By: Reynaldo Leanos Jr. and Max Parrott
HARLINGEN, Texas — Drag queen Beatrix Lestrange, whose real name is Joe Uvalles, is wearing a neon multi-colored dress, a red wig and a pair of black pumps. She’s standing in front of a full room of mostly baby boomers and is ready to call out numbers for bingo.
“Can we kill these lights?” Lestrange laughs. “These are not drag queen friendly.”
Lestrange, a self-proclaimed ‘dragtivist,’ was hosting a game of bingo, but it was slightly different. In this “Bling-o,” the players competed for donated jewelry instead of cash.
“Bingo, to me, sounded kind of boring,” said Andi Atkinson, the organizer of the event and executive director of La Posada Providencia, a shelter for asylum seekers and refugees. “We decided, why not give away bling?”
Bling-O was the result of a web of unorthodox partnerships. Lestrange was invited to support La Posada Providencia at an LGBT-friendly Christian church in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas on the U.S.-Mexico border.
What brought the groups together? A shared crusade for immigrant justice, where participants paid a fee at the door, which all went to the shelter.
The Rio Grande Valley has been in the national spotlight after President Donald Trump deployed thousands of soldiers along the U.S-Mexico border and has installed barbed wire on some parts along the southern border.
According to Customs and Border Protection data, Border Patrol has apprehended more people in the Rio Grande Valley sector, though the numbers are drastically lower than those in the 1980s and 1990s.
Most of La Posada’s clients come from detention facilities in the Rio Grande valley, though some could have been transferred to those facilities from any port of entry in the U.S.
Atkinson said the shelter provides a safe place for immigrants seeking asylum to locate and make plans to travel to friends and family after they are released from detention.
“At La Posada, basically what we do is we help people finish their journey,” Atkinson said.
Before working for the shelter, Atkinson began her immigration activism through a United Methodist Women group. She explained that her idea to ask a drag queen to host the event came after she saw Lestrange marching at an ACLU rally protesting the separation of parents from their children at the border.
“It just makes sense that the LGBT community would want to support refugees. It just makes perfect sense because they are [also] discriminated against,” Atkinson said. “It’s all about people standing together–all types of people standing together.”
Click here to read the entire story. This story originally ran on NBC News / NBC Latino on November 20, 2018.
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