January 2020

UMedia: Aldita Gallardo is a Latinx trans woman, community organizer, and former youth worker based in Oakland, California. At the time of this interview, she served as a Senior Program Associate for the Fund for Trans Generations at Borealis Philanthropy, and as a board member at El/La Para Translatinas, a community center, public health, and anti-violence organization serving trans Latinx migrants in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to her work at Borealis, she organized alongside queer, trans, and gender-variant youth in the East Bay. In this oral history interview, Gallardo discusses her political development as a high school and college student and first forays into radical queer and trans people of color-led communities in the Bay Area, her work with queer and trans youth and her belief in the urgency and importance of that work, her work with the Fund for Trans Generations, and her thoughts on philanthropy and its relationship to queer and trans people of color-led movements on the ground, violence against Black and Brown trans women, and visions of a better future for trans people of color.