Archivo LGTBIQ+, Purita Pelayo del Ecuador

Archivo  LGBTIQ+, Purita Pelayo del Ecuador is a compilation of photographic, audiovisual and newspaper materials that have been worked, preserved and guarded with the purpose of disseminating and revitalising the history and political process that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Ecuador on 27 November 1997. 

One of the main objectives of this story and for the Círculo de Amigos de la Memoria (Circle of Friends for Memory) is to have the opportunity to explore diverse spaces and to maintain a permanent line of exhibition, mediation, preservation and enhancement of the archive and the symbolic implications contained in the images, both inside and outside the country. But above all, it aims to vindicate the struggle and social achievements that mark a before and after in the belief system and values of Ecuador, by making visible the LGBTIQ+ collective as managers of changes and social transformations. Hence the importance of the archive and its permanent dissemination.

Purita Pelayo
 

Purita Pelayo (Esmeraldas, Ecuador) is a trans activist and key figure in the history of the LGBTIQ+ movement in Ecuador, one of the last countries in Latin America to overturn the criminalisation of same-sex relationships. In the years since, she has remained firmly committed to the struggle for the social and civil rights of the LGBTIQ+ community. She is the founder of the Coccinelle Transgender Association, the first LGBTIQ+ collective in Ecuador to be legally recognised by the State, in 1998. She was the organisation’s founding president for nine years, consolidating her leadership in the movement. In 1997, she organised a group of trans women engaged in sex work in the La Mariscal and El Guambra neighbourhoods of Quito, with the aim of gaining legal recognition by the Ecuadorian state and contributing to the struggle for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. In 2017, she published the book Los fantasmas se cabrearon, a series of chronicles on the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Ecuador. In 2022-2023, she founded the Círculo de la Memoria LGBTIQ+ del Ecuador, also called Los Enchaquirados. In 2024, she published the photo book Relámpagos bajo el puente, expanding her contribution to the visual and documentary memory of the movement. She was responsible for Ecuador’s first LGBTIQ+ historical, photographic and audiovisual archive, entitled Los Enchaquirados, which gathers material from the 1980s and 1990s.