Reporting by Anita Pouchard Serra and Lucía Cholakian Herrera
To update your paperwork and documents, to access a formal job, to apply for work visas, to look for a home: these movements are easy and ordinary for many. But for someone migrating to a new country, these tasks represent enormous challenges. And for someone moving because they’re fleeing persecution, they’re harder still.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants from México head north each year to the United States, where they hope to flee the challenges back home: an economic crisis, authoritarian regimes, and violence stemming from high levels of organized crime. A subset of this group are also fleeing violence or threatened violence as a result of their gender or sexuality. In Latin America, LGBTQIA+ migrants face unique challenges — just for being who they are.
Ronny, 26, sits in a room in Casa Frida, a haven built for LGBTQIA+ migrants seeking asylum in México or on the trail to the United States. It took him two months to arrive in Mexico City from Escuintla, Guatemala.
He and his girlfriend, a trans woman, fled after the threats and attacks got deadly. The last time, in early July, a criminal group in the area smashed his motorbike to intimidate them.
“We’ve got to go to the U.S.,” he told his partner, 30, who he met at a party dancing eight years ago. They have been in love ever since, although most of the time, in hiding. Together, they underwent violence in their home country, Guatemala, and they were internally displaced once before deciding to move up north, to the United States, far from the discrimination they faced for their sexuality and gender identity.
But their vision was far from easy. Over the two months of their journey, they faced extortion on behalf of the cartels, were smuggled and detained several times, survived an attempted kidnapping by cartels, traveled in overcrowding hiding in buses’ toilets, saw friends die and disappear forcibly in the trail, and got kicked out of caravans because of their sexuality. Without any exaggeration, they survived, over and over, several times. Each one, said Ronny, felt like the last one. But they endured, with one picture on their minds: the change of rooting elsewhere, far from so much violence.
After two months that felt like a decade, they finally arrived in Mexico City. Shortly after deciding they wouldn’t risk traveling with La Bestia (the freight train that people jump in to migrate from the south of Mexico or somewhere close to México City up north), a woman told them there was a safe place for them. They looked it up on the internet: Casa Frida. But the Google Maps comments were misleading: anti-LGBTQIA+ groups had posted several bad reviews or alarmed users to stay away. Ronny and his girlfriend had been through enough, so they were initially wary.
“Our Mexico City shelter is the only one with a public address,” said Reyna Angélica Hernández Guzmán, a part of the team in Casa Frida. The others, in the cities of Tapachula and Monterrey, are kept private for security reasons. “So people mostly walk in here, ring the doorbell.” Others are derived from public offices. The population reaching the house varies, but Reyna said that recently they were mostly receiving people from Cuba, Venezuela, Russia and Honduras.
What migrants find on the other side of the metallic doors is the reverse of what they go through during the trail. Casa Frida is a quiet, nice place, where they can spend time in a terrace, cooking in the kitchen, resting in their beds. They have a psychology cabinet and volunteers on hand to help them navigate the city and find work. When they arrive, migrants are given a full week to decide what they want to do — whether to apply for refuge in Mexico, or to continue their way up north.
“Staying is, of course, optional,” she said. “But our goal is that they leave Casa Frida being financially independent.”
If they decide to stay in Mexico, they receive help with the paperwork at COMAR, the Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid. Although COMAR provides the know-how and pipeline to regularize their situation in Mexico, such paperwork has jumped from taking less than a month to up to six months recently due to the bottleneck of migrants in the country after the United States stiffened its border policy in the last months.
The house is small, with two floors, a few rooms, and offices. But last year, in December, they were overflowing with people seeking refuge, amounting to almost 30— there went the common spaces, the offices, and the psychology room, which were all turned into rooms for people to sleep.
“I found activities that helped me focus on something else than my issues,” said Roberto, a pseudonym requested for safety reasons, who fled El Salvador recently and arrived in Casa Frida.
Last weekend, he had watched a drag show for the first time in his life, in an outing organized by the house team. “In El Salvador you cannot be openly gay, I feel safer and freer here — I see couples on the street holding hands and I tell myself: this is happening, I’m in another country.”
Casa Frida seeks to build a safe space for LGBT migrants, but also to help them integrate into Mexico City by assisting them in finding jobs, getting their paperwork together, and, ultimately, requesting asylum in the country. However, many migrants wish to continue their way to the United States by registering in the CBP One App and getting an appointment at the border. By the time I met Ronny, he had just got theirs, and is headed to the border in mid-October to seek asylum in the United States.
The challenges, however, are not finished yet: flying up north costs about $500 for migrants, who can’t risk to go by bus due to the presence of cartels along the trail, and are prone to being kidnapped, extorted or attacked in the cities of crossing below the border.
But hope is strong, and every morning, Ronny wakes up to check if the appointment is still real and if it’s there. Once in the United States he hopes to go back to one of his passions, tattooing, and, finally, live freely with the love of his life.
*Ronny is his real name, but his surname has been removed to safeguard his identity as he continues his journey up north.