Karelia de la Vega's feet are long and thin. His prominent veins run up two waxed, brown, stringy legs. On the right, in Gothic letters, one of the eleven tattoos that cover her body allows us to read a male name: Javier. That's what her mother called him when she was born, on October 14, 1993. Javier Antonio Hernández Urrutia.

- Why do you have that name tattooed? – I ask

"Because when I got that tattoo I still didn't have a woman's name," he replies without giving it much importance.

In this eloquent, dynamic and at times contradictory transgender woman, two people come together: Javier -as they call him at home and in his neighborhood- and Karelia -the name with which she identifies- and a character thanks to whom she is known worldwide. national and international: Lady La Vulgaraza.

"The life of Lady La Vulgaraza began here!"

- Go! I'll show you my television set!

It's nine in the morning on a Thursday in May and Karelia leaves her house jumping over a wooden plank placed on the door. This plank serves as a barrier so that her Scooby puppy does not get out of it.

During this day, the young woman mentions several times her desire to finish high school – which she left in the second year – and be a journalist. The truth is that, if she proposed it and had the opportunities, she could be whatever she wanted: tour guide, lawyer, social leader, actress, model.

When she barely begins to walk down the street, it is the tour guide side of her that comes out.

— This is the El Jobo settlement and everything around it is Pochocuape. Far from here there is a spring that had dried up, but it has regained strength and people go there to bathe, to wash... That way they save the washing machine, you know.

And laughs. Karelia is joking and smiling. He walks and points out places, gossips about the neighbors, explains how the area has been populated little by little and that before all we see was weeds and mountains, however, the panorama shrinks the heart: dirt streets with rivers and puddles of dirty water, ravines full of garbage, dust devils, some concrete houses and most of wood, zinc sheets and black plastic with improvised fences with barbed wire. “Precariousness”, as she says on several occasions.

Right in front of the Lady's home is the last stretch that can be accessed by vehicle. We pass over a green-painted pedestrian bridge under which there is a riverbed -the first of many- and we enter the recesses of Pochocuape.

The Pochocuape region is located south of Managua and borders El Crucero and the Loma Linda and Las Nubes neighborhoods. Despite belonging to the capital, the abandonment is evident and palpable. The place is crossed by channels and gullies that, if they are not cleaned and taken care of soon, can cause a misfortune this winter or the next.

During the journey, Karelia does not stop talking. Sharing with her is immersing yourself in an endless conversation in which you go from one subject to another without flinching. In an instant she remembers that the first time she was recognized in public was in Puerto Salvador Allende when she did not even know that the first video of her had been published and a minute later she is talking about "a husband" who beat her.

— The man was very obsessive, he liked to hit me and you know that we cannot allow someone to hit us. I spent about three months with him, nothing else because whoever hits you once, hits you several times...

We arrived at a huge vacant lot located on the very edge of a riverbed and close to the community sports field. She points to a tree.

— Here began the life of Lady La Vulgaraza! It was 2015, we were exhausted, I climbed on the branch of this stick -which even broke- I sat down, I started to rock and sing. A boy took out her phone and started recording. Fuck plan. The video is uploaded because the phone was stolen, someone found the video and it was published there. I had forbidden them to upload it because it was vulgar and you know that children see those things.

That is the difference between Karelia and Lady La Vulgaraza. Hours later, folding her clothes in her room, she expresses it forcefully: "The character is vulgar, but I'm not vulgar... Only the basics and mainly when I get angry."

"We are starving, but we don't screw anyone"

After showing her “television set”, Karelia moves from her memories to reality. To the reality of “her people of her”. And her social leader impulse appears.

Right next to the field there are two shacks built in the middle of two "zanjones". Elders, men, women and several children live here. Xóchilt, Ana and María are sitting outside. They are friends from Karelia. Xóchilt is dedicated to the sale of cigars. Ana and María are “pichingueras”: they collect plastic in the garbage and take it by cart to Acahualinca, where there are a large number of informal recycling stores. The round trip takes an average of four hours.

— Let's talk honestly: These people have been seen as shit. The government can do more for them. As a person and as a resident of this neighborhood, if I could do more for them, I would. The leaders have the power, but they do not have the desire to do so. They only want your convenience. And you know what? These are my people. It's my people! If they are starving, I am also starving. With great pride I tell you. And yes, we are starving, but we don't screw anyone.

“I am an ambassador of the Pochocuape region”

Karelia looks up wherever she goes. She walks upright, she wears short shorts and today she also wears a black, tight and transparent blouse with lace on the arms and chest. Two simple earrings shine in her ears and a golden chain with a cross hangs from her neck.

- Goodbye Princess! – Shouts a resident from the sidewalk of her house in another sector of the neighborhood

— You are famous… – I affirm

— Let's not say fame, let's say popularity. Fame is something heavier than popularity. Everyone wants to be famous, everyone wants to stand out, but popularity is getting together with people, knowing what people need and thus seeing if you have a heart and put your hand on your conscience to help them.

Her popularity and getting together with the people she has lived among since her childhood helped her see that children in her community were starving. A year ago, thanks to a donation, she began to distribute lunch to them. At the beginning she did it three times a week and now she does it from Monday to Friday. On this Thursday in May, eighty boys and girls received a plate of rice and spaghetti cooked in the patio of Karelia's house. This social work -which she carries out thanks to the contributions that she requests on her social networks- is her great project and her greatest current illusion is the celebration of the first anniversary.

— It will be May 30 and we will celebrate the first anniversary, Mother's Day and Children's Day. Our activities have always been a success. For Christmas there were clowns, piñatas, packages of clothes and toys came to me from the United States, from Masaya, from everywhere, everyone was given it and even rials came out in those packages! So I hope that this time people will also support me.

Touring Pochocuape with Karelia de la Vega is a tour with full access. She crosses courtyards, sticks her head into the houses she finds open and greets, tells the story of the community's undertakings, praises the hard-working citizens and fighters of the environment, vehemently denounces again and again the lack of action of the authorities in the face of the uncleanliness, the danger of the riverbeds and the general unhealthiness, but suddenly and without transitions, his chip changes and he walks in this semi-rural suburb of Managua as if he were walking a luxurious catwalk.

— I am the first trans from Pochocuape. I am the first person to announce that Pochocuape exists. With my fame, with my popularity, I have made this place known. I could have the audacity to say that I am an ambassador of the Pochocuape region. I would like my remains to remain here, but not to live here. I need to go out to be able to experience other things, to know beyond Nicaragua.

“I was born free, I am who I wanted to be”

The first time Karelia cross-dressed was in 2013 to participate in a beauty pageant. She was among the five finalists. These events were important in her past and on different occasions throughout the day she shows photos of her on her phone dressed in gala or fancy dress.

— And since when did you feel like a woman? – consult

— Ask me how long I dilated in the closet… Nothing! I was born outside! I was born free, I am who I wanted to be.

That freedom in being is also expressed in the way she speaks: at times she refers to herself in the feminine and two sentences later she does so in the masculine.

— I have had to kill all the stereotypes in this neighborhood, change the mentality of these people because there is homophobia, rejection, discrimination. And I have done it with my actions, giving myself my place. If the children call me cochón, it's because their parents teach them that. So I come and tell the child: Who told you that I was called cochón? Tell his mom that my name is Javier.

— If you could change your name in the civil registry, would you change it?

- Sure! Here we are talking about gender identity.

— And if you could do the sex change operation, would you do it?

- Sure! Well… I think that the sex change would not be for me. I think I would feel strange, different.

Back at her house, Karelia decides to do the laundry. In the spacious room with a dirt floor, which in a few hours will be full of children, there is a wooden dining room and a concrete laundry room. Here are also her pets, who are often seen in the tiktoks she shares: three rabbits frolicking in a white cage on the floor and her beloved Scooby, a tall, furry, lazy seven-month-old gray puppy at What do you think of your child?

While she checks the clothes that she is going to wash, her mother, Catalina, goes out to buy a bundle of sweets. She is a slender, dark and quiet woman. She is 65 years old, but her tired face looks older. She had six children, one of whom drowned thirteen years ago. In these four walls where Karelia's voice resounds every second, hers is rarely heard.

— He (Javier) was the calmest child I ever had. All the others were crybaby and with him sometimes she had to go see him in the hammock where she put him to bed because she didn't wake up or cry

Catalina looks at her Javier and love is reflected in her eyes. She is a devout evangelical, she claims to have been cured by God of the chronic asthma that she suffered from and now, at home, she prepares and helps distribute the food to the children in the dining room and makes the nougat that the family sells on the streets.

- I do not have friends. Only God and my mother – Karelia sighs

“Lord, if one day you are going to bless me with money, I am going to help people who need it”

In front of the laundry, on the edge of a wall, Karelia puts her cell phone. It's an old phone with a broken screen that she never leaves, but that she uses little during the day, mainly at this time when the electricity service is cut off in her house. To load it she goes to a neighbor.

After the boom represented by her first videos as Lady La Vulgaraza, Karelia went "on tour".

— I was in Rosita, Bonanza, León. I worked with a DJ who was in charge of finding the places and I did the show. He told anecdotes, vulgarities because, well, the character is vulgar and therefore I had to be vulgar. There I went earning my money, we charged 200 dollars, I gave 50 to the boy and I kept 150 because the artist has to earn more. I remember that the first thing I brought to my first show was that wardrobe that I have in my room because my clothes were lying around.

As she vigorously scrubs the clothes and the stream of water fills the sink, she looks around her room. It's like a miniature apartment. In addition to the light wood wardrobe, there is a double bed, a television, a pedestal fan, a set of three blue upholstered armchairs and a couple of tables. Half of the room is painted pink and the other half remains unpainted.

Everything inside the room has its history. He bought the bed, the television, the fan and the armchairs with a $600 gift from a Facebook follower whom he only knows by video call and who only mentions that he is a Nicaraguan citizen residing in the United States for 35 years. .

— He told me that I was a queen of Nicaragua and I told him not to joke around with me because a queen does not sleep like animals, in misery and I gave him my phone number. We connected, we talked and he told me that it was not possible for me to live like this, that I should wait for him. Within half an hour he sent me a photo, a Western Union voucher for 600 dollars. That's how my legs trembled, look. I had never seen so much money.

This same man has helped her to expand her room and to take the COVID-19 test in 2020 when she presented symptoms and was denied medical care at the public hospital because she was an opponent of the Ortega dictatorship.

At the end of May of last year, another of her followers – 300 thousand on Facebook, 131 thousand and 16 thousand on TikTok because she has two accounts and 2,500 on Instagram – sent her one hundred dollars with the instructions that she distribute it to the children. She decided to make them food.

— We started with 50 dishes three times a week and later they increased, right now we have 210 children in total. Since we started I felt happy because when I was little I went through many difficulties, I came from school and there was no food, we had to wait until at night for my mom to come home from work and I would say: “Lord, if one day you are going to bless me With money, I am going to help people who need it.” I told the Lord not to give me too much so as not to believe me so much, but not to give me too little so as not to starve. And so the dining room began.

“I retired (from prostitution) in 2017 when my friend was killed in front of us”

After finishing washing, with strength and energy, a dozen and a half of her clothes, Karelia returns to her room, apologizes for the mess and prepares to clean. She sweeps, dusts, moves the furniture, makes the bed, takes the clothes out of the closet, puts them on the bed, folds them and puts them back. All without stopping to talk. It is here, in her most intimate corner, where she decides to play the hardest and most private topics, without filter, true to her style.

— I spent three years in prostitution. 2015, 2016 and 2017. I entered because homophobia in Nicaragua is tremendous and if I went to work dressed as a woman, they didn't give me the chance. So I said, "I'm going to be a whore." I met some trans friends who were also in prostitution, they invited me to drink and I got excited. A man arrived on a motorcycle and one of my friends told me the prices and I left.

Just as she says this, they call her on the phone. Her interlocutor refers to her as "ma'am" and she replies: "No, no, I'm a lady, no one has touched me yet." And she laughs loudly. Hers Ends her call by asking them to get back in touch with her at 4pm.

— I retired (from prostitution) in 2017 when my friend was killed in front of us.

Saying that sentence her face takes on a total seriousness and her voice becomes serious, even sad.

— It was 2:30 in the morning. We were next to the Zumen, we were five transvestites. Some men arrived in a car, requested her services, she left and after a while the car came back and they just threw her away. She dead. It seems that they put her on her knees because her knees were sore and they put a bullet in her forehead. That's where I said, "This is not for me."

From her time in Karelia prostitution, she says that she earned between two thousand and five thousand cordobas every night (between 57 and 85 dollars) and that she worked Friday, Saturday and Sunday because the rest of the days she needed to rest and recover.

She — she was in the Israel market, in the Zumen, on the road to Masaya. That is the life of the whore. The whore has to search, the client will not arrive where you are. In prostitution there are many trans girls who steal, but there are some who come and tell you: "Look, your friend stole the rials from my children's food." And I thought: “Bastard! You have your wife in your house, you have your children, what are you coming here to look for! And if you come because your partner doesn't give you what you want, it's because you haven't told him what you want.

She then asks Ella Gray's sister-in-law to pass her the backpack, Gray goes, she comes back from her and Karelia pulls out a pair of condoms. “I always wear them. This is one life and two errands,” she declares. Now we are in the yard. Catalina, her mother, listens to the conversation in silence and passes Karelia nougats. She squeezes with both hands those white balls made of corn until they are compacted. Then they will bathe them in sweet and arrange them on trays. This is what the family lives on.

"Homosexuality is hard, difficult, crying, suffering and sometimes even dying"

Having finished with the nougat, Karelia returns to her room and talks about her experiences. And it is here that she opens her heart.

— I'll tell you that when we get mad at a man, oh, cute pipita, you spoil your life. I lived with a couple who beat me, told me they loved me, but what they wanted was rials. She came with lies, with deceit and when I no longer had anything... she goes with God.

Karelia lowers her voice as if she were speaking to herself.

— I have been a worker since I was a kid. I have sold at traffic lights, I have sold nougats, cajetas, donuts. When I was 14 years old I saved almost 15 thousand córdobas (about 430 dollars) and I wanted to go to Panama to work to have money, but I got mad at a bastard and I almost took my life for him. That happens with us. Many homosexuals have taken their lives for men. I gave him everything: my rials, my life, my time. He was 27 years old. And when I had nothing to give her, goodbye to the beauty queen. I was like two years in the alcohol.

There is a brief silence in the room. Through the window comes the trill of the family's chocoyito that is in her cage in the patio. Catalina and Gray cook on the stove where they used to make the nougats, the rice and the spaghetti that will be given to the children who are about to arrive. Karelia has a scar on her chin, she mentioned it to him and says that she was the product of a transphobic attack: some men kicked her and hit her in the face with a pipe after a show. Her jaw was split and she went a month without eating and hardly speaking. After recalling that, she picks up her speech.

I have two big dreams. The first is to finish my studies, go to university and be a journalist and the other is to have the children's dining room with chairs, tables, teach them, values, a message so that they lead a good life. I have some gay friends younger than me and I tell them that they don't know anything, that homosexuality is hard, difficult, to cry, to suffer and sometimes even to die in the attempt to be homosexual, to be trans. If I were born again I would be homosexual again, but I don't want people to repeat my story. That's why I tell them to get ready, that studies are going to be the most important thing they're going to have in life, that way nobody is going to see them as shit.

"Let's not confuse humanitarian aid with politics"

It is almost one in the afternoon and the children of the area are about to arrive to pick up their lunch. The room is clean and at the entrance there is a plastic bucket with water to wash the hands of visitors. There is also a bottle with alcohol and a sign signed by Javier H. where the use of a mask is reminded. Now the blue and white Karelia, the woman who has told her truth to the dictatorship and who has therefore earned the siege of the police even in her own home, she speaks.

— An opponent offered me two quintals of rice and I told her that it was fine, but that she should not confuse humanitarian aid with politics. Because what I do is humanism, advocating for those in need. So if we're going to do something, let's not do it expecting something in return. No one can profit from this, let them forget about that clowning. I told him that and the quintals of rice never arrived.

With that anecdote, a bit of Lady La Vulgaraza appears.

"Besides, you had a chance to sink this bastard!" Why did you sit down with a criminal to talk? You don't talk to criminals! Why didn't you strike private companies if they are the largest capital in this country? And now you don't want to join! Now only you want to be president. What does it cost them to put only one, we must be united all of us who are against, whatever the party we are. You already forgot the dead, the political prisoners!

The visitors begin to arrive. A slow and steady trickle of boys and girls from three-year-olds to twelve-year-olds. They meet in the garden outside the house and Javier, as everyone calls him, watches them while they wash their hands and then organizes them into lines. The room fills up quickly. The children laugh, shout and play, the rabbits jump in their cage and Scooby dozes. Then the diners go little by little to the patio where Catalina serves them the food in the plates and plastic containers that they carry. Karelia makes a Facebook Live of a few minutes referring to the lunch of the day, remembering the event of May 30 and showing the children and the food they are going to consume.

When the children leave, only the photo session remains. Shown here is the Karelia model. She poses, she laughs out loud, she jokes with the photographer. She is so comfortable that she doesn't seem to feel the sun on her skin. We leave behind her humble little red house located in front of a riverbed and we go back into the labyrinth of Pochocuape. As she walks down the main street, she turns and speaks once more.

— I am an influencer from the highlands, many people have said that I am the first trans heard and recognized in Nicaragua. And you know what? Yes. And I've done it all by myself.