Editor’s Note: This story is part of a project recognizing LGBTQ+ people who have shaped Washington ahead of the 50th anniversary of Seattle Pride. Keep an eye out for more in-depth coverage of changemakers through June 30. To read more, click here .
Ray Corona wants LGBTQ+ Latinx people to know they have a place in Seattle. Corona created the nonprofit Somos Seattle, co-founded the city’s Latinx Pride festival and runs a Seattle-based program to help Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival recipients — people who were brought to the U.S.
without documentation as children and have been granted permission to live and work in the country — travel outside the U.S. At the heart of his work: centering joy and pride over pain and adversity.
Intersectionality is key to his activist work. As an undocumented gay man who uses the gender-neutral term Latinx, he says his experiences pushed him to carve out a larger, joyous and inclusive space for his community in the Pacific Northwest. Corona was born in Mexico City and moved to Everett with his family at 9 years old.
In 2008, Corona, then 17 and in his senior year of high school, testified before the Washington state Legislature in support of a bill that would allow undocumented students to receive state financial aid. That moment spurred his activist work, and was the first time he publicly revealed he was undocumented. “It was a time when, I would say, very few people did that,” Corona recalled.
That bill eventually passed i.