Breaking down barriers to build a more inclusive Guatemala 

By Erin Treinen

Guatemala City — Noé Velasquez has known who he is and what he believes since he was a young child. Originally from Villa Nueva near Guatemala City, Noé comes from a multicultural family with strong matriarchs who taught and inspired him.  

He has been an empathetic and giving person his whole life, ever since he was old enough to receive an allowance, which he would immediately donate to people he deemed more in need. Noé is a gender-fluid gay person, a volunteer, an activist, a defender of human rights and the Executive Director of Asociación SOMOS Jovenes Diversos en Acción, or SOMOS as it is commonly known. 

Despite an upbringing that could have lent itself to internalized homophobia — including religious and toxic masculine pressures from his grandmother and father plus years of relentless bullying in school — Noé instead learned to separate who he actually is from how other people see him.  

“I have always fought for people to see me as a human being,” says Noé. 

Seeing people without labels is one of Noé’s core values and what he tries to instill in everyone that he meets. His patience, willingness to teach, bubbly personality, and ability to draw people in has made him successful in challenging long-held stereotypes about the LGBTQI+ community. 

“We all have the right to a good life, to health care, to education and to employment and it does not matter that you do not agree with LGBTQI+ issues, but [you should know] that the issues exist, that we are here and that we have the same rights you do,” he explains. 

At only 31 years old, Noé is leading and empowering a diverse team of young change-makers through SOMOS, a civil society organization dedicated to ensuring LGBTQI+ inclusion and the full exercise of human rights for all individuals. 

One way he has done that is through a grant financed by USAID and implemented by Creative Associates International through the Peacebuilding Project, which allows the SOMOS team to train 150 leaders in the Western Highlands on sexual diversity and human rights for LGBTQI+ people. To do this, they have adapted and simplified the trainings so that everyone can understand the concepts and use a participatory methodology that encourages questions and conversation. 

“You need to bring people along step by step, teaching them what is sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender exclusion,” says Noé. 

SOMOS is one of few LGBTQI+ organizations to provide sexual diversity trainings in the Western Highlands, which is a predominately indigenous region. To broaden participants’ notions of heteronormative sexuality, SOMOS intertwines concepts of duality, gender, and sexual diversity from the Mayan worldview to bridge ancestral knowledge with current LGBTQI+ realities. Through dialogue, participants gained new perspectives, recognizing that sexual diversity has been a human reality throughout millennia and within the Mayan worldview. 

Noé believes the positive response to the training is because participants have acquaintances, colleagues, or friends that are LGBTQI+. And while it is a topic that has historically been taboo because of social and cultural norms, many people are now ready to listen and learn. 

Noé has seen these shifts in perspective after just a few months of training.  

“As an organization we have seen the most impact among Peacebuilding Project staff. Many of them are men and at the beginning [of the trainings], they were reluctant,” explains Noé. “Now these same people are so friendly, they say hi, they want to chat, they want to give you a hug — it tells me their perspective has changed … We are breaking down barriers.”