Giving Compass' Take:

• Lola Deja-Vu Delgadillo Vargas, a trans woman, shares her journey from sex worker to advocate working to protect sex workers and LGBTQ people in Mexico.

• How can donors identify community leaders who need financial support and resources? What are the advantages of elevating people within the community to make improvements? 

• Learn about a trans woman fighting for trans rights globally. 

Lola Deja-Vu Delgadillo Vargas started her long career as a sex worker in Mexico at the age of 15. After coming out to her family as transgender, she had nowhere to go. Sex work was how she survived.

Now, 20 years later, Lola has become a force for change. As the general secretary of the nonprofit Agenda Nacional Política Trans de México (National Trans Political Agenda of Mexico, or ANPT), she is a fierce advocate for dignity and equality for sex workers and LGBTQ people in Mexico.

Why did you decide to work for gender equality?

Since the first week I started as a sex worker at 15, I suffered human rights abuses by public institutions. The police would hit us, abuse us, lock us up; all under the pretense that we were spreading HIV.

We started getting informed and defending ourselves. We worked with sex workers’ organizations to educate people that we weren’t spreading HIV. Our bodies were our tools—if our bodies stopped working we couldn’t make a living.

Since then, I’ve been working for more than 20 years to organize and protect sex workers. We’re always helping our co workers know what their rights are, because if we don’t defend ourselves the authorities can extort us, lock us up, etc. But after a while we realized that we can’t just help people defend themselves, we also need to change the law.

Read the full interview with Lola Deja-Vu Delgadillo Vargas and learn more about the Latino LGBTQ community in Mexico at Hispanics in Philanthropy.