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Conclusion The Road of Compañeros We had driven for two hours, when Marco asked me to stop and turn back. We were on our way to Chihuahua, the state’s capital, to meet with a group of gay men who were working on HIV and AIDS. A compañera we met in the women’s health organization for which I was working in Ciudad Juárez had put us in contact with the group. Older than us and a product of the student movement of the late 1960s in Mexico, Patsy was a hippie. She lived in Chihuahua and knew of this small group of men who had come together to fight HIV and AIDS, but had no financial resources. Patsy thought we could provide some guidance. I borrowed my brother’s pickup truck, and Marco and I were driving there for a long weekend. But Marco was not feeling well.At first I attributed his mood to one of his not-so-rare impulsive and stubborn outbursts. He was afraid and anxious. The week before, we had taken our first HIV tests. José drew the blood from us in his house and sent it to the lab, via the clinic where he was employed. I had forgotten about it already, but Marco hadn’t. On the road, he asked me to return to Juárez. He thought his result would come back positive. He was pretty sure. He wanted to be alone on the second floor of his parents’ house in the bedroom he had claimed as his own. I made a half-hearted attempt to change his mind, having always respected his opinions and his own peculiar way of being, while he always respected mine. I started to turn the truck around, but Marco stopped me.“Never mind,” he said. “Forget about me; let’s keep going.” I got a little angry but continued driving to Chihuahua. Marco had changed his mind because of the commitment we had made with the guys in Chihuahua. That commitment was more important than our individual worries and troubles.As it turns out, we had a fantastic time in Chihuahua. We met with the guys and visited a couple of gay bars. And our test results came back negative. Months later, we were in El Paso’s airport. I was leaving for Michigan to begin graduate school, and Marco had come to say good-bye. I had missed my flight because the lines to cross the border between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso were too long and moving very slowly (we on the border think the gringos and the immigration officers want to make the crossing as inconvenient as possible). So, we had plenty of time to kill as I waited for the next flight. Marco stayed with me the several hours before my departure. My plans were to return to Mexico after finishing my master’s degree. I might not go to Juárez—perhaps to Mexico City. In any event, I would go somewhere in Mexico. Marco suspected otherwise. He told me I was not coming back. He was right: I have been in United States since then, visiting Mexico and Juárez only occasionally. Compañeros are at the heart of this book. I discovered compañeros while working on this book, reading through thousands of pages of transcripts, cutting and pasting excerpts, and translating words and passages. I did not start this research with the idea of compañeros, or with a question about compañeros. I found them along the road and after a couple of years working on this project. They probably have been there all along. I just did not see them before. I realized that compañeros are an essential quality of our volunteerism and activism as Latino GBTs. They constitute a force that drives us to come together. They are the glue that keeps us together. But we should avoid essentialism. Being a compañero is not in our skin color, in our Spanish language, or in our accented and broken English language . It is not a quality inherent in being Latino, a gay man, or a transgender person. In the same manner that Latino is not a natural quality or a quality based on skin color, neither is compañeros. It is not the way all Latinos relate; it is not a universal relationship among Latino GBTs. Compañerismo is a quality of a type of relationship created through participation...

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