TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras . The women in the photograph don't smile at the camera, but they look happy. In the image, taken in the Honduran capital thirty years ago, in a park, on a bench, under a tree, four sex workers wait for clients. The night is dense, their gazes penetrating. From left to right, Gaby Spanik, Bessy Ferrera, Abigail Galindo, and Michelle pose: four important figures in the trans movement in Honduras.

Flash. A flash of lightning, the night, and suddenly, they're immortal.

In a few years, two of them will be killed, another will flee the violence. Only Abigail will remain to tell her stories.

But in the photograph—now an icon—they look happy.

So many, so many photos. They hang on the wall, pile up in albums, rest in photo frames. At first, they were nothing more than the personal collection of Abigail Galindo, a trans woman and human rights defender. She photographed for 35 years without knowing, without imagining . Now she's 52, she left sex work 20 years ago, and her images are part of the collective memory of LGBTQ+ people in Honduras.

They're digitized for Instagram, printed in poster format, and displayed before thousands. The same Abigail who roamed the streets of Honduras's capital in heels, sequins, and fury is left behind as a slender, almost shy figure, moving slowly in her wheelchair, missing one leg. She's still surprised when she finds hundreds of people gathered around her, listening to her. 

For most of her life, photography was nothing more than an amateur hobby. She never expected, nor dreamed, that her photos would be part of exhibitions or that she would be leading tours through fragments of her life. Her intention was to capture memories on 60mm film, to reminisce with her friends about parties, loves, and nights out, once they were older.  

"I always liked taking pictures everywhere," she says. "I carried around a roll of 36 film. When we went to an event or went out, the first thing I grabbed was the camera, ready to take pictures of my classmates, my friends." 

In June 2022, Abigail met a photographer named Dany Barrientos . He told her about "historical memory" and a project to "reconstruct and deconstruct" the history of people like her : the Honduras Cuir Archive , an initiative that sought, through any scrap of paper they could find, to prove that LGBTQI+ people existed. Abigail, with her photos and her stories, was also going to become a crucial piece of the living memory of those who remained and those who are no longer with us.

"I took so many photos to keep my memories," he says. "Photographs are very important because they're a story captured on paper. If we have memory and remember everything, we can explain it, but without a photograph… No story can be told without proof, right?"

The stories behind Abigail's images reveal what various LGBTQ+ organizations have called a transgenocide in Honduras, of which she is a survivor. The rest of her friends, like those posing in the park photo, ended up like this: one night, two men left their homes, said goodbye to their wives, got into a car with tinted windows, and drove through the city with intent. Bessy was shot dead. Her body was left lying on the sidewalk where she worked.

One day, a client told Michelle, " I'll take you with me to Guatemala," and she said, "I'm going to Guatemala with the client ." What happened in between is unknown. What is known is that they were able to identify what remained of Michelle by her tattoos. Abigail shudders when she remembers.

—Of those, only two of us are still alive: Campero (Gaby Spanik), who is in Germany, and me, who am here .

Here: Honduras, according to the organization TransRespect , this tiny sliver of land between the Caribbean and the Pacific is one of the most violent in the world for trans people, especially sex workers. Various organizations have dedicated themselves to recording the attacks, murder weapons, court rulings, and everything else needed to explain the complexity of all this violence, but the conclusion is that in Honduras, as in other Latin American countries, trans women do not live to old age.

— I always tell the girls, "Let's take a picture, because we don't know if it's the last one." 

Abigail's photos in the Honduras Cuir Archive 

When Dany Barrientos, founder of the Honduras Cuir Archive, is asked what he sees when he looks at Abigail Galindo's 700 photos, he doesn't hesitate for a second.

—The genealogy of the community.

Dany Barrientos studied contemporary art at La Fototeca de Guatemala and has a background in documentary and editorial photography. She was inspired by projects in other countries, such as the Trans Memory Archive in Argentina, to tell "the other story": the memory of the LGBTQI+ population.

In the first months of her project's life, she heard from a former trans sex worker who had recorded much of the 1980s and 1990s. Not many years after the last military dictatorship in Honduras, when the nights were longer, the police controlled the streets, and the first LGBTQ+ groups in the country were founded.

Abigail says the Archive saved her life. After an accident involving boiling water, she suffered severe burns on her right foot and, due to complications from her diabetes, lost her leg below the knee. Death, which she had escaped so many times, was coming for her. She sat down to wait for it. The only thing she was leaving behind were her photos, and there was someone there who promised to take care of them.

—After the accident, before the amputation, she saw that something bad was going to happen to her, and I think that was one of the reasons why she lent me the photos, says Dany.  

The photos were what I was looking for.

The Archive, which houses all documents related to the diverse population in Honduras between 1934 and 2015 , does not have a physical space. At the beginning of the project, the recovered photographs and documents were digitized and uploaded to Instagram, with information that provided context about what the images showed: scenes from everyday life, party scenes, love letters, newspaper clippings with discriminatory news, etc. Hundreds of people from the LGBTQ+ community in Honduras began, for the first time, to see their history reflected . Months after the Instagram account , various live conversations began where the story behind each photo and the lives behind each name were told.

“Here we have a story of our own”

Grecia Ohara, a trans activist and LGBTQ+ rights advocate, highlights the importance of the Honduras Queer Archive for the country's diverse community. It allows us to remember the lives, struggles, and work that past generations did to advance recognition and respect for human rights in Honduras. She also highlights how it helps build a national LGBTQ+ identity. 

—Whenever we think about LGBT rights here, we're consuming international issues: those from the United States, Mexico, and the south of the continent, says Grecia. Here, too, we have our own history. Let's include Honduran people, our own people whom we recognize as leaders, so that, as a community, we can identify with our own people and our own context.

It is for this construction of Honduran LGBTQ+ identity that Dany Barrientos highlights Abigail Galindo's photographic work. Her collection of photographs, she says, reveals a fluidity of vision, ease with the camera, and a drive to capture the things she loved and that shaped her world.

—I like how the perspective of the major journalism groups like La Tribuna and El Heraldo, which also portrayed her, is juxtaposed with the way she sees herself, says Dany. 

Many of the more intimate photos, such as those she took of her family or lovers, are not part of the Honduras Cuir Archive, but they represent a part of the photographic collection that perhaps allows us to better understand Abigail Galindo beyond her role as a representative of the LGBTQ+ population, a trans activist, a showgirl, or a sex worker.

"Lately, I've been very fond of a section of Abigail's archives that are photos of her family," Dany says. "In those images, there's a nostalgia, a very beautiful melancholy. I can't help but wonder what part of Abigail's identity contrasts with her mother's identity, like a burden, like a rebellion, and what of the person who was her mother she took for herself."

—If there weren't any photos, how would you explain who Abigail Galindo is?

—I would say he's an amazing human being with a great capacity for overcoming challenges, says Dany Barrientos, with a burning rage inside that can consume everything, and also incredible generosity.

The family album 

Abigail's house, in an old neighborhood of Tegucigalpa, is a museum, a souvenir shop, and a wreck. Faded paintings and a million handicrafts hang from the damp walls. Flowers made of paper, plastic, and rubber. A dreamcatcher with colorful feathers and a portrait of her mother. On the shelves are photos of her family, scented candles that have never been used, and half-burned paraffin candles. There are porcelain figurines and a bunch of eagles from Motagua, the soccer team she supports. Next to it, carefully placed, is her companion: a Canon Sure Shot 38-60 mm.

Abigail grew up with five older siblings and one younger brother. She was the daughter of José del Carmen Galindo, an Air Force soldier, and Eva Soto, a seamstress to whom Abigail dedicated a considerable portion of her work. Abigail's portraits of Eva Soto, created by her youngest daughter, stand out for their naturalness of home life, in contrast to the rest of her work, where artifice and excess were part of the charm.  

—I would stand in one place and my mom would be distracted, and I would say, “Mommy!” and she would turn around and flash, I would take the picture, distractedly she would grab it… I liked it because she took them like that, without posing.

Eva was an old-fashioned woman: serious, homey, and under the military yoke of her husband, dreaming of more. One day, Eva, who had completed sixth grade, tried to continue studying, but her husband set fire to her notebooks. 

“It always comes down on them like a bucket of cold water.”

Her mother's personality and experiences, coupled with years of working on the streets of Comayagüela—Tegucigalpa's sister city, which is precarious and plagued by high rates of violence—shaped Abigail from a withdrawn, even bewildered girl into a rebellious, fiery woman with a sharp sense of humor.

"At first, they didn't accept me... like always, right?" he says. " In every family, it always comes as a cold shower. I say that often it's not that our parents don't love us...what they want to avoid is society's rejection of us. I remember my dad once telling me, 'I'd rather have a thief, a murderer, or a pothead than a faggot in the house.'"

Her father didn't find out for several years, and her mother, who discovered her daughter's identity through gossip, did her best to hide it. It was in vain. At 16, Abigail would sneak out of the house with a backpack over her shoulder, a dress and heels hidden, and meet up with her friends, several years older than her, who hung out on street corners.

—The first time I just went out to see what it was like, to accompany the girls on the street, to get a feel for the scene. We went to the "chupaderos" (beach bars). I've always been tall, so we put on makeup a little older and they let us in. Afterward, the girls gave me a wig, and I looked in the mirror and felt good. I felt like that was me, not the one in the house. 

23 husbands and photographic collections 

Three circles of light, camera flashes or spotlights, bounce off a mirror behind her. In the early 1990s photo, she stands on stage wearing a blue and black bikini and a feathered headdress. She balances on a pole, smiling. Behind her, well hidden in the shadows, a security guard stands watch, arms crossed and with a "I'll break your face" expression: his job was to prevent drunken customers from touching Abigail on her show nights. The image decorates her room, accompanied by memorabilia from her best years.

"That guy over there was madly in love with me," he says, "but I didn't even notice. 'We can't have a romantic relationship here,' I told him; it would have been dangerous." 

It's not that there was a lack of danger, but there was no lack of love either. One of her albums is dedicated exclusively to her 23 partners who survive frozen in time. They lie carefree and naked, smiling at the camera, defenseless. She remembers them as "my husbands," and 22 of them are dead.

The photos of her showbiz nights each tell their own story. For years, Abigail dominated the gay bars and clubs in Comayagüela and Tegucigalpa, where she would briefly become Selena or Thalía in exchange for food and all-you-can-drink. She earned more from her street clients, and despite being a 16-year-old trans girl, she was already a nightlife fixture.

In one of her photographic collections dedicated to that period, she is seen at parties and shows, walking down runways in beauty pageants, parading through the streets in a baton dress or a feathered costume during one of her shows. 

—I'm not going to say it was all dark, gray, and black. There were some nice moments, too.

In those moments, scattered in the immovable time of the small blue box in which she keeps her photos, someone appears smiling. A Halloween costume. Military fatigues. A naked man. Her mother's face. Colorful balloons. A lit cigar. A corset. A purse dog. A lover. A beauty queen with her tiara. A woman dressed as a man. A Catholic baptism. Two men kissing. An impossibly blond wig. A heart-shaped pillow. Her mother's face. A chubby, pink baby. A thigh with a heart tattoo. A rainbow flag. A shirt that says "The guy next door is gay." Six women dressed as a man. A nude poster of Pamela Anderson. A parade of cheerleaders. A leopard-print bra. A person dancing. A person who died of AIDS. A person who was killed. A person who fled the country. Someone laughing. Another lover. Her mother's face.

Memories of sex work 

There are no customer photos.

Abigail says she started sex work at 17. In 13 years, she had offered her services to all kinds of men: professionals, diplomats, politicians, military men. They wanted to see her dance while she masturbated, talk about their problems without judgment, sleep with someone of the same sex. There were also those who came with requests that, so many years later, still disgust her.

And there were the police, the military.

Meeting them could mean a good payday or a night in jail. In the late 1990s, Abigail says, Tegucigalpa Mayor Vilma Castellanos ordered the removal of sex workers from the area of ​​the Honduras Maya Hotel, the most elegant hotel at the time and where clients paid the most. During this time, she was arrested 25 times on charges of public disturbance.

“We were running around like deer because they wouldn't let us work,” she says. “The patrols were coming all the time. Once they took me to the Ulloa police station in a civilian truck. Me and eight other police officers. The police were also in civilian clothes, but armed to the teeth. They forced us into the truck, kidnapped us. They took us through Ciudad del Ángel. It was all dirt. It was dark, dark, and they told us: ‘Here we're going to kill all these assholes.’” Abigail's voice narrows to a single, monotonous thread, through which the words slip between her teeth. “We all hugged each other,” she continues, “we started to cry and say goodbye. And the police were laughing. We thought there was no way, that all we could do was hold hands so that when we were dead we'd leave together. But they started shooting in the air. And then, what did they do? They put us back in the truck and took us to the police station, where they raped us .” While they raped us, they told us they were going to kill us, that we were assholes, that we were worthless. That people wouldn't even cry for us.

He has no photos of any of that, but he doesn't forget.

How to remember

Abigail thinks about how she wants to be remembered. She thinks about it because her friends are often remembered for their deaths. She wants to be remembered for what she lived through, for the art she created, for the portraits of her loved ones, and also for those last photos she took of friends and colleagues before they too became statistics and lived only in their photographs and in their memories.

Although she's no longer as dedicated to photography as she once was, Abigail Galindo has begun exploring new interests: she's writing a memoir, leading a tour of the Archives, acting in short films, and has begun attending a Latter-day Saint church where she found a new mission: to change 200 years of Mormon tradition.

—The bishop tells me: "I don't know how to treat you." Here on earth, anything goes , I reply, so you're going to call me Abigail because that's how I feel. Don't call me anything else, unless you're going to give me a check for money—he laughs.