Bárbara "Soraya" Santiago Solla (December 6, 1947 – September 22, 2020) was a pioneer of the transgender community in Puerto Rico as well as the first person in Puerto Rico to change the gender designation on their birth certificate following gender reassignment surgery.
A native of Puerto Rico, Santiago had gender reassignment surgery in 1975 at the age of 28 while living in New York City. Upon returning to Puerto Rico in 1976, she successfully petitioned to change the gender listed on her birth certificate.
Her memoir, Hecha a mano : disforia de género (Hand Made: Gender Dysphoria), was published in 2014. During the same year, Santiago was featured in the documentary, Mala Mala, which was nominated for awards by GLAAD and the Tribeca Film Institute and won numerous others.
Early life
Santiago was born on December 6, 1947, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Alicia Solla, a local hotel housekeeper, and Ramón Santiago Berrios, an official for a Puerto Rican tax agency. Santiago grew up alongside one sister, Carmen Santiago Solla. In her memoir, Santiago recalls that, from an early age, her parents were attuned to her effeminate mannerisms, resulting in physical abuse and frequent immersion in conventionally masculine activities, including attending boxing matches with her father.
In her later teenage years, citing irreconcilable differences with her family, Santiago departed to New York City, where she stayed for over 10 years. There, Santiago met and befriended numerous members of the LGBTQ community, many of whom also belonged to the million-member Puerto Rican diaspora that had relocated to New York City following the Second World War. This mid-century mass migration from the commonwealth to the mainland was due largely to the worsening Puerto Rican economy as well as the rapid expansion of the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport, the latter of which made contiguous migration much more attractive to young Puerto Ricans. In New York City, many queer Puerto Ricans, including Santiago, were frequent patrons of the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village for years prior to the notorious Stonewall riots of 1969, when LGBTQ patrons throughout the neighborhood fought back against violent police raids in an event now considered to be a major catalyst for the U.S. gay liberation movement.
Transition and return to Puerto Rico
In the 1950s, Bronx-native Christine Jorgensen dominated public attention when she traveled to Europe in order to find a surgeon willing to provide gender reassignment surgery as well as hormonal treatment. The later-actress and activist rose to fame in large part due to her background as a U.S. serviceman during World War II, a contrast which challenged the masculinity that had come to define the post-war U.S. (as demonstrated in the New York Daily News' front-page story, "Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty"), and which emboldened other transgender women to pursue their own surgeries and treatments. As the gender reassignment industry expanded overseas, American universities and colleges began to heavily invest in studies related to sex changes. By the 1970s, over 40 gender clinics could be found in universities across the country.
After receiving $3,000 from her mother in 1975, Santiago followed the lead of Jorgensen and other trans women in New York City, undergoing gender reassignment surgery at a local clinic after receiving approval from both the federal and Puerto Rican governments. A year following the procedure, Santiago returned to Puerto Rico and settled in Carolina, where she petitioned in court to legally change both her first name to Bárbara and the gender on her birth certificate to female. During the court case, a gynecologist testified that Santiago had female genitalia, leading to the success of the petition and Santiago's subsequent fame across the island as the first Puerto Rican to publicly acknowledge having undergone gender reassignment surgery.
Also in 1976, Santiago set up a later-famous hair salon in Carolina called Soraya Hair Design. At this hair salon, Santiago consorted with politically-influential upper-class women for decades until the aftermath of the global financial crisis — and its later role in the 2014 Puerto Rican government-debt crisis — rendered the salon's operation unsustainable.