TDoR 2017 / 2016 / October / 13 / Alessa Flores Mendez


Alessa Flores Mendez

Age 23

13 Oct 2016
Ciudad de Mexico, Distrito Federal (Mexico)
Strangled

TDoR list ref: tgeu/13-Oct-2016/Alessa Flores Mendez

Alessa Flores Mendez
Alessa Flores Mendez [photo: desastre.mx]

Alessa Flores was found strangled in a hotel room in the Cuauhtémoc branch of Mexico City. She had also been beaten and stabbed.

Alessa was originally from Tabasco and was engaged in sex work to survive. She was also an activist and struggled to make visible the specific security needs of women engaged in sex work.

Just a week earlier, she had participated in the Youth Capital Forum of the Youth Institute of Mexico City, where she spoke on “Sex work: Democratisation versus precarisation”. In her speech Alessa recalled that transgender sex workers lack protection and are exposed to dangers because their work is not recognized as a job.

“Sex work is stigmatized by the idea of selling the body, an idea that the conservatives use to disqualify them because the workers make their bodies public and (for the conservatives) the women are not public, but this idea is wrong because all the workers sell his body, the same as a worker, as well as a clerk.”

Alessa had been collaborating for two years in the placement of a day of the dead altar for sex workers, some of them murdered.

The altar was to remember them, “remember they were here and they were very good,” Alessa said in a video recorded last year in November, just in front of the altar placed by Tlalpan’s sex workers.

“I hope I do not have to be on this poster, I hope I do not end up here and end up somewhere else, sex work is an option but I would not like to do that alone,” Alessa said in the video.

http://desastre.mx/mexico/alessa-flores-activista-trans-y-trabajadora-sexual-fue-asesinada-en-la-cdmx/

http://www.excelsior.com.mx/comunidad/2016/10/15/1122594

http://www.proceso.com.mx/458800/reportan-asesinato-joven-transexual-en-la-cdmx

https://www.animalpolitico.com/2016/10/alessa-flores-activista-trans-cdmx/

https://www.animalpolitico.com/2016/10/quien-alessa-transexual/

http://www.sinembargo.mx/14-10-2016/3103882

Report added: 1 Sep 2018. Last updated: 13 Jan 2021

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