After a gang member held him at gunpoint inside his home, the 24-year-old gay man knew he had to flee El Salvador to survive. He had been beaten and harassed repeatedly on the streets by gang members. Eventually, they warned, they would kill him.
It took two attempts to get across the U.S.-Mexican border, but in 2006, he was smuggled into Arizona and made his way to Washington, where his brother lived.
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“Finally, I can have my real life, exactly how I am,” he thought.
Valerie Villalta, now 30, found that new life as a transgender woman and, in the process, won a kind of protection she didn’t even know was possible for someone like her: asylum.
Asylum, which allows an immigrant to live and work in the country legally, is more commonly associated with immigrants who have been persecuted in their home countries — or who might be in the future — because of their politics, race, religion or ethnicity. But Villalta learned that it also can apply to gay and transgender immigrants who have been tortured because of their sexuality.
Since winning her asylum case in 2009 with the help of the Whitman-Walker Health clinic in the District, Villalta has dedicated much of her life to providing guidance to gay and transgender Latino immigrants who find themselves in a foreign land with little or no knowledge of the language, the culture or the services that can help them find peace with who they really are.
She volunteers with a health education program for gay and transgender youths called Empoderate, or “Empower yourself” — the same program that helped her find her way. The youth center is just a few blocks from its umbrella organization, La Clinica del Pueblo, a bilingual community health center in Columbia Heights.
“When you try to help other people, you feel good,” Villalta said recently, sitting in the center’s coral pink Girls Meeting Room. A drawing of a butterfly emerging from its cocoon hangs above her head. “Soy mujer trans (I’m a transgender woman),” it says.
In many ways, Villalta is that butterfly.
At least twice a week when Villalta was growing up, the boy’s father and brothers beat him with a belt or branch for looking effeminate and playing with dolls. Before the age of 12, Villalta was raped by older neighborhood boys, she said.
The abuse continued, and after high school, Villalta left the family’s small home town for San Salvador, the nation’s capital. The young man let his hair grow and began wearing makeup and women’s clothes. Villalta also enrolled in a two-year culinary arts program.
But the school was in a notoriously dangerous area ruled by members of the gang MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha. During an asylum hearing, Villalta recalled carrying a cooking knife for self-defense as gang members shouted gay slurs and robbed, beat and threatened to kill Villalta.
There was good reason to be fearful. An openly gay co-worker was fatally shot by gang members, and a friend who was a transgender prostitute was killed by gangs.
Villalta arrived in Washington unable to speak English and without legal documents to work. And Villalta was kicked out of a brother’s apartment for being gay.
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