A Culinary Union Local 226 kid, Jasmín Margarita “Jas”(she/they), under the artist handle Palabra y Cuerpo, grew up in a working-class, Black, brown, and immigrant community, the East Side of so-called Las Vegas (Nuwuvi Lands), and was drawn into community organizing by generational means and ways, witnessing her single mother and tias consistently share resources, cafecito y chisme and gather across dinner tables and front door stoops. They have a career in civic engagement, reproductive rights, health, and access, gender justice, and LGBTQIA2S+ advocacy, both regionally and nationally, spanning half a decade. It’s important to note and give credit where credit is due-Jas been organizing community-wide events with Jerome D. Mack’s Middle School’s Student Council first-ever fashion show using only recyclable items with every club and sports team, and peanut butter and jelly sandwich drives for unhoused neighbors, back in 2011! (Shoutout to G-Money.)

Having founded Avanzamos, an East Side LGBTQIA2S+ bicultural and bilingual (now-dissolved-status) non-profit, in April 2020, starting with disseminating COVID-19 information virtually to her community, and virtually gathering, supporting, and highlighting Black, Indigenous, Latine, and TGNC folks and issues. Now with a new chapter, the sights are set on launching Línea Colibrí, an East Sider LGBTQIA2S+ hotline, in dedication to and memory of Marco Castro Bojórquez, human rights documentary filmmaker, ancestor, and friend. For more information, please reach out to [email protected]. Palabra Y Cuerpo is now a business entity, registered with the Nevada State of Secretary, Creative Commons License y todo! Palabra Y Cuerpo is marketing, content, business/organizational consultation firm from an ever-growing East Side matriarca. If you’d like to reach out para saludar, a collaboration, or consultation, please reach directly out to [email protected] for a faster response or submit on our page an inquiry.

Now, tethered to self, breaking generational curses, basking in and creating generational joy, Jas is a cuír elder, an abortion/pregnancy-loss doula, sober, independent artist and poet, her art and her labor are reflective of and center the realities TGNC, BIPOC and East Siders, live in and the future we collectively and actively build. A just, compassionate, authentic, loving, and bad bitch-ery future. Expression, journaling, communicating – the tools we all have at our disposal as our oral histories. Laughter as medicine, cries as offerings, please don’t ask permission to exist. Just do. Just be. Acércate una cobija calientita, una bebida caliente o fría, inhala profundamente, exhala profundamente, y ponte al chisme.