Almost 20 years ago Julia Llorent went to get a pregnancy test. It was positive. Then she took an HIV test. It was positive. Her husband had already taken a test. It, too, was positive.

In just months, Llorent became the mother of a baby boy. A few years later, she became a widow. Now, 18 years on this side of the diagnosis, she is an advocate who stubbornly launched a determined fight against the lingering stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS in the Hispanic community.

Five years after Llorent was diagnosed, Tania Lopez buried her husband who had died from AIDS complications. Through her loss, or perhaps because of her loss, Lopez began her own grass-roots mission of encouraging women to be tested for the virus that causes AIDS, even if they are in long-term relationships or married, as she was.

These South Floridians, bound by the immeasurable impact of HIV/AIDS, have joined other women whose faces adorn the Southern AIDS Living Quilt (www.livingquilt.org), a new digital collection of front-line stories designed to raise public awareness and stop the spread of HIV and AIDS, particularly among African-American and Hispanic women.

''This is a disease that can be prevented,'' says Llorent, 51, a Miamian whose son is HIV-free and whose husband died in 1992. ``It's about teaching. And spreading the word. And protecting our children.''

ALARMING NUMBERS

A sobering picture of HIV/AIDS in the South -- characterized by health officials as an epidemic -- emerges in the statistics:

About 40 percent of U.S. AIDS patients live in the South. Some 65 percent of AIDS cases among rural populations occur in southern states.

Florida's portrait is equally alarming: Women constituted almost a third of the people living with HIV/AIDS in 2006. And more than 80 percent of them are minorities -- 70 percent are African American and 13 percent are Hispanic, according to the Florida Department of Health.

''We must turn the tide on the 56,000 new HIV infections annually,'' says Tom Liberti, chief of the Bureau of HIV/AIDS for Florida's Department of Health. ``Nationally, Florida ranks fourth in AIDS rate cases and second in the number of AIDS cases reported. It is critical that we act now.''

The advocacy organizations Southern AIDS Coalition and Test For Life became partners to create the website, banking on the power of personal testimonies, kinship and familiarity. And the faces of women living with HIV -- people named Gina and Denise and Ruby and Angie and Vivian.

''We want the voices of people affected by HIV living in the South to be heard,'' says Liberti, a Coalition board member. ``Whatever we can do to empower, educate and encourage. . . . And we are doing it electronically to get as broad a reach as possible.''

The project, introduced in New Orleans and Raleigh, was unveiled in Florida at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine Mailman Center for Child Development. Collectively, the three cities represent the South's most vulnerable populations.

''The stories that make up this quilt will empower young women to get tested and know their status,'' says Alex Moreno, director of outreach at the UM medical school's division of adolescent medicine.

Thirty women, four from Miami, offer their stories as survivors, advocates, teachers, mothers, sisters, daughters in video quilt ''patches.'' Some of the women are HIV positive. Others are HIV negative but also invested in the fight.

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