Hermes Espinoza was 17 and alone in New York, without a family and undocumented. He had crossed the border a year earlier, in 2006, to escape the LGBTQ discrimination he faced at home in the state of Guerrero, Mexico.
In the midst of his loneliness, he even attempted suicide. “I missed my family a lot… There was this moment where I didn’t want to live anymore. I felt completely alone and empty,” Espinoza, now 25 years old, says.
But things started to change when a friend told him about a priest from a midtown Manhattan church famously known for serving Latino parishioners and the LGBTQ community. It was the Church of Sión, a Lutheran congregation of Saint Peter’s Church led by the Argentinian pastor Fabián Arias.
[For more of this story, written by Jesenia de Moya C., Estefania Hernandez, and Lidia Hernandez Tapia, go to https://www.citylab.com/equity...guardianship/535002/]
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