At 15, bigotry drove Viviana Gonzalez from school. Decades on, a dedicated school in Buenos Aires is putting wrong to right

'For me, it was everything': the trailblazing school for trans people

Viviana Gonzalez vividly remembers her first day of high school.

She was 12, and imagined a future as a doctor, a teacher or an artist. But the school administrator in her home town in Argentina looked at her long hair, noticed the boy’s name on her ID and kicked her out “like a dog”, admonishing her for wearing “a costume”. She refused to cut her hair and wear a tie. “I was already Viviana. I didn’t want to dress up like a boy.”

When she was 15, Gonzalez, now 48, gave up on studying. She became a sex worker to survive, and also held other jobs, including one as a seamstress. Then, in 2016, a friend offered to help her get a housing subsidy; in reality, Gonzalez was being inveigled into a school for transgender people in Buenos Aires.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Viviana Gonzalez, a graduate and president of the students’ centre at Mocha Celis. Photograph: Natalie Alcoba

She recalls how a teacher helped her sign up: “He opened his arms and said: ‘OK, amiga, welcome to the Mocha Celis. You’re going to go to high school.’ I think I had been waiting for those words since I was 11 years old,” says Gonzalez, flicking away a tear.

“I know a lot of people would say: ‘Finishing high school, that’s nothing.’ For me, it was everything.”

Located in the neighbourhood of Chacarita, the Bachillerato Popular Trans Mocha Celis is the first school of its kind anywhere in the world. It is named after a trans woman who never went to school and was murdered (friends suspect a police officer). The three-year programme enables young people and adults to obtain their high school diploma, or finish elementary school.

Argentina’s bachilleratos populares are schools for people who did not complete high school. They are typically run by social or human rights organisations and are tailored for specific communities. La Mocha has classes you would find in any school – history, maths, biology – as well as more specialised subjects, such as gender and health education. It has trans and non-trans teachers, a mixed bathroom, and afternoon classes to accommodate sex work.

And it is inclusive. The school has drawn other members of the LGBTQ community, cisgender single mothers, married women over 50, and migrants. It started with 21 students; now, there are about 130.

“What we want is for people to be able to say who they are. That which isn’t named doesn’t exist, or is invisible in a system. That’s why we call ourselves the baccalaureate transvestite-trans,” says Francisco Quiñones Cuartas, the school’s director. The term transvestite is commonly used in Argentina.

Classes started in 2012, months before Argentina passed a historic law that allows a person to change their gender on official identification without having to undergo sex reassignment surgery or hormone therapy.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A classroom at Mocha Celis on the eve of the school year. Photograph: Natalie Alcoba

Silvana Alvarez, a Mocha graduate, says the school was “a second home”. Its curriculum, which includes projects such as creating a sex education toolkit to be used in public schools, was empowering, says Alvarez, 45, who is now studying communications at university.

Gonzalez’s life has also changed. The decorated martial artist left sex work to teach self-defence, and a playwright has cast her as the lead in a theatre production about her life.

Some graduates work at the school, while others are in the civil service, helped by the introduction of a quota for trans workers in the province of Buenos Aires.

Access to education in the city has improved. In 2005, 20.8% of trans women and transvestites said they had finished high school, compared with 24.3% in 2016, according to research by the city and the Mocha Celis school. The same study showed that the percentage currently in school rose from 10.4% to 26%.

Tireless activism in Argentina has secured some of the most progressive policies in the world, yet trans people still confront a violent reality. Former laws that criminalised dressing as the opposite gender, or soliciting sex, drove much of the community into a precarious existence, denying them basic rights. Advocates say sex work remains the only option for most trans women. Their average life expectancy in Argentina is 35. Ten former Mocha students have died, including 31-year-old Ayelen Gomez, who was found beaten and asphyxiated in 2017.

“Things have advanced a little, but there’s still a long way to go. Their rights are not guaranteed at all,” says Quiñones Cuartas.

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La Mocha struggles to make ends meet. The city government pays teacher salaries, but like other bachilleratos populares, it doesn’t cover rent or maintenance costs. Amid the ongoing recession, students have had to collect donations to pay the school’s electricity bill.

Critics have accused the Mocha of “self-discrimination” by creating a separate school, a suggestion Quiñones Cuartas rejects. “There is a self-determination to not participate in spaces that discriminate against us and inflict violence upon us.”

Lautaro Rosa, a trans man, said he was guarded when he arrived as a student in 2017. He always lived his gender, and paid the price in the schoolyard.

“This school helps me, because it’s no longer just me,” says Rosa, 38. “I, Lautaro, am in my place. But I will offer you my place so that you can learn, too.”