A Latina Champion – outsmartmagazine.com
“I was hungry to help the community,” she emphasizes. And since other organizations were providing information that was not in Spanish and seemed to alienate the Latino community, she decided to form FLAS.
Chinó also volunteered at AIDS Foundation Houston to learn more about the disease. She remembers walking into a hospital and seeing three floors of beds full of people dying from AIDS complications. She would help patients when they were too sick to feed themselves and walk them to the bathroom when they were too weak to stand. She prayed and read the Bible with them, and often held them in her arms as they took their last breath.
She continued volunteering with AIDS Foundation Houston while building a rapport with the Houston Health Department and Texas Southern University. Both institutions provided her with condoms and pamphlets about HIV/AIDS to hand out. She stayed out all night offering information about HIV and AIDS to people at several local nightclubs, bars, and cantinas.
“I wanted people to receive the information because I didn’t want to see any more people dying,” she says.
After years of hard work, she was able to open an office for FLAS and help people in the Latino LGBTQ community.
However, her struggles didn’t end there. In 1995, she lost her apartment and car because she was dedicating all her time and resources to establishing FLAS. She was homeless for nearly eight years, but never gave up.
In 2017, she was diagnosed with lymphoma cancer. She underwent chemotherapy, radiation, and surgeries to remove her gallbladder and repair her hernia. She is currently in remission.
“I wasn’t scared to die. I was scared to leave my community behind without the services and empathy and quality [care they deserved],” she says.
“Our community is treated badly by health providers because we are different—because we are trans, gay, lesbian, or whoever we are. But in the end, we all are human beings, and we deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.”
While Chino continues to experience a great deal of turmoil—her mother passed away last April—she says she now lives in peace.
She was recently recognized by Televisa Univision for serving the local Latino community, and she will receive an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Veracruzana.
“I just ask God to continue giving me life [so I can] continue giving hope and life to people who are really underserved and marginalized by society,” she says.
She encourages people to give back to their community by either volunteering or donating to organizations such as FLAS whenever possible. “Nothing is impossible when you have love in your heart to help somebody.”
For more information, visit flasinc.org.