A 24-year-old Guatemalan woman from the community of San Lorenzo, Huehuetenango, stands out in the crowd. Her elaborate tattoos, jewelry, unconventional style and huge smile are the first things you notice. Her motto? “Your fight is my fight, and I hope that my fight is your fight.”
Alexandra Gonzalez is part of the LGBTQI+ community and a force to be reckoned with. She is a member of numerous social change networks and groups and an ardent defender of human rights.
Her activist spirit began to blossom from a young age, as Gonzalez participated in all types of activities, ranging from social projects to the arts to sporting events.
“Along with my sisters, I’ve always been very active in different organizations,” says Gonzalez. “That’s how I started getting to know new institutions, organizações, and people who began inviting me to meetings, oficinas, or dialogues. That’s how I got involved in the things that interest me, like sexual and reproductive rights and social conflict.”
Participating in meetings was not enough, and Gonzalez wanted to develop skills to influence tangible change in her community. Em 2021, she joined the Youth Voices for Peace Network, an initiative implemented by USAID and Creative Associates International through the Peacebuilding Project and the Central American Institute of Studies for Social Democracy.
A core focus of Voceros Juveniles is that youth are key partners in peacebuilding. They have an important role as agents of change able to promote harmony, peaceful coexistence and development in their communities.
“The curriculum with Voceros Juveniles is very complete. It goes from how to speak in public to how to have dialogue with authorities, because it’s not the same to speak with an authority as it is to speak with a friend,” explains Gonzalez. “I’ve also learned to use technological platforms to spread messages and share ideas with other young people.”
Voceros Juveniles is made up of 226 youth from different communities in Huehuetenango, Totonicapã, Quiche, and San Marcos. The purpose of the network is to promote and strengthen the capacities of youth like Gonzalez to carry out peacebuilding activities by building their leadership, skillsets, and their knowledge of technology and theater.
“The idea of using theater to address social problems is so you aren’t just talking at people, but you are also using audiovisual materials so that people can recognize the problem,” explains Gonzalez. “But it’s important to not use videos from Argentina or Spain or other countries when you can use stories made by people here, people who are affected by the social problem so that they feel identified with.”
During the height of the pandemic, Voceros Juveniles could not use traditional in-person theater due to social distancing restrictions, but that did not deter Gonzalez and her peers. Gonzalez and a group of Voceros Juveniles members throughout the Western Highlands created a script, recording video clips in their distinct locations and editing them together for a video entitled “The Trip” about migration. The video was shown at virtual Peace Fair events hosted by Voceros Juveniles but Gonzalez really felt the impact when she saw it shown in-person at different meetings with women’s organizations in Huehuetenango.
“Our work has come all this way,” says a proud Gonzalez.
“Being a member of Voceros Juveniles has opened the door to many new opportunities,” says Gonzalez. She has built her knowledge base in human rights, civic participation, and conflict resolution, which in turn has empowered her to defend LGBTQI+ rights in her community, for herself and her peers.
She volunteers doing human rights work for the LGBTQI+ community through Trabajando Unidos (a local nonprofit organization) and the Observatory of Reproductive Health but acknowledges the very limited safe spaces that exist for LGBTQI+ individuals in Guatemala.
“Many LGBTQI+ people prefer to stay closeted because they don’t want to be ostracized,”ela diz. “They say ‘I’m not going to come out as gay because it’s better to be able to put food on the table.’”
Gonzalez says that as a bisexual woman she has lived experiences of discrimination and violence, but she acknowledges that individuals of different sexual orientations and gender identity experience increased levels of discrimination and risk, stating that it is particularly difficult and even dangerous for transgender individuals and gay men to be out in Guatemala.
This has led her to the volunteer work and advocacy she does today. “It’s important to recognize that at the end of the day, we are a collective and to recognize that a collective fight is better for me, for you, for everyone now and for everyone to come,” says Gonzalez.
“If I can be part of that change, I want to be.”
