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Ruby Bracamonte is a Latina trans activist and national spokesperson on issues of
violence against transgender people: She grew up in El Salvador in a middle-class
family that became working class after her parents' divorce, when she was seven or
eight. Her father was an electrician, and her mother worked in a factory. She lived
with her mother after the divorce, but her father continued to pay for her to attend
an international school, where she studied English. She fled El Salvador in 1986,
at the age of sixteen, after surviving kidnapping and gang rape. In the Washington
area, Bracamonte worked a number of low-wage jobs and focused on learning English
At the time, she thought of herself as a feminine gay boy and went on dates with gay
men. After meeting a transgender woman, she started to realize that she wanted to
be "something more" than a feminine gay boy. She started to cross-dress and perform
in drag shows, winning the Miss El Salvador pageant in 1999. Then she became known
as Ruby and "just didn't go back" to being a man. Bracamonte has been involved with
local support groups for Latina/o transwomen and say men as well as the national Latina
Transgender Leadership Summit. She has advocated with the Metropolitan Police Department
and other Washington, D. C, agencies for better treatment of trans people. In 2003,
she gained national attention speaking out against violence after the murder of her
friend, Bella Evangelista. She helped build Washington's Latin@s en Accion into an
established nonprofit community organization and participated in the creation of Unid@s,
a national Latina/o LGBT organization. With all of her public speaking and organizing,
however, the activism that means the most to Bracamonte is the personal support she
provides to those who are "really marginalized" even within the trans community, those
who are homeless, sex workers, addicts, or HIV positive, those she calls her "daughters."
I interviewed Ruby Bracamonte in Washington, D.C., in three sessions, on October 6,
18, and 25, 2004, as part of a larger project collecting oral histories of activists
who work at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and nation.
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