‘Our Communities Are Literally Dying’: Inside a Mexico City Activist’s Fight for Liberation

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Razzia Santillán is no stranger to activism. Having spent much of the past few years as an organizer for trans and sex worker rights in Mexico City, she gained headlines in 2023 after police violently assaulted her in — and ultimately forced her out of — the women’s bathroom in the Cineteca Nacional. This institution functions as Mexico’s dominant archive of culture and film, and is directly maintained by the Federal Secretary of Culture.

So she stood strong against Cineteca Nacional, coming after waves of demonstrations against transphobic violence in Mexico City. Regular readers of Trans News Network may recall our December 2025 article rebutting the sanitized nonviolence myth. It discussed the case of Natalia Lane, a trans woman based in Mexico City who, in 2022, was nearly killed in a hate crime. Since then, there have been numerous protests and actions done to further protect trans people in the city. Razzia Santillán is one such activist, who has directly aided and raised awareness of Lane’s case.

After the protest at Cineteca Nacional, the archive is suing Santillán for allegedly damaging property, in spite of countless activists and organizations rallying in support of her for protesting violent discrimination. Additionally, since the incident, the Mexico City government and Mexican Supreme Court have ruled in favor of trans people’s right to use the bathroom of their choice. This legal battle has even continued into this year. Meanwhile activists have maintained a continued occupation, protest, and presence at Cineteca Nacional throughout. This primarily manifests in the form of a tianguis, a traveling market, profiled previously at outlets like Yaconic.

In spite of these hardships, Santillán is still working hard to support her community. She is one of the most notable members of the collective Clan Mariposas Negras, a leftist affinity group of trans women who regularly engage in mutual and direct action to support marginalized groups, particularly the trans community, in Mexico City. Currently, the group is fundraising to help with Santillán’s legal costs amidst an ever-growing battle. This is occurring against the backdrop of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which has displaced numerous marginalized people across the city, something Mariposas Negras has likened to social cleansing. This fundraiser can be found on GoFundMe and PayPal.

Following the publication of Trans News Network’s article from last year, a friend of Razzia, Flora, reached out to arrange an interview with Razzia and Trans News Network to talk about the Natalia Lane case, the legal action against Razzia, and the struggle for liberation in Mexico City. Flora assisted with translation during the interview, and the following is a transcript of that interview that has been translated and lightly edited for readability. Flora’s statements are denoted in italics.

I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about the Natalia Lane case and how the case relates to the broader trend of discrimination against transgender workers and sex workers in Mexico.

Razzia Santillán: We are a neo-colony. I don't hold the belief— at risk of being redundant—that rights are progressive. That is to say, the idea that as time passes, and as social movements and population sectors gain ground, there is a guarantee that living conditions have actually improved for every vulnerable population. I don't believe in any of that. In that sense, there is no doubt that just as in the United States there exists a genocide and an explicit system of segregation the same certainly exists here [in Mexico] as well.

And all of this, I think, has also led us to occupy this very peculiar position right on the front lines, and involved in a social movement that feels very outdated. Because there was a time when social struggle was also inherently criminalized, it was disruptive, it provoked riots. And I think that here in Mexico, some of our collectives find themselves in that very same space of disturbance and agitation, of having to defend ourselves because our very lives are being systematically destroyed, no?

And this is happening even though we are currently living under a ‘progressive’ government. A government that, despite everything, we have already seen refuses to negotiate with social movements which, outside of Mexico City, actually persecutes them. I mean, just look at how many human rights defenders have been assassinated. The truth is, it’s a lot. There’s no doubt that this is our actual reality.

Natalia Lane is a symptom of all this. She is a symptom of the place we currently inhabit. Honestly, it’s a sensitive moment. But I certainly believe that, at least here in Mexico, this is how [trans] people's lives have always been, constantly forced to occupy the role of the delinquent, the pariah. And even forced to adopt unacceptable ways of manifesting this. Because marching is one thing, and provoking a disturbance is another, as I said. And occupying a public space, come what may, is something else entirely—just as we did at the Cineteca Nacional.

Can you tell me a bit about some of the organizing done in response to this state persecution, especially in relation to Cineteca Nacional?

Well, we've been there for like two years and eight months, since I [survived] a hate attack on the 13th of September of 2023. Before that, we've been checking the streets since February of 2021, when we took a bridge in the downtown of the city where we used to live and work. [There were] like 100 LGBT people. That moment was like four years ago. That's why our organization works. We are so united because we've been at Cineteca for like 5 years in June. Can you believe it?

We can talk a lot about this moment related to that question, because in this moment, we are seeing that intergenerational dialogue [that] has been really interesting. And plus we've been the refugees of a lot of collectives. [We’ve been in] both houses, I mean, to other organizations with indigenous people, with anarchist people, anti-globalization people and stuff. And in this space that is the Cineteca Occupy, we've been active a lot in this network of solidarity. [And the movement is] interracial, interclass.

And it's an interesting moment for that because actually we are living this other moment that collectives have called the displacement, being motivated for the [2026 FIFA World Cup]. Mexico City is giving a lot of the white supremacy of the the effects of the neo-colony. It’s increased. It's gonna be awful — not because, [say], Palestine is gonna steal [from the] the other side of the sea. Sometimes Americans don't understand that at this moment we are almost on the extinction of humanity by global climate change, by conflict.

Coming back to the point, I'm so happy actually, I'm so glad because this Cineteca Occupy has worked, and while we are in difficult times, I bet that we're gonna win. We're gonna get this space and one day the government is gonna take these awful demands that are against me. And we're gonna have the space, and even if that doesn't happen, I don't care because the process is more important, [the network] is more important.

I know a lot of the work that groups like Mariposas Negras have done revolves around mutual aid. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about just some of that sort of work that you've been doing.

If we're gonna talk about it, we're gonna talk about class. When you are a sex worker in Mexico City, the girls ask you first of all, when they see you, if you've eaten, if you’ve paid for a hotel, if you are doing great. That doesn’t happen in middle class spheres of society. That's why that's a subject about class, about race, about not being a citizen. When we are not citizens, we are talking about the community. Instead of [saying] that, we are, we can be a citizen, we can think about [how] there's a future for us when actually we are all people dying in some sense. That's why we’re such a peculiar group.

There are sex workers that have taken up a conflict with Narco – organized crime. A sex worker that fought that [fight] for 50 years, like Vicky La Gardenia Mayor, was a pioneer pioneer. She survived the nasty war – Guerra Sucia – in the ‘80s. That was an awful period of our history in Mexico and besides, there's a lot of people – we are like 30 people in the Occupy group. I think that's why it has worked in the Cineteca Occupy because we are an affinity group most of all. Because we're taught by class. We are all poor, racialized people, we are sex worker people, we are persecuted people.

That's actually the reason why we call our clan Mariposas Negras. We are called that because clan is so different from families, you know. Because La Familia, it's a heterosexual, a straight concept and a straight form of traits and society, you know? Clan actually is a historical form of transgender people, of racialized people. These ties or this connection of the straight society like family, like partner, actually like friends, you know, we are just a bad bitch. We are working and we have nothing.

I think we do not have any rights. That's the point. We have a partner in occupied Palestine. The guy that is working there has traveled from the genocide to México City and we have embraced him We can't discriminate that kind of people because they are with us. It's so important to embrace the conflict, the complexity of being in this place.

[In terms of mutual aid], we are doing a lot of things. Look, first of all, I live in an awful place where I don't have a lease, and I am in front of neighborhoods where all the sex workers of the downtown area live and plus most of the Mariposas Negras. And [it’s where] my partners live because they are also, bad girls, sex workers, addicts. [There’s also] elderly, older people.

We distribute clothes, HIV tests, condoms. We provide some activities like classes for learning about phones, the social networks, you know, with other women. On the other hand, in this occupation we do cultural activities, you know, uh, really great shows with lucha libre. You know what lucha libre is?

Flora: That’d be wrestling.

Yeah, the typical lucha libre of Mexico.

We recently had a wedding in my church’s garden. That was really amazing because there were a lot of people. On Saturday, two days ago, we made a festival for the Transgender Day of Visibility. That's why I used to say that we are a care network, an intergeneration and interdisciplinary network. We’ve been [working] in a lot of worlds. In art, in activities, in advocacy. We are doing a lot of stuff.

[For instance], Barbarita is a girl, an elder gay that is historic because she survived anything, and that she's like 68. She was one of the only girls that, in her time, took photos of her partners on the streets. This girl has been giving me photos, all old photos and I'm so glad to start this project that we've been trying to start, that is archives of the transgender memory. Fortunately, nowadays we have a scanner, a camera, a computer. It’s [just a matter] of time to make this project of transgender archives [a reality].

That ties a little bit into my next question then. What sort of end goals is your affinity group working for? Like what are some of the core things you're hoping to achieve both in the short term and the long term?

Well, we expect that the government will give us [an organizing] space, because we've been asking for that for years and it seems that we've won the battle. It’s just a thing of time because they obviously have been giving up. They obviously are afraid of us. But we’ve been doing so with strategy and [have been] so resilient and we are not doing nothing bad. We are just selling things, we are just doing shows and I think they have understood.

We expect that to really consolidate [into] a really strong project, because we need a house to live. We need a place to work. We need health. We need rights. And that's why we are thinking of opening a care center, authority center, something like that. We've been doing this for 5 years and we cannot believe that we don't have a place yet. We are trying – actually we have a meeting tonight to talk to all kinds of people because we are asking for help. We need a low rent house to do this center.. And it's so easy for some people. We just need people to redistribute.

We've been doing a lot, firstly like the garden. [This is while] being the target of fascism and that's why we're trying to sensibilize these people. And, I bet that we're gonna open the house. Maybe it's gonna be difficult but we're gonna try to, yeah. Secondly, we're expecting to open in that house a kind of high school for transgender people. And we need to do it, or something like that because it's so important to make this network in these times because we're gonna climb for the truth of our rights.

Believe me, there's no [decision] whether to live in this world, and everything is gonna get worse. That's so important in our fight. That's so important to [recognize] like, it's the war [against trans rights] because the war is getting worse and worse and worse. It seems that there's no refuge, and we need to do this for refugees – and secure spaces – because believe me, all that is happening in the USA is gonna happen here.

That reminds me a lot of what I know a lot of trans people here, myself included, are dealing with, like constant poverty or even homelessness. It’s really nice to know that there's so many folks in Mexico working on solutions for the stuff y'all are dealing with locally.

I wanna tell you something. Some American girls have talked to me, to us, asking for help. They are asking for a place, and many girls are coming here. I think that it's important to say that many American girls, Latins, all kinds of people, transgender people [need help] – that's the reason why it's so important to open this house and these projects.

Has there been like a larger influx of trans people coming in since last year?

Yeah.

That leads me a little bit into my next question. Would you be able to tell me a little bit about the similarities and differences of the struggle for trans liberation in Mexico City compared to elsewhere in the world?

Well, first of all, I think that the USA has [culturally] exterminated almost all the transgender girls – if you have seen that, [at least] that is my perception – because of the process of assimilation, of becoming citizens of society. All the ways your people have lived these past decades has destroyed all the street forms of living. I talk about that kind of spirit and that form of life in my zines. Obviously there's a few transgender girls that are still in this with these abilities to survive. I'm talking about the legendary street girls, and the “bad” transgender guy and the “bad” non-binary transgender, all kinds of people.

In the USA that has happened at the same time that they have killed a lot of people, and that's different here, a little bit, you know, because we are in a colony and most of the girls – we are not citizens. We are not “good girls,” good citizens. Most of the transgender girls, we are not people that are thinking about the future. We are not people that are being like Americans because all the transgender people – they're gonna hate me for saying this, but I think there's a lot of transgender people that have collaborated with Trump’s genocidal politics.

Yeah, very correct. I agree.

Yeah, they are citizens in that they do not realize that they are second on the murder scene. We are gonna light the Nazis [and their ideology] on fire

I can say that here in Mexico City, we have this audacity, we have these abilities to survive. The middle-class, and the [moderates] don’t have that, you know?. That's why it's so different. We are still fighting but we are also so, so happy. We are so happy because that's the other aspect of not being a citizen. It requires a sense of humor. (Laugh)

I can definitely relate to that. Tying that into my next question, I'm interested in if there's anything further you can say on what sort of diversity of tactics you've been employing in your activism.

There’s a lot of praxis that we’ve [done]. We can talk about the common food that we made and that we worked with before we actually before our community kitchen, and our miniature kitchen. We’ve done a lot of work in those moments, and we're trying to open another one.

We're also trying to actually open this [communal] house in the ‘bad’ [area], and maybe we're gonna use a government building. It's gonna be a little bit difficult because [former mayor and current president Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo] has changed the laws, but we're gonna try because it's so urgent to open this place. We’re thinking about it. There's a lot of buildings that we are gonna check that's gonna be the last option if we don't open this house [through] our allies.

I can tell you about the strategies. We have ‘bad’ strategies, you know? I usually think about how there’s common, ‘acceptable’ activities [for] our rights, and there's ‘unacceptable’ activities. That's why actually we're not gonna go to Transgender Day of Visibility march because we are looking at that as an ‘acceptable’ way to protest, while it's not acceptable to [protest] the Cineteca Nacional. That's not acceptable at all. [Yet] it's so urgent to understand the politics in that sense, and not the politics of the politicians. The politics of the people, among people.

Flora: When I was there I noticed that there were these kinds of actions that involved art, and I think it fits in here.

(Laughs) Yeah, we are really crazy people! Flora is saying that one day we put a mattress in the streets, you know, to make an homage.

Flora: Like honoring someone who passed away.

Yeah, we wanna do more of that because we want to get beds on the streets in the places where transgender girls have died.

Flora: There was a specific [instance] where they made a ceremony. Where they set a mattress on fire where this girl was murdered. Maria.

Yeah, Maria Christina. Yeah, that was a legend of the streets. We are crazy, really crazy girls because we don't have nothing.

Flora, [in Spanish]: But how do you see it? As also part of the praxis, or is it more like art?

Well, I think that as I said, in the past, art and activists used to have this delinquency form, and we are getting back that in this clan, Mariposa Negas. It's so important to recover that delinquency aspect, because there's no time. There's no time at all. I don't know when I'm gonna die, when I'm gonna be in jail. It’s like, you don't need to do something to be in jail actually.Just look at most of the people that are there, no? Because of that, that's why I am in my group, [doing] actions like that, you know?

That makes sense. Tying this into the next question, the original article that led to me even getting in touch with you both was primarily about the question of violence versus nonviolence in organizing. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about your views on the subject and what you personally view as the most effective means to bring about change.

Yeah, we can talk about a lot about it. And thinking about [Angela Davis and] such as a core thinking about a lot of people. And I think that peace has never been an option. Like Magneto of the X-Men comics said you know?

Because there's no time, as I said, our communities are literally dying, are literally being criminalized. But we need to organize the [attack], as some feminist girls have said. We need to organize our sadness, organize our things, you know? And we need to, first of all, destroy who we are [supposed to be]. That's still a debt of the social movements. Destroying all the ‘citizen’ form of being

We need to start doing that, starting networks because it has been increasing — the violence. I've been living that as [I get] transgender care in Mexico City, I’ve been feeling the increasing of the fascism. I’ve been feeling the increasing white supremacy in a lot of subjects. But we're not gonna get that organized though if we're not starting doing the personal job of educating us, starting to open these spaces for these refugees and starting to listen between us, starting to wake up, you know?

It happened historically. All the young people used to even think that being violent or rebel is, anything like, I don't know — stealing something off a partner or of a friend, a friend, stealing something from anyone of your community. They think that is violent and that is being a rebel and being a dissident. We need to really think about this praxis and we need really to listen up the elders, because the transgender elder people has actually lived a genocide. They lived [through] fascism before. We need to study that.

I definitely am inclined to agree, just from my own experience. What are some ways that some readers of this interview can help out trans folk and sex workers in Mexico City?

There's a lot of ways to do that. I can give you the PayPal, I can give you the GoFundMe. I can give you the accounts of our collective. But first of all, I will ask to get in contact with us and start to learn about us, about our strategies, or experience of life. There's a lot of channels to get to us. And especially we need to not be an American, you know? Not being citizen of this fucking empire.. And maybe in that way you can suffer less. Sometimes I just see um your people, I just see the teaching of their people. I feel so sorry for them.

And actually, what are you afraid of? What are you afraid of, if they have killed you? Then they have killed you. We are going to wait for you. And we have this space in Mexico City. So, I'm gonna tell if they have a problem, they can come here, you know? The transgender American people, they can come here.

I know many people here have been looking for places to flee and have not really had much of a plan with it so that's very lovely to hear. Is there anything else that we didn't cover that you wanna say to readers of this interview?

Oh, I hope that I didn't say anything that [suggests like] “she was too depressing.” Yeah, they expect that I can be the transgender activist of visibility, but I'm not the transgender activist of visibility that is going to tell you that everything is fine, that everything is going to get better. I'm not going to tell you that.

Edited by David Forbes