For the first time in the country’s history, two trans women have been elected to Congress in Mexico. Maria Clemente Garcia and Salma Luevano are members of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s MORENA party and will be seated in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Mexico’s Congress. Both women have long histories of LGBTQ+ activism.
Also known as the Movement Of National Regeneration, MORENA is a left-wing party that came to power in 2018, promising to prioritize working-class citizens; support ethnic, religious, and sexual diversity, and further environmental justice.
Both Garcia and Luevano say they are committed to pushing for affirmative-action policies that will benefit LGBTQ+ people.
“There’s really a lot of poverty... extreme poverty within our trans population,” Luevano told Reuters on Wednesday. “I’ll take this fight proudly... for our people who are vulnerable.”
Luevano, 52, owns a beauty salon in the central state of Aguascalientes and is also the director of a collective called Together for the Way of Diversity. She became an activist after she was detained by police for wearing women’s clothing more than three decades ago, but sadly, little has changed since. 2019 was the deadliest year for LGBTQ+ people in Mexico in the last 5 years, with more than half the victims being transgender women and a third being gay men.
“Thirty years have passed and we still have the same discrimination, we still have the same fight,” she said.
In Mexico, the Chamber of Deputies has 500 members. Three hundred are directly elected, while the other 200 are assigned through what’s called “proportional representation,” a closed-list system that allocates seats to political parties based on percentage of the national vote. Garcia and Luevano will take two of the latter seats in September, when the new Congress convenes, and serve three-year terms.
Luevano’s nonprofit was part of the push for new rules that allow for a minimum number of candidates from underrepresented groups to be part of that closed list. As a result, more than 100 LGBTQ+ candidates took part in the June 6 election, the largest number in the country’s history.
As for Garcia, she hopes to use her new position to advocate for tax breaks for companies that hire LGBTQ+ staff, as well as pushing to amend Article 1 of Mexico’s constitution. As written now, Mexico’s constitution prohibits discrimination solely based on “sexual preference,” meaning that trans people lack non-discrimination protection at the federal level.
According to Garcia, the current wording uses a framework that “no international organization has used for 30 years.” Instead she hopes to see the federal government adopt comprehensive laws that offer protection based on “sexual orientation and gender identity and expression.”
Garcia hopes to continue using her lived experience to push for change for her community. “It’s an achievement,” she said of her history-making election, “it’s a step forward, it’s a symbol.”
While LGBTQ+ people in Mexico still face discrimination and violence, Luevano and Garcia’s victories suggest further progress is coming. Trans people are legally allowed to correct their gender on government documents, and last year, Mexico banned conversion therapy in a historic vote.
While some states have still refused to change their local laws after the Mexican Supreme Court ruled marriage equality bans unconstitutional in 2015, two Mexican states recently approved sweeping reforms. Last month, the state of Sinaloa removed language banning same-sex marriage and cohabitation, and a similar measure was passed in Baja California.
Sinola’s reform must be approved by the governor, while the Baja California proposal must be approved by three of the five local governments within the state.
Francisca Abello, a progressive lawmaker in Sinaloa’s state legislature, told the local news outlet teleSUR that these changes illustrate the importance of “freedom, security, and equality” to the happiness of Mexico’s LGBTQ+ community. “[T]here should be no second-category citizens,” she said.
More than half of Mexico’s 32 states allow same-sex marriage, with the conservative state of Puebla beming the 20th Mexican state to legalize marriage equality last year.
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