When Juan Pablo Delgado (MPP’19) started litigating cases in Mexican courts on LGBTQ+ rights abuses, local and national authorities often denied the existence of prejudice against queer populations.
“There was a legislator in my home state’s congress that publicly laughed when being asked about transphobic attitudes in the state government and congress,” said Delgado, who is from León, Mexico.
The experience fueled Delgado’s efforts to expand Visible, an online platform that he launched while completing his master’s degree at Georgetown, which gathers data on violence and discrimination against LGBTQ+ Mexicans. Prior to Visible, there was no such repository.
Since he launched Visible with a $20,000 grant from Georgetown’s Baker Center for Leadership and Governance (now known as the Baker Trust for Transformative Learning), more than 2,500 LGBTQ+ Mexicans have completed an anonymous eight-minute survey in which they’ve reported their own hostile and discriminatory experiences.
Even though the number of respondents may sound modest, Visible is the largest database of its kind in the country. Information is being made available to policymakers in hopes they will create data-driven inclusive policies in areas such as criminal and civil law, housing and health care.
Information is also being used by civil society, media and international organizations to support advocacy and legal initiatives. From 2015-2019, Mexican media reported on the murders of at least 441 LGBTQ+ people. Such coverage underplayed the scope of the problem, “as nonlethal violence wasn’t mentioned,” said Delgado. That created challenges in adjudicating justice for all violent offenses.
“You could bring a case before a court, and it would be quite easy for a judge to deny a systematic presence of discrimination and violence, which is crucial,” said Delgado. “You need to bring data that will demonstrate that there’s actually something systematic within society. We created Visible to demonstrate that discrimination and violence are everywhere.”