Meet the young Latinx organizers changing the face of queer life in the valley

A day before the second annual East Coachella Valley Pride Festival, the small room at the Coachella Boys and Girls Club is bustling with people. Seated around a large table, organizers are assembling buttons, writing signs and folding shirts for the big day.

For the second year in a row, young Latinx organizers have teamed up with high school students to put on an event centered around LGBTQ experiences in east valley communities.

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"We're just glad to come together and do this again," said Paulina Angel, a trans singer-songwriter and member of the event's advisory board. Angel will also be performing at the event on Saturday.

"I wished we had that kind of thing when I was growing up," Angel said. "To make this happen today is really a dream come true."

Angel grew up in the east valley and to see her community represented in the form of a Pride Festival has been an important form of recognition of both her cultural and gender identity.

"It speaks to my experience as a Latinx woman to see all that married together," Angel said.

In addition to providing representation and visibility for the east valley's LGBTQ community, the event also serves as a space for interaction and learning.

"I hope that this Pride will help educate the east valley community about LGBTQ issues," Angel explained.

Alongside performances and speeches, the event will also feature a resource fair. The organizations were selected based on community needs identified in conversations with students of Desert Mirage High School.

Resources presented at the fair range from legal assistance to mental health services and projects focused on cultural healing.

"The youth are the ones giving us the directions," said Sahara Huazano, project coordinator with the Building Healthy Communities initiative.

The Pride Festival came about as a result of a BHC project, seeking to assess the needs on east valley youth aged 14-24. According to BHC's assessment, one in ten high school students in the area identified as LGBTQ, a data point that showcased a need for events and projects centered around this community in the eastern Coachella Valley.

"That connection was already there," Huazano said. BHC then moved on to facilitate the space and resources necessary to make the event a reality.

By relying heavily on student input, the planning committee sought to ensure that the event would fall in line with the needs and desires of "an invisible group of young people that have been historically overlooked," the event's description states.

One of the students participating in the event is Angel Flores, 18, who will be holding a speech Saturday afternoon. Flores has chosen to hold his speech in full drag, a form of expression he has become increasingly interested in after years of experimenting with "regular" make-up.

"Even in our own community, I'm a little scared of going up there in drag, just because of the attention that it draws," Flores said. "I've never been in drag in public before, but I thought: What better place to do it?"

For Flores, the group of organizers has become an important support network. "It's really the individuals that have facilitated so much," Flores said. "Being part of this, I've made so many connections that I'm incredibly grateful for."

Originally from Sonora, Mexico, Flores moved around a lot as a child, before settling down in the eastern Coachella Valley with his aunt, who has been his legal guardian. To help carve out a space for people of color in the valley's queer community has been an important motivator for Flores.

"I like being part of something, and being involved in the community that I form a part of," Flores said. "It's a responsibility, because if you don't take it on, who else will?"

Empowering students to take action and help shape the environment they live in has been a crucial part of BHC's mission, said Victor Gonzalez, project manager at BHC.

"There's a lot of assumptions about our community," Gonzalez said with regards to east valley residents. "There's the assumption that we don't have the ability to get engaged in leadership or that we don't know how to identify needs in our community."

Together with The LGBT Center of the Desert, BHC is hoping to organize more events and workshops to provide resources and support for east valley residents who identify as LGBTQ.

As an organization located in Palm Springs, The LGBT Community Center of the Desert's role in the event was mainly to listen and facilitate, said Alexis Ortega, the center's director of community engagement.

"Sometimes, people who come from the west side think that they have to come here and build something, because it isn't there," Ortega said.

That's when it's time to step back and listen, she said. "You learn about the strength, the resilience. Because there's a lot of work already being done here."