LOS ANGELES—Lorena Borjas, a longtime activist and advocate for transgender and undocumented sex workers in the New York City borough of Queens, died late last month, a victim of the coronavirus pandemic, according to an obituary published by The New York Times. She was 59 years old.
“She pushed us to shine authentically, to become an unstoppable insubordination, a scream of subversion that says, ‘I am here, and I deserve happiness, too,’” wrote Cecilia Gentili, a New York trans activist who was mentored by Borjas.
According to a BuzzFeed News report, Borjas died on March 30. She had run away from her Veracruz, Mexico, home in at the age of 17, finally crossing into the United States in 1981 after four harrowing years on the Mexico City streets.
She received a green card in 1986, when then-President Ronald Reagan granted a broad amnesty to about 3 million undocumented immigrants.
But she lived under the threat of deportation due to a series of sex-work arrests in the 1990s that made her unable to renew her green card. But three years ago, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo granted her a pardon. She obtained full United States citizenship in 2019.
“She was very interested in breaking the cycle that is arrest, jail time, immigration detention, deportation procedures,” Gentili told BuzzFeed News. “She knew if she was able to pay the bail, the girls wouldn’t go to jail.”
In 2011, she founded the Lorena Borjas Community Fund with the stated intention of helping transgender sex workers break out of the “arrest-jail-deportation” cycle. Her fund posted bail for at least 50 transgender individuals, according to Chase Strangio, a friend and colleague who spoke to The New York Times.
“But this is just a fraction of what Lorena herself did,” Strangio told The Times. “She probably helped over 100 trans people obtain immigration status or other legal support.”
With Gentili, who worked at a Queens health clinic, she also handed out condoms to sex workers in Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, always making sure they never carried more than two at a time — because holding more than two condoms often led to an arrest.
“This was lifesaving work,” Gentile wrote. “For many sex workers, particularly transgender women, arrest meant facing degrading treatment and abuse at the hands of the police.”
The Jackson Heights neighborhood in central queens, which served as home base for Borjas, has been hit especially hard by the city’s coronavirus outbreak. With a densely-packed populatiom if about 600,000 largely by working class and immigrant residents, central Queens had suffered 7,260 cases of the virus by April 10. Manhattan, with a population of more than 1.6 million, recorded 10,860 cases in the same time frame.
According to Gentile, Borjas is survived by a partner, as well as family members still living in Mexico.
Photo Via Lorena Borejas Facebook
