Start of classes at Mocha Celis Transgender High School: "We don't want any more trans people with pencils or blank notebooks."
The Trans Mocha Celis High School resumes its classes in a semi-presential mode while it looks for a headquarters to operate in.
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After a year without classes and the creation of " El Teje," a support network formed by teachers and students to address the basic needs of the trans community during the pandemic , the Mocha Celis Trans High School , the first secondary school in Latin America designed for trans people, is resuming classes in a hybrid format. However, this year it is doing so without its own physical space. Due to record enrollment, they have had to vacate the building where they had been operating since 2011, in the Chacarita neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Viviana González, a Mocha graduate, literature student, and member of the organizing committee, writes about how this educational experience has changed her life and the lives of her classmates.
By Viviana González
There are memories that, bittersweetly, my mind can hold onto.
I can see myself as a child, in 1982, standing outside, looking out the window, carrying the weight of a guilt my eyes refused to shed; on the other side, my former elementary school classmates sat inside the high school classroom, absorbing all the tools that education can offer.
Clearly, having experienced my transition at an early age was the sin that the white, religious, classist system of heterosexual pedagogies could not, and would not, forgive me for .
My childhood dreams of one day becoming a doctor or a teacher, or even going to university, were canceled; however, I carried with me everywhere a pencil and a blank notebook that I needed to fill.
A block from that school was a plaza; beneath the canopy of a tree was a desolate and cold empty bench where I used to sit in the afternoons, waiting. Before the final bell rang, I was already there with my black pencil and my blank notebook that painted the rawest and cruelest reality.
From the throng of people, some classmates broke away and came toward me, trying with limited words to share all that the education system had refused to teach me.
I lacked the techniques and tools; I couldn't understand anything, despite my best efforts.
Perhaps I had abilities or potential; what I lacked were opportunities, and that absence forced me to forget my young age and condemned me to grow up in a childhood of prostitution in the darkness of the highways, beside the tall grass, amidst false caresses and the wet kisses of casual affairs.
Long gone are the decades of that recurring dream; the education I so desperately needed and sought.
With time working against me, the system's selfishness finally achieved what it sought: for me to stop striving, or at least trying. The passing years left scars, and the reflection in the mirror showed me the image of a tired and sad woman, my appearance ravaged by a pain I hated to look at.
But as I approached my fifties, history finally decided to write a different ending for me.
A decade of embrace and education
On November 11, 2011, the Mocha Celis Transgender High School, the world's first inclusive, non-exclusive trans school, happily opened its doors, and it was there that I was able to resume my studies. With a warm welcome, they greeted me with my pencil and blank notebook, in which I began writing again from the very first day, and each word invited me, once more, to dream.
Mocha Celis, with its non-binary pedagogies, and out of love for the community, challenged the education system by including transvestites/trans people in the classroom, restoring one of the most important rights among so many others that the State also denied us.
While I was a student there, I was fortunate enough to be elected by my classmates to serve as president of the student union, where I was able to develop my political awareness and interests.
Today, we are a little over 220 graduates, both trans and non-binary, who proudly hold a high school diploma. Some of us even went on to university.
Now a graduate, currently studying to become a literature teacher, I feel that I never could, nor did I ever want to, leave. I chose to dedicate part of my life to activism for the right to education for trans people, and that led me to join the Mocha Celis Civil Association, where I have a say in decision-making.
I also give talks in educational settings.
Making the LGBTQ+ community visible and discussing the importance of gender non-conforming people within formal educational spaces is about building something from a place of commitment and responsibility.
There are fundamental factors that can't be learned by reading books because most of them were written from a hegemonic and binary perspective, and that's where my identity needs to take center stage, using my body and voice to question things from a different point of view.
The participation of so many students and teachers in these activities amplifies the need for change in a systematically patriarchal and exclusively heterosexual pedagogy. Being able to commit is a starting point that guarantees free childhoods and adolescences, unconstrained by stigma and paradigms, ensuring significant gratification for students in the classroom.
That's why I continue to champion this cause, because I believe that another kind of education is possible.
We've enrolled students but we don't have classrooms yet.
This year, 2021, with the new presidential decree of necessity and urgency regarding the trans/travesti employment quota No. 721/20 , we are receiving approximately 375 new students with the sincere intention of overcoming adversity; but the crazy and incomprehensible thing about this is that our school is facing eviction.
This confronts us once again with a sad reality that has us drowning.
Lacking our own space, we are racing against time, improvising as we go to ensure our fellow students are not left out of the classrooms. Classrooms that no one has yet guaranteed or even promised us.
The name of our school was chosen by our predecessor, Lohana Berkins , in memory of a trans woman from Tucumán who also lacked even a primary education. Mocha was found murdered with three gunshot wounds on the sidewalk at a corner in the Flores neighborhood, at the same bus stop where she worked, days after being threatened by a member of the "security" forces.
This November, our school will celebrate its 10th anniversary: a symbol of strength, resilience, and struggle. We would be very proud to celebrate this milestone, but for that to happen, we need more commitment from others as well. Perhaps if we all join forces, we can break the deafening silence, because we cannot allow Mocha to be killed twice.
This new school year begins without desks, without a blackboard, or perhaps outdoors in some open-air plaza with no walls and only the infinite sky as our roof. It doesn't matter where, but rest assured that classes, whether people like it or not, will begin anyway. Because we don't want any more students stuck with blank pencils or empty notebooks.
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