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Letters, texts, brochures, photographs and newspaper clippings reconstruct a moment in the intimate history of María Belén Correa: the formation of her identity and activism, her friendships, a note that changed everything, exile and the character who touched her: Eva Duarte de Perón. Belén, María Belén is the new photobook by Editorial Archivo Trans , in collaboration with the publishing house Cesura. It portrays the life and legacy of this emblematic trans activist and one of the driving forces behind the Association of Argentine Transvestites (now ATTTA ) and Red Lactrans, and founder of the Trans Memory Archive .

Today, some 18 people, including older trans women, are responsible for protecting, constructing, and vindicating trans memory through the Archive. Its collection now exceeds 15,000 documents. These include photographic, film, audio, and journalistic records; items such as ID cards, passports, letters, notes, police files, magazine articles, and personal diaries, dating from the early 20th century to the 1990s. In addition to the online collection of several of its members

Belén was convinced that the new photobook would be about her story, but she insists it's actually a collective project. She was selected for the Andy Rocchelli managed by Cesura and also received a mention in the Dummy Award 2025. She confesses that it's strange to talk about herself. But she finally succeeds.

In Germany, where she lives, Belén spends her days with her mind on her home country. “I have my phone, computer, work, and television connected to Argentina. I'm 100% dedicated to the Archive,” she says during a call, sitting in her home in Hanover, where she lives with her husband and two dogs, her children. Her daily life is monotonous, without much of a social life. The opposite of what she's experienced for much of her life: shows, demonstrations, police persecution and threats, sex work, moving from country to country. 

In 2015 and 2016, she suffered from cerebellar meningitis followed by tuberculosis. She nearly died. “After that, I asked myself how I wanted to spend the last 10, 15, or 20 years of my life. I wanted to be calm, without any surprises, doing what I love, which is partly collecting for the Archive,” she says.

Around her neck, she wears a pendant that belonged to her friend, activist Claudia Pía Baudracco . During the conversations they shared in their youth, they imagined a place to store the memories and images of their comrades, so they wouldn't be lost during the constant raids and moves.

“At the time, I didn't realize its importance. I did it because I loved it. We wanted to document our family, which in our case were our friends. Pía was the one who was always taking photos or asking the others for theirs and saving them. Because of the moves, much of it was lost: entire boxes. But we found a portion that she hid in a friend's house where she lived. Today it's the Claudia Pía Baudracco Library in Quilmes,” Correa shares.

In 2012, just before the Gender Identity Law was passed, Pía passed away. She left a mark on Belén, who that same year decided to realize her fantasies and founded the Trans Memory Archive from exile. 

The importance of being called Belén

She was born on June 25, 1973, in the Luján district of the province of Buenos Aires (Argentina). She is 53 years old: a survivor of the trans community, whose average life expectancy is 35 to 40 years. She knows this very well. Although she lives peacefully in her home in Europe, where she wants to spend the last stage of her life, she understands that violence against trans people transcends borders. “Just because I'm locked up in my house doesn't mean my husband won't kill me tomorrow. You live with the enemy. No one is exempt,” she says. 

She was 5 or 6 years old and playing under the table when she heard her grandfather say, "María Belén, what a beautiful name." Some time later, she asked her family to name her unborn brother after her. But he was born a boy: lifelong frustration and tears. "When my sisters, who are twins, were born, they gave me the pleasure. They named one María Belén and the other, María Vanina."  

He took the train to primary school in a neighboring town, Jáuregui, which was larger and had a manufacturing center. He lived with his parents, his brother, who was seven years his age, and his twin sisters. 

For ten years, in addition to being a daughter and student, she was a nurse, an assistant, and cared for her siblings. The longest days came when her father had cancer. In 1989, when he died, she packed her things and traveled on the Sarmiento train to Buenos Aires.

“I arrived in Once and started walking down Pueyrredón Avenue, going from business to business. I didn't know anyone. Before reaching Santa Fe Avenue, I went into one of those whiskey bars that used to be there; they were cabarets. They asked me if I knew what it was. I told them no, that I imagined it was a bar, that I could go and wash glasses. They told me they only hired women. I said I was gay. They asked me my age. I was 16 and they couldn't hire me, but they gave me the address of a new agency that was looking for people. I stayed there.”

In those early days in Buenos Aires, she went to a birthday party for the first time, a big event with a show and a performance. “I had thought of everything: dress, shoes, makeup, eyeshadow. Everything except the name. When I arrived, they greeted me and asked, ‘What’s your name?’ It took me by surprise. ‘Belén, María Belén…’ I said. Afterwards, no matter how hard I tried to take it off, I couldn’t because for the transvestite life I was marked as María Belén. The only thing I could do was take off the María and be called Belén.”

“I felt like I was being educated alongside Pía.”

At the agency, she met many transvestite and trans women. Those identities hadn't yet touched her imagination. She also didn't know that lesbian women existed. "I started meeting different girls, the legendary ones, the ones who escaped from Panamericana. The agency was a place of respite for them because they weren't running from the police. There were also girls who worked at night on the streets and during the day at the agencies. It became like a rotating roster of girls. I started making friends. Among them were Pía (Baudracco) and Brigitte (Gorosito)."

With the help of her mother, with whom she maintains a close relationship to this day, she rented an apartment on Armenia Street in the Palermo neighborhood at the end of 1992 and left the agency. Shortly after, she ran into Pía again on the street, and ten days later they were living together.

“Pía and I ended up becoming very good friends. Like any friendship, we went through all the stages: from living together to no longer being able to live together. She was very sociable, too much so. You didn't have a house, but a club that was always full of people. I'd come home from work all night, and I'd come home and find people sleeping in my bed with my clothes on. So we'd end up fighting over these things. She was used to living like that, in a community,” Belén says. 

They were similar in age but had very different backgrounds. “She was three years older, but a transvestite since she was 13. She'd been fighting with the police since she was 14, had been in jail a lot, and had been to another country. She had an experience I'd never had before. I felt like I was being raised alongside Pía .

From friends to founders of the Argentine Transvestite Association

Belén never liked celebrating her birthday, but a few months after living together, on July 25, 1993, Pía invited friends over to celebrate. They cooked and arranged to welcome them. They arrived little by little, but late at night two of the girls were still missing. “They had been taken into custody. There we put together what we called a 'bagayo,' a bag with a blanket, cigarettes, and food, so they could spend the night. We put the same birthday food in a Tupperware container. This changed the conversation. Of all the women there that day, the only one who had experienced freedom was Pía because she had traveled to Italy. We talked about when she was going to take us there. And Pía said, 'No. We have to make changes here so we don't have to be leaving all the time.'” That day, along with other activists, they founded the Association of Argentine Transvestites (now ATTTA), the first association for the collective in the country.

Organized, they began to report police bribes. The Armenia department filled with people: between 50 and 60 transvestites attended every Saturday to plan their next steps. They experienced at least two raids: the more people there were, the more targeted they were. "My photo was posted on the bulletin board at the Central Police Department for five years," Belén shared in several posts.

“If I weren’t an activist, I wouldn’t be a transvestite.”

“For me, the world of activism was directly linked to being a transvestite. I didn't have a phase where I was first a trans woman or a transvestite and then an activist: it was parallel. I understood it as the same thing: living in a community, being an activist, wearing lipstick. I never had any other life than this one. If I weren't an activist, I wouldn't be a transvestite ,” she explains today about how her identity came to be at that time.

She chose her mother's surname, Correa, and not Carlocchia, her father's. She says she did it for safety reasons. "In the '90s, to protect ourselves, no one used their real surnames so they wouldn't identify you so quickly: Berkins doesn't exist. Carlocchia, in Argentina, is the descendant of my great-grandparents: if I used that one, they'd find me immediately and go to my town."

Those pioneering Pride Marches, from the first one in 1992 to 1995, were protest marches, without shows or dancing. Belén's name began appearing in newspapers, associated with complaints against the police and her appearances at demonstrations. One day, she received a personal proposal. Para Ti to write a different story. They wanted to feature Belén as a person , the one behind that struggle. She welcomed them into her home, introduced them to her mother and her town. They talked about her life, took photos. Shortly after the story was published, the first threats to her home began to arrive.

“It was one of the biggest fights I ever had with my mom. She blamed me for what was happening. That's when I decided to leave and tell my mom to start denying me: saying she doesn't love me anymore, that she kicked me out, that I'm not part of the family. For a long time, I called the neighbor to talk to her. Now we don't talk about it. She prefers for it to be a thing of the past.”

From the moment the threats arrived, she had 15 days to make the most important decision of her life. Barely a month earlier, the world had frozen in front of television screens showing images of first one and then another plane crashing into the north and south towers of the World Trade Center. While many fled New York, terrified by the attack, Belén disembarked in November 2001. 

Exile in the United States

“My time in exile was the worst I've ever been through. The worst part is leaving without meaning to. I left in 2001 and didn't return until 2008. In 2005, I was able to start traveling outside the United States. I went to Uruguay to see my family. I couldn't cross into Argentina because I had political asylum. For many people, I was dead. I was revived in 2008 when they saw me at the Pride March back in Argentina,” she says.

She says it was hard to find her place. She often thought they would help her, but in the end, there was a real agenda. She worked as a sex worker for the first few years and gradually gained visibility as an activist in the United States. She liked the term "trans"—which she uses to this day—because "it didn't show whether someone had had surgery or not." She had to prove to a judge that she wasn't gay or lesbian and explain what it meant to be trans in Argentina, when, despite being a democratic state, they suffered persecution by police edicts. 

For four years, she went to Immigration every four months, not knowing if she'd be detained, deported, or released for a few more months until her next appointment. "You had to prepare yourself psychologically and say goodbye in case something happened every time you went," she recalls.

Belén and Evita

One night, at a social event for Latino migrants, she put on a show. She wore her blonde hair in a low bun, sparkling earrings, a large necklace with translucent white stones, and a white corset with silver appliqués. She sang "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina." 

“There weren't any good experiences with transvestites or LGBT people playing Evita. There was the experience of Copi or Perlongher. They'd set the theater on fire for one of them. Besides, you thought they were going to laugh their heads off. Peronism would get into your face for anything at that time if you 'insulted' Eva. It was the time of Evitomania.”

The first time she played Eva Perón was at the request of her friend Vanesa. In 1993, drag birthdays were social events, and each woman brought a show to perform. "Why don't you play Evita for me?" her friend suggested. She took the role to the stage for the first time at the 1995 Pride March. Back in the United States, she spent a whole year preparing for the Pride parade in Manhattan, where she performed under the name of the Argentine Transvestite Association. This hostile, yet supportive, context of Evitomania allowed her to take the role to various countries. She arrived in Germany, precisely "thanks to Eva." 

Over the years, every time she performed it, she would add a little something: a bracelet, an appliqué. Today, she has 36 books about the biography that address Eva Perón's life from different angles. The Eva Perón Case , written by embalmer Pedro Ara, was full of photographs of her alive, which he copied for his work. Belén took some gestures from there. She also fondly cherishes And Now... I Hablo , by Lillian Lagomarsino de Guardo , who accompanied Eva during the early years of Peronism and on her trip to Europe.

“In Europe, they teach you how a queen greets: slightly, bowing your head and moving your hand, showing your rings. I can never physically see myself like Eve: big breasts, tall. The other one weighed 40 kilos, and I weighed 80. But I always remembered something they told me: that in theater, if you maintain the illusion and believe it, everyone else will. So I copied all her gestures and movements,” Belén says.

Her family didn't have photos of Perón or Eva in their home, but Peronism had entered the world through various means. Her father's relatives were railroad workers, and her grandfather was a member of La Fraternidad, a union historically linked to Justicialism. Her mother was four years old when she received the Eva Perón Foundation , and her grandmother received the sewing machine from the same institution.

Belén was, for many years, "Eva." She began portraying her at 20 and soon learned of a curse. All the transvestites who played Evita died by 33. "When I was approaching that age, around 29 or 30, I had the idea that these were my last days. I lived dressed like an ancient lady, people waited on me in bed, I lived in bedclothes. I had developed that Esther Goris syndrome, which stuck with the character for I don't know how long. The character had consumed me. I thought I was going to die."

She discovered the curse wasn't true when she passed that age, but Eva continued to be present throughout her life. With the Gender Identity Law passed in Argentina, she changed her legal name to Belén Eva Carlocchia. 

“We must be united, because if not, they will kill us separately.”

For her and so many other trans people, that law was a turning point. “It brought us into democracy in Argentina because it was the moment the State recognized us as citizens and made us equal to the rest of society. Wanting to take away those rights with modifications or eliminating the law would be a return to clandestinity,” she says, referring to the various attacks the legislation has suffered under the current government of Javier Milei.

The photobook about her story culminates with her years of exile. Perhaps what she remembers most from those tragic years is the feeling of loneliness and helplessness. Fortunately, this feeling is far behind her today. Although she is thousands of miles away physically from her friends and colleagues at the Archive, she shares her thoughts, conversations, and shared life plans with them. 

“We have to be united, because otherwise they'll kill us separately. And be alert. In the times we've been through, when they arrested you just for going out on the street, what we did to resist was live as a community so that when something happened to us, there would be someone to help,” she says.

That, she says, is what will save us. That community life that her transvestites and friends taught her so much about throughout her life. The book will be presented on Saturday, September 6th at 8 PM in Parque de la Estación (Juan Domingo Perón 3326, Buenos Aires City), as part of the Migra Fair .