to spy on women in the bathroom. Some said something needed to be done.
Early the next morning, Alexa’s body was found in an empty lot in San Juan. She had been shot multiple times.
[Archival audio, news report]: And now we go to Puerto Rico where they are searching for the relatives of the transgender woman who was shot and abandoned.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: The news of the brutal murder of Alexa, a trans woman, spread across the island and around the world.
[Archival audio, news report]: The FBI could come in and open a hate crime investigation but they haven’t done so so far.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Protests were organized. Even Bad Bunny spoke out.
[Archival audio, news report]: And the artist wore a shirt with the message: «They killed Alexa, not a man in a skirt.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Being trans in Latin America means having a life expectancy of no more than 35 years.
In 2020, the year of Alexa’s murder, our region was one of the most dangerous in the world for trans people.
And that is why, a few days after her death, and thousands of kilometers away, in the city of New York, a group of Latin trans women decided to organize a vigil in her honor. It was as if a sister or a daughter had been killed. Or as if they themselves had been killed.
[Woman at vigil]: We are all Alexas. We all think they’re going to come after us because we’re trans. I’m afraid to walk around, even in a city that’s supposed to be safe.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: The vigil was organized by the Puerto Rican trans community in New York. Women from many other Latin American countries joined in. They were trans, undocumented, and in many cases, also sex workers.
[Liaam Winslet]: Long live trans activism!
[Women at protest]: Down with the patriarchy!
[Liaam Winslet]: Because they were taken alive!
[Women at protest]: We want them alive!
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: That night, in a small park on Roosevelt Avenue, in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of the borough of Queens, beneath the elevated subway tracks, around 50 people gathered.
Among them was a trans woman. Her name was Lorena. Nearly 60 years old, Mexican.
Lorena was perhaps the person with the greatest authority and prestige there, but that night she remained silent, listening in the front row to her companions — or, as she called them, her pájaras.
[Liaam Winslet]: It’s very important that we understand this work concerns all of us — it’s not just a matter for Puerto Rican women, Black women, or Latinas. It’s a matter of coming together as a trans community. Regardless of our skin color.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: The one speaking is Liaam Winslet, also trans, Ecuadorian.
[Liaam Winslet]: I remember we had had a protest here in front of the office, in the little park here.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Liaam and Lorena were close friends, colleagues, and fellow activists. If anyone knew how important Lorena was to the Latin trans community of New York, it was Liaam.
[Liaam Winslet]: Well, she was the… We always say the mother of Queens, the queen of Queens, but she was always the queen here — so she’s like this queen of the Jackson Heights area.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: A queen, yes, but also a companion, with no need to be the center of attention — like that cold night in Queens.
[Liaam Winslet]: I remember that was the last action we did where Lorena was present. The whole community was together. And we had already heard, a few days, a few weeks before, that there was a situation with a virus going around. But we were like, «oh, it’ll never get here. That’s not going to happen, and so on.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: That virus was Covid-19, the coronavirus.
[Cristina Herrera]: I think it was around the end of February. I don’t remember exactly, because I’ve blocked that period from my mind because it was very hard.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: This is Cristina Herrera, also trans, born in El Salvador, and one of Lorena’s closest friends.
[Cristina Herrera]: I would tell her, «Lorenita, try not to go out too much, try not to…» Because she used to go visit a lot of girls in the community.
[Archival audio, news report]: The city has become a ghost city, but the number of infections and deaths continues to rise.
[Cristina Herrera]: And she would tell me yes, that she was going to see less people and so on. But Lorena was always very generous, and so she kept on doing her outreach work like that.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: The thing is, Lorena was irreplaceable. No one had protected the community the way she had for so many years.
[Liaam Winslet]: I remember she said to me, «pájara, this situation is really hard,» because some of the girls had already called her to tell her they had also tested positive for COVID. She told me, «Liaam, we have to do something to help the pájaras, because a lot of them don’t have food. Some of them are worried. Some don’t want to go out because they’re scared.»
[Archival audio, news report]: The death toll in the state of New York has doubled in just three days. Doctors are overwhelmed and alarmed by the rapid spread of the virus.
[Liaam Winslet]: A few days later Lorena told me, «Liaam, I feel sick. I’m running a fever. I have a sore throat, my body aches.» And I was like, «what? I mean, how are you, what are you feeling?» She says, «it’s this, I’m feeling it, I’ve already had a temperature for about two days,» and so on. I told her, «well, let’s go to the hospital.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Meanwhile, other friends were keeping a close eye on her.
[Liaam Winslet]: They would call me saying, «Liaam, what’s happening with Lorena? She told us she’s in bad shape. We haven’t heard from her. What happened?»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: But neither Liaam nor Cristina knew exactly what had happened to her.
[Liaam Winslet]: We were only told: she was transferred. But nobody knew where — we didn’t know where they had taken her. The ambulance had moved her to another hospital, but nobody knew which hospital.
[Cristina Herrera]: We couldn’t find her. We didn’t know where she was, which medical system she was in.
[Liaam Winslet]: So among all of us it was like, «look, there’s no way. How can we? Someone who can go and ask.» Nobody wanted to go out. There was total fear. And going to the hospital was pointless because they weren’t going to let you in. So there was a very, very great concern. We didn’t know where to go or what to do.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: What will we do without Lorena?
In the midst of the chaos and fear of the pandemic, that was the question her friends kept asking themselves as they searched for her.
And this is the question we will try to answer over the next 10 episodes.
When a group of women with so much stacked against them loses their adoptive mother, their greatest advocate, their queen — how do they carry on?
From Central Series and Radio Ambulante Studios, this is Las Reinas de Queens. I’m Rula Ávila Muñoz. Episode 1. Saint, Mother, Queen.
There are so many recordings of Lorena Borjas: Lorena on the news, Lorena at marches, and Lorena at community talks with trans women in New York.
But here we’re going to start with a more intimate Lorena.
In 2012, Guillermo Flórez, a Spanish documentary filmmaker, visited Lorena at her small apartment in Queens. And while she was getting ready to go out for the night, he filmed her. We are listening to the audio from that video.
[Lorena Borjas]: The accessory. The accessories…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Lorena, then 52 years old, is sitting in front of a large mirror and a case full of makeup brushes and cosmetics.
[Lorena Borjas]: I haven’t washed my brushes.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: She begins to powder her full face. There are already a few wrinkles. She lines her eyes — small and mischievous.
[Lorena Borjas]: Can you believe I ran out of lash glue?
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: She combs her hair, pulls it back, and puts on a braided wig in the shape of a crown.
[Lorena Borjas]: «They say men shouldn’t cry over a woman.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: She puts on large golden earrings. She looks unmistakably Mexican. Since she was six years old, she knew she was a woman.
[Lorena Borjas]: And I wanted to look like that — like a Mexican vedette. I don’t know if you’ve heard of her, her name is Lyn May, a very famous Mexican entertainer. And I was a huge fan of hers. I used to say, «I want to look like that woman, so beautiful and lovely.» And I was always playing with my sister’s dolls. I was always doing things like sewing. And my brothers would say to me, «you’re going to like men, right?» And I’d say, «oh, no, come on, I’m going to like women.» But I would say to myself, «never.» And I laughed on the inside. And I’d think, «can’t they see?»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Lorena looks at herself in the mirror for several seconds. She smiles coyly.
She is Lorena.
She crossed the border in 1981, through the Rio Grande, when she was 20 years old.
[Lorena Borjas]: Honestly, when I saw that river, I didn’t want to cross. «Oh no,» I thought. I said to myself, «I’m going back to my Mexico. No. What am I going to do, to look for another country?» But I was already there. I said, «it is what it is.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: She went all the way to New York. She wanted to be somewhere she could safely undergo her hormonal transition, because in Mexico that simply didn’t exist. But the New York she found was very different from the one she had imagined.
[Cristina Herrera]: Back then New York was a city full of graffiti, full of crime.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: This is Cristina again. She arrived in the city in 1985, being 16 years old.
[Cristina Herrera]: It was also filling up with people who had problems with substances — crack. It was starting to destroy a lot of neighborhoods here.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: The crack and HIV epidemics were at their worst, and the LGBTQ community was particularly vulnerable. On top of that, at the time no one talked about the differences between a gay or bisexual person, much less a trans person. So carving out a place for yourself was hard.
[Cristina Herrera]: Back then we didn’t have safe spaces where we could gather. In those days you either hung out in the bars, or you hung out in, say, places like train stations, certain train stations, and Port Authority.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Port Authority, the bus terminal in midtown Manhattan, at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue.
[Cristina Herrera]: So every day after work, we would go to 42nd. That’s where we met up with other trans people, other people who were LGB.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: A place to chat, to meet people, even to cruise — to have sex in public places.
[Cristina Herrera]: For me it was a really nice experience, because it wasn’t just worry and discomfort anymore, it was also like, maybe this is going to be my new family.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And it was there, around 1987, that Cristina met Lorena.
[Cristina Herrera]: You’d see her on the street and think: this is a schoolgirl, because she had her two little buns, one on each side, with her little clips, just like a little student girl. So that’s when they introduced us. She says to me, «hi mami, how are you?» and greets me. And back then too, like now, we’d give each other a little hug, like to reaffirm that we’re part of the community.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: By then Lorena had already been in the city for about six years. She had found work at a belt factory in the Garment District, a few blocks from Port Authority. She was also in the middle of her transition. On top of that, she already had her residency. She got it through the amnesty that President Reagan granted to undocumented immigrants in 1986. And she was studying accounting.
In other words, things were going relatively well for her.
But not long after, in ’89, she lost her job at the factory. And the further along she got in her transition, the harder it became to get hired anywhere else. This is how Cristina explains it.
[Cristina Herrera]: A trans person couldn’t just walk into a place, into a McDonald’s, and say, «I want to apply for a cashier position.» They’d laugh in your face. Or they’d take your résumé and throw it in the trash — sometimes right in front of you, because there were no laws protecting us, so to speak. There was so much ignorance.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: As the 1990s began, Lorena could no longer find opportunities. She faced discrimination and was running out of money. And that pushed her into sex work, a crime punishable by up to three months in jail in New York State.
She soon met a woman who would find her clients in exchange for a cut of the earnings. Without realizing it, Lorena had become the victim of a human trafficking network.
She began walking Roosevelt Avenue. Remember this street, because we’ll visit it many times in this series. Roosevelt is one of the most important avenues in Queens, where sex workers gathered — and still gather — at night.
[Liaam Winslet]: Back then, when she arrived here, it was hard to be trans, to be a sex worker.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: This is Liaam again.
[Liaam Winslet]: Substances were very easy to come by. Back then Lorena used substances, used alcohol, and she talked about it openly, right? She would say, «I’m a survivor because I was abused by the system.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: For example: if a client wanted to drink alcohol, Lorena had to join him; if the client wanted to use drugs, same thing.
[Liaam Winslet]: Nobody knows what you’re living. If you have a client, and the client pays you a thousand dollars, you’re not going to say no, because in that moment you need that thousand dollars. She used to say, «when I went with my clients, I’d go to a hotel and wouldn’t come out until three or four days later because the client was paying me for each day to be with him.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: It was a vicious cycle. Little by little, substance use became both a means of survival and also a source of comfort.
[Cristina Herrera]: She was already a joyful person even without being under the influence of alcohol or drugs. But when she was under the influence, she was so much more joyful. She made us laugh more, she made things feel more normal, she helped us forget our problems more.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Because Cristina was also a sex worker. And going out on the street at night was a huge stress.
[Cristina Herrera]: When that little voice inside you sometimes starts to say that being trans isn’t the best, or that it comes with complications, she helped us neutralize or ease that kind of thinking.
[Liaam Winslet]: She used to say, «Liaam, when I was very young I did so many things because I felt so much pain. I carried so many memories, so many wounds from my life, a lot of abuse too,» right?
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: It was around that time that Lorena contracted HIV. Receiving news like that in those days, when treatments barely existed, was like being handed a death sentence. But on top of that, Lorena was also suffering domestic violence at the hands of her partner. And as a sex worker, she was a constant target of police abuse on Roosevelt Avenue.
[Cristina Herrera]: Working on Roosevelt back then, trans women were like easier prey for police to meet their quotas. Because Roosevelt at that time was full of drug dealers, they were brazenly selling on the corners. But it was trans women that the police went after because trans women were never going to fight back.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Throughout the 1990s, Lorena was arrested several times, always for reasons tied to her sex work. All of this criminal history was enough to make her too afraid to renew her residency. She was scared. And so Lorena began living undocumented. She fell into extreme precarity. Liaam sums it up this way:
[Liaam Winslet]: Being a trans woman, being Latina, being a woman of color, being an immigrant, living with HIV, not speaking English — it all becomes a constant barrier.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Here is Lorena again.
[Lorena Borjas]: I used to go to a support group here in Queens, and in the support group there were trans girls who were using drugs, who were using alcohol. And I would think, «but how am I going to give advice when I also drink, when I also, in one way or another, use drugs, in one way or another get drunk?» Well, I couldn’t see myself reaching out to a girl.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: But she began doing exactly that: reaching out to her fellow women, going wherever they went to help them. Lorena knew by heart the streets that sex workers frequented and the clubs on Roosevelt Avenue where Latin trans women gathered.
She started visiting those places with a cart full of condoms to hand out. Something that today sounds like a small thing, but in the 1990s was very risky. The police could arrest you and charge you with prostitution if they found three or more condoms in your bag. That’s how harsh the laws against sex workers were.
[Lorena Borjas]: I learned my work from the streets. I learned it with the girls. I myself had many run-ins with the police, and from not being well informed. What can I do? Where should I go? Who’s going to help me? Well, nobody knew.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Lorena put no limits on her help. One example: many times the city’s shelters — the ones supposedly giving refuge to vulnerable populations — would turn away Lorena’s companions for being trans. So she would invite them to her home.
[Liaam Winslet]: When you arrived at Lorena’s house, you always wondered why she had that little folding bed at the entrance of her home. You’d think, «why?» Until she would say, «no, because sometimes the pájaras, when they come by, I know a lot of them don’t know where to stay. So I have that little bed because I know how hard it is when you don’t have a safe place to sleep.» So many of our companions — and I include myself — stayed in Lorena’s bed, right? It was like something very sacred. She could renovate her house, fix up her house, change things, but that bed always had to be there for whichever girl might need it.
[Lorena Borjas]: And people would say to me, «Lorena, you sound like someone who’s into activism.» And I’d say, «what is this activism?» They’d say, «activism is what you’re doing.» And I’d tell them, «what I’m doing is something I enjoy — helping out. And also, I don’t like injustice.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: That’s how she spent several years — with street-level activism. She did what she could, but in those days HIV kept spreading. And the police never stopped harassing trans sex workers.
[Lorena Borjas]: Well, one day, on a Friday, eight girls were arrested. Another weekend, twelve were arrested. Another weekend, five. And on and on like that. One day I said, «No. Lorena Borjas needs to step up. Who’s going to do this work? Lorena Borjas. Lorena Borjas is the one who’s going to look out for these girls who have no voice and no vote.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: We’ll be right back.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: We’re back with Las Reinas de Queens.
In the early 2000s, the obstacles facing Latin trans women in New York were many: transphobia, precarity, police violence. But among all of them, there was one far less obvious: invisibility.
Almost no one knew what the problems were, much less the needs of the community. And that’s where Lorena came in. She began weaving a network of contacts with organizations across New York: health clinics, activists, and immigration lawyers. And she brought to them the community’s stories so they would know what was happening.
[Lorena Borjas]: We brought testimonies to a table, to a discussion panel. How we could use that to tell the police… To tell the New York City police that what was happening was unjust. Why so many arrests? Why were so many transgender girls being deported?
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: She also began accompanying HIV patients at a time when the stigma weighed heavily. Cristina told us that Lorena connected them with social and medical services, from getting an HIV test to receiving treatment.
[Cristina Herrera]: At that time, a lot of people in the community didn’t want to be seen or associated with, say, a clinic that had to do with support services for people living with HIV. So sometimes Lorena would go to other places — out to Long Island, or up to Westchester — so that people could receive those services without worrying that someone would see them and automatically label them as a person already living with the HIV virus.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And that help from Lorena kept multiplying.
[Cristina Herrera]: Because there were hundreds of people she helped. Hundreds of appointments she went to. There were people who maybe needed just one appointment and were fine. But there were clients who needed to be accompanied five or ten times. And Lorena was there to help them.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: But among all of that support, something was still missing.
[Lorena Borjas]: The girls would get out but they didn’t have a safe place, somewhere they could go to talk about their problems, somewhere to spend a nice afternoon.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Around 2008, Lorena secured a space in Queens to bring trans girls together and give talks about their rights. She then joined the board of Translatina Network, an organization co-founded by Cristina in 2009. Their goal was to have an institution made by the community, for the community.
[Cristina Herrera]: We didn’t start out receiving money from the government or from foundations. For MetroCards, for food for the group meetings, we had to go hold raffles at the clubs, at the discos in Queens.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: The clubs where many women in the community gathered.
And in 2012, Lorena partnered with Chase Strangio, a highly respected trans lawyer in the United States, to found the Lorena Borjas Community Fund. Its goal was to raise money to pay the bail of incarcerated trans women.
Here is Lorena speaking about one case that affected her deeply: two trans girls facing 12 years in prison.
[Lorena Borjas]: What happened was that these girls were framed — they were accused of attempted murder with robbery, when these girls weren’t doing anything other than walking down the street. And I knew them personally. And when I got the news — that they were locked up and being charged, that there was no other way they could get out from under that accusation — I said, «no, I’m going to find whatever resources it takes.» I knocked on agencies’ doors. One agency said no, another said no, another said maybe, another said we’ll let you know. Until one agency finally said yes: «Lorena, I’m going to take this case and we’ll go wherever we have to go.» I was in court with them for 19 months straight. They were locked up inside, but I was, you could say, locked up outside — searching for resources, figuring out how we could get them free.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: If someone needed medicine in the early morning, Lorena answered. If someone had to be accompanied to a police station or a hearing, she was there. Sometimes she ate nothing more than a slice of pizza or a sandwich the whole day. Tiredness was always with her.
By the 2010s, the landscape for the trans community in New York was, if not optimistic, at least promising. There was more visibility compared to previous decades. Laws protecting trans people were being passed, and the city seemed to be becoming a refuge for them.
By that point, Lorena had woven an enormous network of contacts. The local government had recognized her work. And in 2015 she was even able to found her own organization: the Intercultural Transgrediendo Collective. It was a small basement office on Roosevelt Avenue, just a few meters from where she had once worked as a sex worker.
[Lynly Egyes]: It’s hard to always remember all of her amazing work because there was just so much of it.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: She is Lynly Egyes, a lawyer specializing in sex work and human trafficking cases. She worked with Lorena for years defending incarcerated trans people. Lynly will never forget one of those cases: a defendant, a minor, who needed someone to represent him, and Lorena told him, «Lynly is going to help you.»
[Lynly Egyes]: «Lynly’s gonna help you. Lynly’s gonna be your attorney.» And I kind of looked at her and I’m like, «you can’t keep telling everyone I’m gonna be their attorney. But yes, I will.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Lynly agreed, of course. But the boy didn’t trust her. Why would he? No one had ever believed his story.
[Lynly Egyes]: I was speechless and I wasn’t sure what to say, and Lorena just kind of took her hand and put it on his shoulder and said, «Lynly will believe you. Lynly knows you’re not lying.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Lorena placed her hand on the boy’s shoulder and told him, «Lynly believes you, she knows you’re not lying.» And the boy agreed. That was Lorena’s power: she planted trust where there was none.
[Lynly Egyes]: But it always felt like this horrible feeling that I was able to help these other women through Lorena’s help, but I couldn’t help Lorena.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: But despite all the achievements they had accomplished together, Lynly was frustrated that she couldn’t help Lorena with her own immigration case. Let’s remember: Lorena was undocumented.
[Liaam Winslet]: And I could see how stressed she got.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Liaam again.
[Liaam Winslet]: Because she would say, «Liaam, I’ve helped so many people. How can I not be able to become a citizen? How can I not have a status?»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And that meant she could be deported at any moment. The risk increased when Donald Trump took the presidency in 2017 and began toughening his immigration policies and his stance toward the trans community.
We’ll talk more about this in another episode. But it was in that increasingly tense environment that Lynly dared to carve a path through the legal labyrinth Lorena was caught in. They needed an urgent and bold solution.
[Lynly Egyes]: So we decided to do a governor’s pardon, which I was nervous about, Lorena was nervous about.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Instead of fighting her case in court, they were going to ask for a pardon from the then-governor of New York: Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat. At first Lorena wasn’t very convinced.
[Liaam Winslet]: She was worried. She was very, very scared, because she would say, «what if he doesn’t grant it? How is a governor going to look at a trans person, a trans woman, and give her that chance of a pardon?»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: But if she obtained it, Lorena could renew her residency and apply for naturalization, and perhaps return to Mexico for a visit. That was something she had promised the Virgin of Guadalupe when she arrived in the United States in the ’80s.
So for months Lynly helped Lorena build her case. In a binder hundreds of pages thick, they compiled testimonies of all the community work Lorena had done over decades: letters from politicians, from activists, from the many people she had helped. That binder lives today at the Colectivo Transgrediendo, which Lorena founded and which Liaam now leads.
[Liaam Winslet]: Here it tells her whole story. It talks about her criminal cases, her name change, the letters that many of our companions wrote for her…
[Andrea]: «Dear Governor Cuomo, the reason for this letter is to request…»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: We asked Andrea, who is part of the Colectivo Transgrediendo, to read us excerpts from those letters.
[Andrea]: «I am writing this letter asking you to pardon the convictions of Lorena Borjas. I met her two years ago at a disco where she was handing out condoms.»
«Governor Cuomo, Lorena Borjas is a key figure in our trans community. Thanks to her efforts, trans girls now count and are part of New York society.»
«Ever since I told Lorena Borjas about my problem with changing my name, she always made sure to follow up, and I am grateful she guided me through my entire transition.»
«I didn’t know where to turn if I got arrested. I had no knowledge of my rights as a trans girl.»
«Please, we need Lorena Borjas with us, because if she is not here, we will once again be vulnerable in this city.»
«And that is why I am respectfully asking that she be given another chance. Without her help we could not move forward.»
«Thank you for hearing my humble testimony, and I trust that you will give Mrs. Borjas that opportunity. She deserves it.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Lynly and Lorena sent the binder to the governor and waited. Months of uncertainty followed. Until December 2017…
[Liaam Winslet]: When they called her, she said, «Liaam, this number is calling me but I don’t know who it is and I’m not going to answer.» Until her lawyer called her and said, «no, the governor’s office is trying to reach you.» So they called back again. And we were both in the office together, and Lorena picks up the phone and answers, and they tell her, «what’s happening is we’re calling because the governor has been thinking about granting you the pardon.» And Lorena couldn’t believe it — she was like, «no, what you’re telling me is a joke, it’s not real, it’s a scam.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: But it was real. Lorena wept.
[Lynly Egyes]: As amazing as it was, like, she should never have had to go through any of this. Like, her convictions should have been vacated.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: According to Lynly, Lorena should never have had to ask for a pardon. Her convictions should have been overturned long ago.
Either way, with the pardon Lorena was able to obtain citizenship and return to Mexico for the first time in forty years.
And Liaam accompanied her to the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
[Liaam Winslet]: That was a whole day, a full day. Listen, Lorena took me to see everything. I had been to the basilica, but just the basilica itself. Lorena took me to the gardens around the back. «Look,» she said to me, «this church — when I used to come here, these floors weren’t here.» And she told me, «Liaam, this didn’t exist. Now it’s nice.» It was so emotional. I remember we even had a… what’s that soup called? A pozole. Right after leaving the basilica. Something else, I tell you. She was so pleased. She said to me, «we shouldn’t eat so late, Liaam, because I’ll get a stomach ache..» But she ate it all the same.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: That was Lorena. She had an huge appetite. At nearly sixty years old, it was as if she was only just beginning to prove who she really was.
We’ll be right back.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: We’re back.
Let’s jump to 2012. That year, at the end of May, Liaam met Lorena.
It was in Philadelphia, at a conference on healthcare access in the trans community. Liaam had traveled from Ecuador, where she still lived at the time.
[Liaam Winslet]: I said, «I have to take advantage of this — this is the moment.» So I was already coming with the idea of staying, but I didn’t know how, didn’t know how to go about that process.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: In Philadelphia, Liaam gave a talk about young LGBTQ communities in Latin America and about violence against trans women in Ecuador.
When her talk ended, Lorena came up to her.
[Liaam Winslet]: She said, «oh, wow, I didn’t know about this. I didn’t know this was happening.» She was very surprised.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: They got along right away. Lorena invited her to visit New York for a few days.
[Liaam Winslet]: I was kind of hesitant, because I thought, «I’ve never been there, I’m scared. I don’t know.» I had researched some things about New York. And just imagine: alone, not knowing where to go or what to do. But she suddenly said to me, «no, look, you know what? Come on, stay at my place. You can stay for a week. You can see if you like it. If you don’t, then you can decide to stay in Philadelphia instead.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Liaam stayed in New York. Lorena helped her in all the ways we’ve already heard: she connected her with medical services to continue her transition, and with legal services to get her papers. She taught Liaam everything she did. And very soon she made her her right hand and one of her closest confidantes.
Liaam remembers that one day Lorena lost her cell phone in a taxi. And to modernize herself she bought an iPhone.
[Liaam Winslet]: So I said to her, «look, we need to set this up, because if you don’t set this up and you lose your phone, there’s an option to wipe all the information or locate the phone.» So she said, «oh, set that up for me because that’s exactly what I need on my phone.» And so I did — I sent her the passcode. I had her passcode, and we really trusted each other.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: I’m telling you this because it was with that «find my phone» feature that, in March 2020, in the terror of the pandemic, hours after losing Lorena in the chaos gripping New York’s hospitals…
[Liaam Winslet]: Searching and searching, I found her phone at this hospital in Brooklyn. That’s where they had transferred her.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Lorena was at Coney Island Hospital, in southern Brooklyn, nearly an hour’s drive from Queens. Her friends were able to speak with the doctor in charge of her care. He told them she was intubated, on a ventilator. And that if she stopped breathing, they would not be able to resuscitate her.
Shortly after they found her, Lorena died. And the news reverberated everywhere.
[Archival audio, news report]: Originally from Veracruz, Mexico. By profession, a public accountant — and undocumented.
[Archival audio, news report]: Lorena Borjas, 59 years old, a trans activist from Jackson Heights, Queens. She was a heroine to the entire community.
[Archival audio, news report]: The coronavirus took her life, as it has taken thousands of Latinos who have fought their battles in this country.
[Archival audio, news report]: She was a critical part of our community and it’s such… So heartbreaking to lose her.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: It was March 30th, one day before the International Day of Trans Visibility.
[Liaam Winslet]: She died on a date where she didn’t want to be forgotten, right? Like, she was saying, «no, pájaras, you’ll never forget me — you’re not going to forget about this old pájara.» So, every single year, the whole community knows that Lorena died one day before Trans Visibility Day.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And today, six years after Lorena’s death, so many people still feel her absence.
[Cristina Herrera]: She left a void, an absence. But she left behind a better community. She left a community much better equipped, far more prepared to deal with whatever problems came their way, you know? So we focus on that, because we weren’t going to stay there paralyzed and, you know, sad all the time. We decided to keep fighting because we have no other choice. Our community has always fought. We’ve always pushed forward.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And that fight, that push, that’s what this series is about. Over the next nine episodes, we’ll meet the queens who have continued, one way or another, in the streets, in the bars, and in the beauty pageants — a desire that Lorena always held.
[Lorena Borjas]: Well, I’m going to get wherever I need to get to like a beast — fight with claws and nails, claws and nails. I don’t care, you know? Without disrespecting anyone, without saying anything. I always say that. They’ll say: «Lorena Borjas left something we’re going to continue: the battle, the fight.» Not because I’m no longer in the world, but I would like this to continue — I’d like them not to stop.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: The queens of Queens will stop at nothing.
Las Reinas de Queens is a podcast from Central, the series channel of Radio Ambulante Studios, and is part of the My Cultura podcast network on iHeartRadio.
This series was produced by Diego Senior and Pablo Argüelles, with additional production and reporting by Nikol Pizarro, Joana Toro, and Andrés Sanin.
Thanks to Guillermo F. Flórez for the archival material on Lorena Borjas.
The editors were Daniel Alarcón, Silvia Viñas, and me.
Fact-checking by Bruno Scelza and Nikol Pizarro.
María Linares did the sound design and mixing, as well as the original music.
The series’ graphic design and art direction are by Diego Corzo.
Product development for Las Reinas de Queens was led by Natalia Ramírez. Digital production was carried out by Ana María Betancourt and Óscar Luna.
Business development and strategic partnerships were led by Camilo Jiménez Santofimio. Julián Santos and Eric Spiegelman provided legal support.
Las Reinas de Queens is an original idea by Diego Senior, Joana Toro, and Andrés Sanin.
The executive producers are Diego Senior; and from Radio Ambulante Studios, our CEO, Carolina Guerrero.
At iHeart, the executive producers are Arlene Santana and Leo Gomez.
Part of the funding for this project was provided by the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, as part of their «Spreading Love Through Media» initiative, with support from the John Templeton Foundation.
You can follow us on social media at centralseriesRA and subscribe to our newsletter at centralpodcast.audio.
I’m Rula Ávila Muñoz. Thank you for listening.
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Este podcast es propiedad de Radio Ambulante Studios. Cualquier copia, distribución o adaptación está expresamente prohibida sin previa autorización.
This podcast is the property of Radio Ambulante Studios. Any copy, distribution, or adaptation is expressly prohibited without prior authorization.