About El Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina

 

VABF 2021: Trans Memory: Keeping Transgender History Alive (Panel)

 
This panel is a conversation about the role of registering and documenting the histories of trans folk. María Belén Correa, the founder of the El Archivo de la Memoria Trans (Argentine); Verónica Fieiras of Chaco Editorial, publisher of the book Archivo de la Memoria Trans; and Dr. Aaron Devor, Chair of Transgender Studies and Archives at the University of Victoria, will join us in a discussion about the practices and politics surrounding queer archiving and trans archiving in particular.
 
Originally live on October 23, 2021
 
Vancouver Art Book Faire, October  23, 2021.

María Belén Correa and Cecilia Estalles speak with Devan Díaz and Thora Siemsen about El Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina.

Founded by activist archivist María Belén Correa in 2013, El Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina is a historical-memory project devoted to lost friends and forebears. This growing collection of more than ten thousand documents—photos, videos, and mementos––gives flesh to trans lives in Argentina. The archive originated as a private Facebook group, a forum for research and discussion sustained by the dedication of its members. With the help of Carolina Figueredo, Luciano Goldin, Car Ibarra, Luis Juárez, Magalí Muñiz, and Cecilia Saurí, the community has retrieved treasures that have survived decades of police, military, and social repression. In 2014, photographer Cecilia Estalles began digitally preserving the group’s efforts and broadening its scope, creating a blueprint for kindred collectives. Last year, with Editorial Chaco, the archive published its first book, which is, inter alia, a beautiful art object.
 
THORA SIEMSEN: When I look at a project that developed among friends, I’m always curious how those people met, how it came about. How did you all find one another?
 
MARÍA BELÉN CORREA: I started a long time ago with one friend, Claudia Pía Baudracco, who was one of the most important activists for trans people in Argentina. We were collecting souvenirs, pictures, documents—trying to remember nice moments. She died in 2012, two months before Argentina passed its watershed Gender Identity Law, which made hormone treatments and gender-reassignment surgery accessible through the public health system, and which allowed people to officially change their gender without a medical diagnosis. Her family got to know me. They gave me her ashes and one big box with all the things that she collected––maybe ten thousand pictures, passports, postcards. I started a private Facebook group for transsexual people in Argentina or from Argentina but living elsewhere in the world. Within four months we had fourteen hundred members. In 2014, I met Cecilia.
 

CECILIA ESTALLES: At that time, I was searching for information about the transfemicide of a woman named Gina Vivanco. She was killed by police in 1991 because she witnessed a robbery that had something to do with them. I was making a short documentary about what happened to her. I went to Canada to present the film and visited the ArQuives in Toronto, a Canadian LGBTQ2+ nonprofit founded in 1973. I said to myself, “Argentina has to see this.” I proposed to Belén that we work toward making a physical archive, and that I go to the house of each of the girls in the Facebook group to gather images and digitize their collections.
 
MBC: I’m in Germany, and I work here communicating with Cecilia in Argentina. Nobody knew Cecilia, and nobody would give the pictures to her directly, so I contacted the girls because the girls know me. The collection, which started with the box from Pía, got bigger. Cecilia is a photographer, and she saw that this kind of photography had artistic as well as historical and political value and that it needed to be seen as all of these things. In Latin America, we are one of the first archives for transsexual people, about transsexual people, and by transsexual people. Groups in other Latin American countries use us as a point of reference for how to do this work themselves. We are always adding new materials to our collection, so that it doesn’t lie there dead.

 
DEVAN DÍAZ: Was this book a way to assert an Argen-tinean identity that has been ignored?
 
CE: For me, the book is a way of rescuing these people from oblivion. I believe the book carries an opportunity for healing for the trans people of Argentina. I think that we always thought first about what’s internal to the collective. We wanted outsiders to see what we had to show them. There are many girls who lost their friends, their families, and in these photos they can visit them again. People whom they had lost long ago may return to their lives.
 
DD: In the book, it seems like birthdays and Carnival are always times of celebration, no matter what is going on.
 
MBC: We didn’t have so many opportunities to reunite. Our reunions were in jail or when somebody was laid to rest. Birthdays or Carnival were our happiest times. Carnival was a moment when we could be whatever we desired, because for a few days, the police couldn’t touch us. I could dance in my costume that I worked on for a year.
 
TS: How would you describe being a trans citizen of Argentina now?
 
MBC: Depends on your age. The statistics say the average transsexual person in Argentina lives anywhere from thirty-five to forty-one years. Young people can continue in school and work while transitioning. But there are people totally out of sight of the system. They don’t have a job; they’re not qualified because they never had the opportunity to go to school. Because of the new law, younger people’s lives are better. The problem at this moment is the older person. Many of those who are now over forty-five have silicone liquid floating around inside their bodies or untreated diseases because we don’t have a good health-care system in Argentina. We need new laws for all the girls who are over forty-five, who don’t have housing, health insurance, work, an education.
 
DD: Silicone injections began in trans communities in Brazil but quickly spread across Latin America. It might be hard for some people today to comprehend the intense cost-benefit calculations of taking such risks. Do you consider silicone to be a drug or medicine?

 
MBC: The only good part is when you can look in the mirror and feel like you have the key for your body so much faster. That moment is magic. Then, slowly, you realize the consequences. We didn’t know anything at the time. But after twenty-five years of silicone in my body, I can say it’s not great. When we speak to the new generation and they’re unhappy with how they look, we talk about silicone like a drug: In the moment, you feel great, but with time, not so much. In the 1970s and ’80s, it looked like a solution. In 2021, we know it’s not a solution.
 
CE: But now there are many more possibilities. With the Gender Identity Law, you can think about getting on hormones, you can consider getting whichever operation, and it’s all fine and legal. It’s a good idea to remind the young girls of this so that they don’t take things into their own hands, even though the wait lists for surgery and hormones are very long and the law isn’t always carried out the way it should be.
 
MBC: Some girls don’t want to wait. My friends died so young, and we all thought we would die without our real bodies. If we died in surgery, we would at least be very beautiful in the box. Everybody knows you need to survive the first twenty-four hours after the initial injection. If the silicone hasn’t blocked your blood vessels after forty-eight hours, maybe nothing went wrong. It’s Russian roulette.
 
CE: Right now, many of the oldest women in the archive are suffering from this, and there are many who have infections, many who cannot undergo surgery because––
 
MBC: —there’s not any doctor who wants to touch that body because it’s a danger. It looks like cancer. It looks like necrosis.
 
TS: Belén, what did you miss most about Argentina in exile?
 
MBC: I missed everything. And every time I come back to Argentina, I have fewer friends. Today I heard a journalist say that certain things are impossible to forget because the mark that they leave is impossible to remove. I’m marked by torture, violence, and exile. The worst is when you leave and you don’t want to, because it’s totally different than when you can prepare to go.
 
Before I left Argentina, I was living with friends. There were constant threats by the police. It was common for a girl to disappear, and everyone would assume it was because the police got her. The threats got more intense, and my family started receiving violent phone calls. I lied to my mother and told her I was going on vacation to a resort town called Mar del Plata. Instead, I took ten days to prepare my escape. I called her when I got to the United States and told her I didn’t know when I’d be coming back. Now, when I return to Argentina, it is not the same. I try to keep track of everything I’ve lost. My life is in Germany now. My family’s here, my husband. Our dog is our Kind [child].

 
DD: Are these photos an antidote to shame?
 
CE: The book was something we fashioned out of love, out of feelings of closeness, out of our connections. It was a long process, and our friend Verónica Fieiras of Editorial Chaco worked alongside us. The book tells the story of our sisters’ distinct experiences—friendship, exile, Carnival, everyday life.
 
There is a young woman who studied Google results in Argentina before the archive, as well as what happened after we brought it into existence. Before, when you put “trans” in the search bar, tragic images would appear. When the archive was established, the search results changed completely. I think all our work has something to do with presenting a new way of seeing the world via the trans gaze, a loving gaze. Like when someone who cares for you takes your photo.
 

Time Regained. By Devan Díaz and Thora Siemsen. Art Forum  June 1,  2021.

The Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina represents a group of trans activists who collect, organize, and circulate photographs and written materials (diaries, letters, postcards) about trans people in Argentina, with a focus on visual archiving. In 2020, in collaboration with Editorial Chaco, this group published an eponymous selection of photos and archival materials alongside short autobiographical texts. After the celebration of the International Trans Day of Visibility (March 31), a reflection on the Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina’s book may help us to see the relationship between cultural memory, visuality, and social movements in the specific case of trans activism.
 
The archive dates back to the 2000s when the trans activist Claudia Pía Baudracco started to collect private pictures of friends and activists with the long-term project of building a trans archive. In 2012, Baudracco died and one of her friend, the activist María Belen Correa, opened a private Facebook group asking trans people in Argentina and abroad to join and share their private memories and pictures. Since 2014, with the support of the photographers Cecilia Estalles and Cecilia Saurí, the collection has been gradually transformed into an archive. In 2017, the Cultural Center of Memory Haroldo Conti in Buenos Aires – one of the most important Argentine memory institutions – hosted an Archivo de la Memoria Trans exhibition titled Esta se fué, a esta la mataron, esta murió [this one left, this one was killed, this one died]. Held in an important site for the symbolic and physical memory of post-dictatorship Argentina, the exhibition was the first public recognition of the trans archive.
 
The three first pages of the 2020 Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina demonstrate how the trans collective (re)position themselves as narrators. On opening the book, we find a black and white picture of a woman in profile against a white background. A short text follows, where a first-person and anonymous narrator describes the many meanings of the act of taking pictures in the daily life of a trans person. Turning the page, we see a woman who is taking a picture in the mirror. This sequence seems to use visual narration to depict a transformation in trans subjectivity: from portrait to self-portrait via a first-person account, the trans subject is repositioned from being the object of the gaze to providing the gaze that frames and organizes. This is the philosophy which underpins the trans archive, one which promotes the narration of trans memory in the first person.

 The book is framed by two cover flaps that, unfolded, present a list of names and nicknames. The focus on names and naming has a close connection to activist causes in post-dictatorship Argentina, in terms both of the right to identity and the right to memory. Disappearance as a practice of repression was the notorious trademark of the last Argentine dictatorship and, in general, of the dictatorships in the Southern Cone under the US-backed campaign “Operation Condor”. It entailed the systematic violation of the right to be remembered for the 30,000 disappeared and the right to identity – the right to a name, to family relationships, to public records – for the estimated 500 children born while their mothers were in captivity and ‘appropriated’ illegally, by perpetrators and their families. Human rights activists have collected information in order to reconstruct the biography of individual victims and to find the children, now adults, of the disappeared, who have lived their lives ignorant of the truth about their parents and their own real names. The mission of many activists, and now of the state, is to find these children so as to give them their original name and the story of their parents. Archives, databases, monuments, textual and artistic artefacts and commemorative occasions (like the National Day for the Right to Identity, on October 22) have been created with this purpose. One device for such acts of remembrance is the listing of names, as epitomized by the walls of the Parque de la Memoria where the names of the disappeared are engraved.
 
The Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina appropriates and resignifies the practice of listing name for another cause: to claim and celebrate the right to identity as the right to a gender identity, i.e. to have a recognized name, publicly recorded and reported on IDs, which is aligned with one’s gender (this right was granted to trans people in Argentina in 2012). In its Facebook group, the Archivo asked members for their own names after gender transitioning and nicknames, as well as the names and nicknames of their friends and loved ones. More than 600 were collected and used for creating lists for different occasions, purposes, campaigns and media – including the 2020 book. The names and nicknames are preceded by a “la”, the Spanish feminine for “the”. The continuous repetition of the “la” gives the list a musicality, while the continuous use of the feminine article genders the practice of listing names.
 
The playful nature of the nicknames, the pink lettering and the musicality of the list, queer a commemorative practice that is mainly used for mourning. The practice is subverted by a celebratory tone transforming it into a poetic list. These names celebrate, perform and claim a right to gender identity, to visibility and to a public memory. They allow for the possibility of choosing one’s own name and of being named by others in a way that chimes with one’s own identity in both the private and the public sphere.

 
The case of the Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina epitomizes how memory and its practices and genres are crucial tools in activism. As a bricoleur of memory, the Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina adopt genres and practices for remembering (as we have seen in the specific example of naming), borrowed from other traditions and social groups, and creatively transform them in order to shape their own collective memories. Pictures and names, by making individual trans lives visible, play a central role in visually materializing a social group so that they can act and speak publicly. To investigate how LGBTQ activists do this through archives and related publications – as well as through commemorative marches and the use of memorial, monument and public spaces – is an issue that scholars still need to address within a memory studies agenda.
 
Trans Memory Activism and Visibility: Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina. By Daniele Salerno.   Remembering Activism, . Utrecht University , April 1, 2021.

 

A documentary shows how photography has united the transgender community in Argentina and allowed them to proclaim their identity. Director Quentin Worthington sought out the guardians of these liberating and painful memories.

 Intimate moments recorded in private spaces that nurture individual freedom, away from prying eyes and amid friendly, joyful excitement: these clandestine photographs were taken by transgender people whenever they felt free to be themselves. In the 1980s, being transgender was illegal in Argentina. Such gender identity made you marginalized and vulnerable to police persecution in a country which had gone from a dictatorship to a regime that suffered its consequences.
 
In this context, photography was a bulwark against segregation. It not only allowed people to assert themselves through images, but also to commemorate members of a fragile community. Many had died as victims of assassinations, suicides, the AIDS epidemic, and illnesses linked to inadequate treatment resulting from their exclusion from the social welfare system. Photography bears witness to their existence across decades—some images going as far back as the 1910s!
 
Several trans women from the community decided to form a collective, the Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina, in order to preserve these photographs and make sure they are never forgotten. “When I discovered this archive project, I became passionate about the subject,” says Quentin Worthington, who embarked on making this documentary as another archive for the community. “Photography has a lot of power. It allowed them to come together, to assert themselves, and to remember.”
 
“These photographs are all the more important that they often help to identify a missing person and tell their life story under their true identity. Many refused to be buried and remembered by their birth name, and these photographs offer a way to respect their memory,” explains Quentin Worthington. This is why it is so important to meticulously preserve these images. To that end, the collective enlisted image professionals who have taught them how to use scanners, how to handle the photographs with gloves, and how to file them. As a result, they are becoming autonomous in protecting and promoting their own archives.
 
It is touching to see the difference between the photographs taken in Argentina behind a bedroom doors and those taken by a handful of exiles in the United States or Europe who enjoyed greater freedom. We can see the latter posing in front of Notre Dame de Paris wearing dresses and high heels or freely sunbathing on a beach in Italy. Such photographs fed the dreams of the community remaining in Argentina and strengthened their resolve and their struggle.
 
Thanks to this documentary and the effort undertaken to preserve the photographs, the members of the collective have been invited to many events, for example at the Reina Sofia in Madrid and, more recently, at a film festival in Paris. They jump at every opportunity to speak in public, to learn to tell their story, and to raise public awareness about their struggle. This is a first step towards what one of them calls “historical reparation.”
 
 
Transgender in Argentina: Photos for survival.  By Coline Olsina & Jean-Baptiste Gauvin. Blind Magazine, January 28, 2020.
 

The women that adorn the Instagram feed of Archivo de la Memoria Trans are usually smiling, dressed in their best threads, seemingly captured on their way out before a night of raucous partying in the streets of Buenos Aires. A joy for life and sisterhood is evident in this online archive of trans women from ‘80s and ‘90s Argentina, but what the women who survived the era perhaps remember most is the institutional repression they suffered at the hands of the police.

 
Today, Argentina is known globally as a pioneer for transgender rights.
 
In 2012, the legislature passed a landmark gender identity bill that allowed Argentines to legally change their gender without a psychological evaluation, a law that would be championed and replicated around the world. But in the 1980s, following the military regime’s fall, trans women were fighting to end a systematic assault on their community that encompassed police extortion in the streets, indefinite detentions, police raids of trans inclusive spaces, prison torture, and disappearancessuppression tactics that had been passed down from Argentina’s days of military dictatorship.
 
In ‘83, democracy arrived for the rest of society, but not for us,” Maria Belen Correa, a celebrated trans activist and founder of Archivo de la Memoria Trans, said in an interview with INTO.
 
Many trans women were imprisoned, murdered, or forced to flee Argentina. Correa herself abandoned Buenos Aires in 2001 after receiving death threats for her activism. In exile, Correa, along with her friend Claudia Pia Baudracco, dreamed of reuniting the trans women who had been forced to flee abroad or forced into hiding in Argentina. In 2012, the same year Baudracco died and left behind a trove of personal items, Correa founded the Archivo de la Memoria Trans, an online collection of photographs, letters, postcards, newspaper clippings, and videos that attest to generations of trans women who fought for a more inclusive and egalitarian Argentina.

 
Trans rights organizations, such as the one Correa formed in 1993, were born in the early 1990s. But before the activism of the ‘90s, many trans women were also putting their bodies on the line, Correa says. The archive is an homage to women behind five decades of trans resistance, from the 1960s to 2000s, and counts more than 1,500 personal documents that together construct the collective and historical memory of trans women in Argentina.
 
“Archivo de la Memoria Trans is the collection, compilation, and protection of archives and memories of the survivors, who are responsible for denouncing what happened to us,” Correa says.
 
In the Argentine capital, a team of four archivists, all trans women older than 55, receive, clean, and scan photographs from around the world and record oral histories with the women who share their personal objects. When a photograph fails to mention the name of a woman pictured, an archivist will search through public records to identify the person.
 
By sharing their personal objects, trans women relate stories of everyday life, defiance, and repression such as that of a day spent sunbathing on the beach or waiting in the men’s line to vote. One photograph featured in the archive’s Instagram feed illustrates the bittersweet act of remembering. Paired with a color snapshot of seven women, the caption reads: “In this photograph, we’re all smiling and happy at the birthday of a friend, La Totoya. Today only two of us remain alive.”
 
For these women, sharing their histories with the project usually entails telling the stories of women who can no longer tell their own and who have left otherwise little tangible trace. Trans women were typically buried as NN or No Name because their family members, who were expected to claim their bodies, had usually disowned them at a young age, says Carla Pericles, one of the project’s archivists. Through el Archivo de la Memoria Trans, the deceased are vindicated and remembered as they were by their loved ones. After all, the women who survived remember not No Names, but friends who they learned to call family.
 
“Many of us are excluded from our families, so, for us, a photograph of a friend is a photograph of a sister, a daughter, a mother, a niece, an aunt, of our trans family,” Pericles says.
 
For Alba Rueda, a trans activist and president of Mujeres Trans Argentina, the project also echoes the questions many trans women who survived the repressive era have asked before and since the passage of the gender identity bill.
 
“We have many friends who died and we ask ourselves, ‘Why?’” Rueda says.
 
 As Argentina enters a new era of democracy for trans women, Rueda argues the state must recognize the history of institutional oppression enacted on trans women. Police edicts of the time, such as prohibitions of cross-dressing and prostitution, were used to violate the rights of trans women, particularly that of trans sex workers. Trans activists are now fighting to receive reparations for the harm done, but first initiatives such as the Archivo de la Memoria Trans must shine a light on a forgotten history of state-sanctioned repression and trans resistance.
 
Archivo de la Memoria Trans Recalls The Fabulous Lives of Trans Women In 1980s and ‘90s Argentina.  Into,   January 3, 2018.
 

Instagram account El Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina

Website El Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina