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By Noelia Trujillo, Alejandra Ironici and Emmanuel Theumer*

Photos: Florencia Palacios ( www.memoriassexodisidentes.com.ar ).

On May 8, 2020, in the midst of the pandemic and mandatory social isolation, Marina Quintero passed away. She was the first trans activist in the province of Santa Fe and a leading figure in the Argentine littoral region.

She was born in Santa Fe on November 30, 1962. She lost a large part of her family early on, and in a context of complex vulnerabilities, she became an activist for more than fifteen years. A simple gathering at her house was enough to set people spiraling towards collective demands for the rights of sexual and gender diversity. 

Marina, as she herself has recounted, was made of suffering. An experience that forged her into a resilient force, enabling her to collectively politicize her own life. At the age of nine, she was confined, under a court order, to a children's home because of her "homosexuality." There she befriended Marta, who named her Marina, and began her gender transition.

Around 1980, she went into exile in Brazil, where she acquired exclusive, subaltern knowledge of the nightlife and prostitution. Upon her return to the city of Santa Fe, it was sex work, more than carnivals or parties, that allowed her to make friends in a highly repressive context, even at the height of democracy. The persistence of the misdemeanor codes enabled a persecutory police power that led to her being deprived of her freedom countless times and suffering numerous abuses. Even so, “prison united us, one brought us together. When we fell, we were all one,” Quintero recalled.

One of the few photos from his youth, which he treasured with pride, was precisely the result of a police raid. He obtained it thanks to the recovery of his file located in what was then the Public Morality .

A turning point in Marina's life came around 2004 when she met the feminist doctor Flavia del Rosso. This allowed her to design the first healthcare access strategies for transvestites/trans people and to connect with feminists from the Palabras Association and the neighborhood organization Manzanas Solidarias. As a result of these encounters, she organized an event attended by nearly eighty women, where they founded the Women and Transvestites Association (AMyT), of which she was elected president, "the public face."

Marina used to recall with laughter the empanada sale they organized to raise funds and rent a van, “with a hunk of a man,” that took them all crammed together to the meeting point. AMyT was likely the first transvestite and women's organization in the region, a unique structure compared to the rest of the country. From there, they focused their struggle on access to healthcare and the fight for the decriminalization of their identities.

Here, Quintero forged ties with the CTA and Lucila Puyol, a feminist and member of HIJOS, crucial in suing the state for arbitrary arrests, abuses, and police bribes. The fight to repeal the misdemeanor codes—which persecuted people for their gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, and offering of sexual services—was coordinated with AMMAR-Rosario, VOX, and other organizations, and extended until 2010, months before the approval of same-sex marriage.

With its repeal, many trans women were able to explore the city center in daylight, and could go more peacefully to buy bread or a pack of cigarettes at the corner store. But those years were anything but easy. Quintero remembered how the police pointed guns at them while they worked . Her house was shot at. One early morning, she was violently kicked and dragged by her hair for a block. Her friend, Coty Olmos, a local trans leader and victim of transfemicide in 2015, suffered severe fractures at the hands of the Santa Fe police. At stake was the street vendors' "petty cash," the money they collected by bribing them to avoid arrest or reduce their jail time.

Marina confronted these harsh memories with others triggered during this first stage of activism. From AMyT, she organized milk programs for the neighborhood children and didn't hesitate to clarify that she financed it with money earned through prostitution. In San Agustín and later Yapeyú, on the outskirts of the city, her little house was a center of learning, support, resistance, and kinship . After the ruins left by the 2001 crisis and the devastating floods, a small flame was lit from that home for all the trans women, gay men, and lesbians of Santa Fe. A flame that is still palpable to us.

When AMyT began to falter, Marina was invited by ATTTA (Association of Transvestites, Transsexuals, and Transgender People of Argentina) to be their delegate for Santa Fe. During this time, she strengthened her connections with other LGBT+ organizations and INADI (National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism) during the fight for marriage equality and, especially, the recognition of gender identity. She organized petition drives for the parliamentary debate on the gender identity law, participated in training programs, and compiled a list of candidates to pursue legal injunctions. “I don’t want to die with my male name ,” she summarized during a meeting with legislators.

Seeing many of her colleagues succumb, she never stopped fighting to guarantee their access to healthcare. Many remember her as "the one who rode around on her motorbike handing out condoms," "announcing the locations of women-friendly health centers," and also "distributing food packages."

The passage of the law, she considered, marked a turning point. But much remained to be done. Marina outlined a project for historical reparations for victims of institutional violence , an idea that, according to local press archives, can already be traced back to her time at AMyT. This project resonated with her when, in 2018, she was officially recognized by the provincial government as a victim of the persecution carried out during the civic-military dictatorship because of her gender identity . She stated that she wanted to dedicate her last strength to the fight for trans and travesti employment quotas and legal, safe, and free abortion. But death, which we choose to problematize here in terms of social travesticide, came knocking at her door.

It could be argued that Marina practiced that “ us-ness ”, the construction of points of union by recognizing differences, which Marlene Wayar speaks of, and she did so through a multi-sectoral articulation: she brought together transvestites and trans people, she provided them with available languages ​​to be able to reorganize their life experience (the enforceability of rights, the very notion of gender identity) adding to her ranks gay men, lesbians and feminists.

“Chapeando” as the representative of a national organization, such as ATTTA, questioned the State's public policies on health, work, housing, education, participating in various advisory councils, the University –integrating extension projects– regarding a necessary curricular change and the admission of trans people, neighborhood associations and a wide range of municipal, provincial and national political representatives, immersing them in situated reality.

In Marina's case, trans identity functioned by "slamming the door when she felt it was necessary" (to paraphrase Camila Sosa) – she herself boasted of the effectiveness of her complaints in certain state offices – but trans identity functioned as "a possibility for encounter, for the recreation of lasting bonds" (Wayar, once again). That was the Marina who, at five in the afternoon, the time when the day begins for many of those who live in the red-light district, would wait for you with a stew before holding a training session at her home.

Marina put her body on the line for a radical practice of caregiving, free of euphemisms: many recognize her as a mother who provided shelter when heterosexual families turned them away. At the same time, she raised several "children of the heart" in a context of structural poverty, alongside her husband, Jorge. 

Fierce. Courageous. Survivor. Friend. Furious. Fellow sex worker. Practicing Umbanda priestess. Critically dissident activist. Rebellious. Sisterly. Health worker. Trans mother. Coalition weaver. “An energy we don’t know where she got it from.” All that and more. In one of her last interviews, Quintero echoed the words of one of her mentors, Claudia Pía Baudracco , reaffirming that “if I had to live again, I would like to live as a trans woman .” Perhaps this is part of her masterful lesson: an intense trafficker of dreams committed to making our ways of life possible and desirable. She knew how to activate the power of caterpillars, making wings sprout and setting us to fly always alongside others.

Marina Quintero: While the saints surround you, it is time to cultivate your continuity, to pull the threads of memory and bring you into our political imagination. To expand the mark you left on each of us, in the struggles open and yet to come. 

*Noelia Trujillo, trans woman survivor and trans rights activist; Alejandra Ironici, trans woman, LGBTIQ activist, representative of MISER-Santa Fe, and Emmanuel Theumer, queer-feminist activist, teacher and researcher.