In October 2019, after months of fundraising and recruiting volunteers, Brent Alberghini, a 44-year-old US expat who has lived in the city for ten years, helped open the free kitchen at Vida Alegre, an LGBTQ senior center founded one year prior by local trans activist Samantha Flores. Though the pandemic rapidly accelerated their necessity, Manos Amigues and Burritos No Bombas grew out of earlier efforts to feed the many hungry people among Mexico City’s queer and trans population. After the project’s leaders began collaborating with an outdoor soup kitchen in Zona Rosa, the city’s gay neighborhood, that seed blossomed into the indoor Manos Amigues kitchen. In Mexico City, one LGBTQ-led mutual aid project, Burritos No Bombas, used donations from the US to purchase 80-plus bags of groceries every week, which it gave free of charge to queer elders, trans sex workers, migrants, and families.
People formed collectives to fundraise for those whose incomes tanked, buying groceries, masks, and medicine for neighbors or sending money to far-away strangers. Manos Amigues, like many other mutual aid projects across North America, first began to address the surge of need around COVID. Here, people of all ages, genders, and sexualities dine side by side on iridescent tablecloths, between walls adorned with work by queer and transgender artists, as Mexican cantina music shuffles with disco on the speakers. In Mexico, gender-neutral Spanish is not yet widely embraced, but here in Guerrero, it has gained a foothold thanks to Manos Amigues, founded in 2021 as Mexico City’s first soup kitchen by and for the LGBTQ community. It means “helping hands,” a phrase that typically uses the gendered word amiga, but here is rendered with a gender-neutral alternative, amigue. On a Friday afternoon, just blocks from one of Mexico’s oldest churches, a dozen people are lined up beneath a rainbow flag and a banner that reads Manos Amigues.