I have been doing community work for more than a decade now. It all started when I got involved with local undocumented immigrant youth in Orange County, California. Since then, l have worked on state and national immigrant and LGBTQ rights campaigns, and that work eventually led to my current position as executive director at Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement (Familia: TQLM). We are a national trans and queer Latinx grassroots organization, and we organize at the intersections of migrant justice, LGBTQ rights, and racial justice.
The current COVID-19 health crisis has deeply impacted our trans and queer Latinx and undocumented communities and the way our organizations engage our community in grassroots organizing across the country. We had to completely reassess our campaign and programmatic work in order to respond to the crisis and support our community with mutual aid efforts, resources, and connections to local health organizations and institutions. Familia: TQLM, like so many other organizations, had to move our grassroots organizing work to digital, and that has come with new opportunities and challenges. Our communities were already facing economic hardships due to racism, discrimination, and transphobia, and this pandemic has only heightened the fear, uncertainty, and economic challenges in people’s daily lives.
Part of the way we engage and continue to build people-power with our base has definitely changed so that we can, in the short term, support folks who have lost their jobs and are struggling to pay for rent, food, medical expenses, and other essential needs. Yet, the pandemic has made it clear that we must continue to stay focused and not lose sight of the long-term work and vision to end capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, and to protect our environment. We are seeing that it is poor people, Black and Latinx people who are dying in higher numbers because of COVID-19. These are the same communities that will also face economic hardships the most as we continue through this health crisis. We cannot get stuck in the immediate and short-term strategies; the systems that are killing our people because they cannot get tested or treated on time are the same systems that are incarcerating, deporting, and killing Black, Latinx, and other people of color in this country.
Despite all these challenges, our members remain engaged in our campaign and organizing work to #EndTransDetention and #AbolishICE. Our community is inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and its organizing power to take the streets to march and protest and demand for police budgets to be defunded and for that money to be invested in Black communities. Our members know that all of these injustices are not going to stop anytime soon so they know we must continue to adapt during this health crisis but continue to organize. No one organization, leader, or organizer has all the answers or knows how best to move forward through this pandemic, but we know that one winning strategy has been to organize and build people power for the long term. We must continue to organize our communities and resources in order to defund the police, abolish ICE, and reinvest that money and resources into Black, Latinx, and people of color across the country. Our communities need affordable housing, universal free healthcare, quality schools, jobs, and mental health services, and we must invest in our youth so that all of us can thrive and be our most authentic selves. ▅
Jorge Gutierrez (he/him/él)
Executive Director
Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement
