Adela Vázquez

Diagnosing Difference (Film) - In 2009, Vázquez starred in a film titled Diagnosing Difference.The documentary film highlights the stories of thirteen transgender and genderqueer people and the impact of Gender Identity Disorder (G.I.D). In the film, Director Annalise Ophelian aims to humanize the conversation around Gender variance by featuring people who don't identify with the gender they were born with, rather than psychologist and psychiatrists leading the conversation. In the film, Vázquez discusses the complexities of gender dysphoria along with the pressure of needing to pass.

Sexile/Sexilio (Comic): - Sexile/Sexilio is a bilingual graphic novel by Jaime Cortez published in 2004 that illustrates the life of Vázquez. Cortez uses comics to illustrates various moments of Vázquez's life: her birth, Cuban school life, sexual explorations, Mariel Boat migration, and many others. Sexilio came out of collaboration with Gay Men's Health Crisis. Gay Men's Health Crisis has been an advocate and leading contributor to HIV/AIDS prevention. Sexilio was nominated as the National Association of Public Libraries' Queer Book of the Year.

Vázquez's activist work began in 1992 when she was crowned Miss Gay Latina, by Instituto Familiar De La Raza—a community based health and wellness center. Post her crowning, Vázquez began to organize around transgender rights and issues. She quickly took notice of the large health disparities in the trans community and the need to mobilize. Vázquez was invited by trans activist Tamara Ching to speak to the issues the trans Latina community faced at the Human Rights Commission at San Francisco's City Hall. Among her many efforts, Vázquez protested the employment discrimination faced by trans people and their removal from the workplace because of their gender queerness.

Vázquez was centrally involved with Proyecto ContraSIDA, an HIV prevention organization. Vázquez volunteered for Proyecto beginning in 1992 and later on became the first trans Latina employee, as their outreach coordinator. To combat the AIDS crisis, Vázquez and Proyecto organized around a multidimensional need to outreach. Vázquez's work was highlighted in UC Berkeley's Professor Juana María Rodríguez book Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces. In her chapter, "Activism and Identity," Rodríguez highlights the ways Proyecto ContraSIDA offered a dynamic, culturally situated, queer approach to community health.

Vázquez's community work continued throughout the 1990s. Vázquez was on a committee of community advisory members for "The Transgender Community Health Project" for the University of San Francisco Department of Public Health.

On April 4 of 1980, Castro's government announced that any Cuban wanting to leave to the United States was free to go. Castro did this in response to five Cubans who stole a bus and crashed into the Embassy of Peru in Havana, seeking asylum.

In 1980, Vázquez was sponsored by the Los Angeles LGBT Center to travel to California. In Los Angeles, she met Rolando Victoria who would become her drag godmother until Victoria's death in 1982. While in California, Vazquez took jobs as a gift wrapper for Neiman Marcus, a hairdresser, and hotel clerk after she moved in 1983 to the Tenderloin district in San Francisco.

Adela Vázquez (born 1958) is a Cuban American transgender activist and performer. Hailing from Cuba during a time of political uprising, Vázquez was one of 125,000 people who sought asylum and migrated in the Mariel Boat lifts in 1980. Local to San Francisco's gay scene, Vázquez began to organize with HIV prevention organization Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida and became a community activist for transgender rights.

In 1958 Fidel Castro organized the July 26th Movement to overthrow Fulgencio Batista. Vázquez was born in 1958, and during her birth, homes were burned and cities were destroyed because of the revolution. Vázquez was born out of wedlock and was adopted by her grandfather and grandmother, with whom she lived.