Demetrius Freeman for HuffPost Joselyn Mendoza, Lesly Herrera Castillo and Jonahi Rosa want the Mirror Beauty Cooperative to create jobs for LGBTQ, Latinx and immigrant workers, providing a place where they can feel free to express themselves without fear of discrimination.

It’s karaoke night at the LGBT Network’s communal meeting space, the Q-Center in Long Island City, Queens, but it takes more than Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” blasted through an office wall to distract the women of Mirror Beauty Cooperative who are assembled for their weekly planning meeting. I’m sitting with founding members Lesly Herrera Castillo and Joselyn Mendoza, along with more recent recruit Jonahi Rosa. (as well as their partner Daniel Puerto, who translated from Spanish during our interview), in one of the Q-Center’s conference rooms a dozen-odd feet from the lively lounge area. Though Mirror was conceptually born in 2015, its members haven’t yet managed to secure physical space to open up shop, each continuing to work in other salons as they meet here each week to pursue their dream: a worker-owned makeup and hair salon run by and for Jackson Heights’ trans Latinx community. At the end of the tunnel, they hope, lies not just economic independence but also freedom from the racial and gender discrimination they’ve experienced their entire lives. The name “cooperative” may conjure up the image of a vaguely crunchy grocery storepopular with white people, as Puerto and I joke before beginning our interview, but the reality is that worker cooperatives, in which workers own and democratically operate their businesses without answering to a separate managerial class, have been a path toward economic freedom and justice for people of color in the United States for over 100 years. Organizations like the Young Negroes Co-operative League in the 1930s paved the way for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in 1967, which in the decades since has grown into a labor network of tens of thousands of rural Black workers. In the past 10 years, the number of co-ops in the U.S. hasnearly doubled, with much of that growth in communities of color. Most new co-ops have been worker takeovers of existing businesses, but Rosa, Herrera and Mendoza are attempting to start Mirror from the ground up as they struggle against the twin stigmas of being transgender and immigrants. “The significance of the cooperative for me is that it’s an opportunity to create more jobs and make a space that’s free of discrimination,” explains Mendoza, a Mexican immigrant who began cosmetology training four years ago. “As trans women, we don’t often have access to a healthy economy, and this allows us to change that and obtain other services like health care.” SUBSCRIBE AND FOLLOW Get the top stories emailed every day. Newsletters may offer personalized content or advertisements. Privacy Policy Newsletter Please enter a valid email address Thank you for signing up! You should receive an email to confirm your subscription shortly. There was a problem processing your signup; please try again later Twitter

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As trans women, we don't often have access to a healthy economy, and this allows us to change that. Jocelyn Mendoza, co-founder of Mirror Beauty Cooperative

“Our communities have limited opportunities,” Herrera agrees. A 26-year veteran of the cosmetology industry (with 15 of those spent in the States after emigrating from Mexico), Herrera says the hardest part about working as a trans Latina isn’t always finding work — it’s keepingit. “Lots of our problems with discrimination stem, if not from our bosses, then from our [cisgender] colleagues” who are often actively hostile, she says. The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey of more than 27,700 trans, gender-queer and nonbinary people found that 16% of respondents who had held jobs reported having been fired for their gender identity or expression. Trans women and trans people of color were the most likely to have this experience. Herrera, Mendoza and Rosa all have their own stories of discrimination and the loss that comes with it, so when word of the groundbreaking Argentinian co-op Nadia Echazú(a clothing and textile workers’ cooperative owned by trans, or travesti, people, which also provides training and education for gender-diverse Argentinians)reached the U.S., Mendoza saw a way out of the cycle of oppression. “I loved the idea of a worker cooperative and was pleased when Joselyn invited me to be part of this project,” recalls Herrera. For her, a trans worker-owned salon is a chance to “work freely” and express her creativity without fear of discrimination or mistreatment from managers or fellow workers. Herrera maintains that Mirror is “focused on giving work to the trans community,” but that’s not the only way in which the collective is trying to aid marginalized people. Mendoza says that, in her opinion, “the greatest benefit of this is for undocumented people to have the ability to work.” That’s why the founders registered Mirror as an LLC, or limited liability corporation (a business milestone they recently hit). As opposed to organizing as an entity like a cooperative corporation, which many co-ops do, creating an LLC makes each member a co-owner rather than an employee, so each can be identified by individual taxpayer identification numbers, or ITINs, rather than social security numbers. Although ITINs don’t automatically grant legal authorization to work, the IRS application for an ITIN requires only proof of identity and a filled-in income tax form to obtain one, making it relatively straightforward for undocumented workers to obtain. Because the IRS does not report taxpayer information to the Department of Homeland Security or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, undocumented immigrants can safely use their ITINs to open bank accounts, apply for loans and establish credit and tax histories. According to the National Immigrant Law Center, ITINs can also be used as proof of residence and to claim “crucial economic supports,” such as the Additional Child Tax Credit. In 2014, the IRSreported that ITIN holders paid an estimated $9 billion in annual payroll taxes.

Demetrius Freeman for HuffPost Lesly Herrera Castillo, Jonahi Rosa and Joselyn Mendoza at the LGBT Network in Queens, New York.