Team

Nicole Santamaria | Executive Director | nicole@ellaparatranslatinas.org

Nicole has expertise in healing justice and anti-violence work and has been providing support to transgender women and survivors of violence for 20+ years. Forced to flee El Salvador because of her advocacy work for human rights within the LGBTQI+ community, Nicole now serves as Executive Director of El/La. Using a trauma-informed lens, she develops El/La’s diverse programs, supports staff growth, and serves as El/La’s representative to the public at large.

Sofía S Ríos Dorantes | Deputy Director | sofia@ellaparatranslatinas.org

Sofía (she/her) was first hired by El/La in 2018 as a Data Specialist and has since climbed the ranks to become our first Deputy Director.  As a volunteer with Amigos De Cleto in México in 1998, Sofía served LGBT and heterosexual HIV+ communities. In 2001, she fled México to North Carolina, and eventually to San Francisco in order to seek asylum. Sofía is an indigenous Transgender woman from San Gabriel Chilac, Puebla, México, and she speaks Nahuatl in addition to Spanish and English.

Roberto Morales Baez | Health Educator & PrEP Navigator roberto@ellaparatranslatinas.org

Roberto has 8 years of experience working to support the LGBTQ+ community in San Francisco and the Bay Area through Health, PrEP and HIV care, prevention and education. In early 2015 he began volunteering with Mission Neighborhood Health Center's Hermanos de Luna y Sol Program and Si a la Vida and was hired 3 months later by the center as Health Educator. Roberto first joined El/La by volunteering to do rapid HIV testing and taking advantage of development and leadership opportunities to further his work supporting LGBTQI+ Latinx communities. He joined  the El/La Para Translatinas team in March 2022 as Health Educator & PrEP Navigator. Roberto is a Cisgender Pansexual man, born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.

Ckatalella Letona | Program Associate | ckatalella@ellaparatranslatinas.org

Ckatalella Letona (she/her) is an indigenous Guatemalan trans woman; refugee migrant and fighter as a survivor; artist and activist. Born in the Republic of Guatemala, raised under patriarchal standards. She has organized many movements like #Not1More, #JusticiaParaRoxana, #EndTransDetention, #FueraArpaio and many others. Her passion is art and creativity which is embedded in her passion for justice, love, and compassion. She takes action to break the silence and chains that have been imposed on her community through colonization, sexism, racism and transphobia. Her work questions our notion of identities, relationships, and journeys. She comes from a long line of ancestral spirits of the Mayan community. She has worked for eleven years with the TRANS population to disrupt, dismantle and dismantle oppressive structures for an equitable future.

Ali Meyers-Ohki | Grants Administrator | ali@ellaparatranslatinas.org

Ali (she/her) brings over a decade of administrative experience and a degree in Creative Writing to her work as Grant Administrator. She began her nonprofit career as a Youth Organizer with the Family Violence Law Center where she generated curriculum, recruited youth, conducted workshops and contributed to regular grant reports and newsletters. Her work in 2021 as an Assistant to the Director of Kweli Journal prepared her well for her continued work as a part time Development Assistant with Digital Curanderas Productions for whom she has secured private and city grants. She was hired in 2022 as a Grant Writer with El/La and has since worked with Nicole Santamaría to develop her role as Grant Administrator.

Jaime Montiel | Interim Data Administrator | jaime@ellaparatranslatinas.org

Jaime (he/him) is an experienced Salesforce Administrator with a demonstrated history working in the non-profit industry for over 15 years. His work in the non-profits space began supporting an organization in San Francisco, CA, providing services for adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities, and assisting 200 users. He has supported El/La as a consultant for the past 4 years training the staff using Salesforce and its best practices. Jaime recently joined El/La full-time to support our efforts in customizing the Salesforce NonProfit Success Pack to better serve the organization’s needs.

Lauren Nicole Bakus | Finance & Operations Manager | lauren@ellaparatranslatinas.org

Lauren Nicole Bakus (she/her) has over 16 years of experience in real estate, finance, and accounting, and currently serves as the Finance & Operations Manager at El/La Para Translatinas. Lauren holds an MBA degree and a California state real estate license. In her role, she oversees the budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and compliance functions of El/La. Lauren is passionate about creating a safe, inclusive, and empowering environment for the trans-Latina community by advancing their health, education, and leadership opportunities.

Frances Prochilo | Special Projects Manager | frances@ellaparatranslatinas.org

Frances (she/her) has dedicated over 15 years of her professional life to being of service in the nonprofit sector. Hailing from New York, Frances has lived, studied and worked abroad in Bolivia, Mexico, and Abu Dhabi, but her passion for social justice was ignited in the San Francisco Bay Area at the Global Fund for Women, where she worked to support women-led grassroots organizations around the globe meet the needs of their communities. She then joined Watershed Company and the world of online fundraising & advocacy, where she strategized campaigns for groups like Planned Parenthood and Ocean Conservancy to connect more deeply with their constituents and increase their resources. Frances has spent the last 7+ years as part of the team at El/La, joyfully serving the trans, intersex and gender-diverse Latinx immigrant community.

Aldita Gallardo | Advisory Committee Chair | aldita@ellaparatranslatinas.org

Born in Lima, Peru, Aldita Gallardo (she/they/ella) is an organizer, facilitator, and resource mobilizer based in Oakland, California, on unceded Ohlone Land. She joined the El/La Para TransLatinas' Advisory Board in 2017 and currently serves as Board Chair. Today, she serves as Program Officer for the Fund for Trans Generations, a donor collaborative at Borealis Philanthropy that resources emerging trans-led organizations in the United States, and is on the Board of Directors at Funders for LGBTQ Issues. Committed to mobilizing new dollars to the field, she advises donors on how to build authentic relationships with trans communities of color. A writer, her gleanings on social justice philanthropy have been published in Nonprofit Quarterly, Inside Philanthropy, and the Stanford Innovation Social Review. Her work is informed by her lived experiences as a formerly undocumented, fat and disabled, nonbinary trans femme migrant; organizing at the intersections of racial, gender, and economic justice for over fifteen years; and her studies at Northwestern University. In her free time, she enjoys learning about plant medicine, going on walks with her chiweenie Peppers, and spending quality time with her niblings.

Ámate Cecilia Pérez | Advisory Committee Member

Ámate Cecilia Pérez (she/we) is a decolonizing Pipil Nahuah from Kuzcatlan (El Salvador) and the founding director of Decolonizing Race and the Latinx Racial Equity Project. She is a race equity and liberation trainer, a social justice warrior and a writer. Ms. Perez has directed multiple national and transnational organizations. Prior to her social justice experience, Ámate worked as a print and radio journalist. Ms. Perez and her family fled the Salvadoran civil war in the early 1980s. Ámate Perez is queer, a martial artist and mother. She now lives in Inverness on unceded and occupied Coast Miwok and Tamal Indian territory.

Marcel Pardo Ariza | Advisory Committee Member

Marcel Pardo Ariza (they, them; b. Bogotá, Colombia) is a trans visual artist, educator and curator who explores the relationship between queer and trans kinship through constructed photographs, site-specific installations and public programming. Their work is rooted in close dialogue and collaboration with trans, non-binary and queer friends and peers, most of whom are performers, artists, educators, policymakers, and community organizers.  Their practice celebrates collective care, intergenerational connection while building sustainable trans futures and archiving trans history. Their work has been exhibited at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Palo Alto Art Center; San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Palm Springs Art Museum; and the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, among many others. 

They recently curated “Juanita: 30 Years of MORE!” at San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries and their installation I Am Very Lucky, Very Lucky To Be Trans, featuring 33 trans, intersex and gender nonconforming leaders working in the Bay Area is showing at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Juniperangelia Gia Loving | Advisory Committee Member

Juniperangelia Gia Loving (she/her) is a trans-Latina, mother, artist, and organizer for TQ2S liberation. Gia began her advocacy work in high school, trying to begin a GSA Club on campus. Now, Gia is serving as Co-Executive Director of GSA Network. Originally from El Monte, California, Tongva land, she lives and works on unceded Ohlone land in the Bay Area. She’s raising her ten-year-old kid named Tiger, the center of her heart.

Jade Mora | Advisory Committee Member

As an undocumented migrant from a working-poor family, Jade Mora Gutierrez (she/her) grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with her family of eight having migrated from farmlands in Jalisco, Mexico as a toddler. Having these lived experiences propelled her to fight for immigrant rights. As a youth of the early undocuqueer movement in the Midwest, she organized to obtain drivers licenses for folks without social security identification, fought for in-state tuition for undocumented people at the university level, and collaborated with community members and local organizations for a City ID everyone could obtain and removed gender markers on it. She championed detained and incarcerated community members with legal convictions in deportation proceedings to be released, heavily fighting against “good immigrant” narratives. 

Jade has worked for Bay Area organizations like the Transgender Law Center and Lyon Martin Health Services. A 2021 DreamSF Fellow, she supported Communities United Against Violence (CUAV) and Legal Services for Children and has been in deep partnership with coalitions. Currently, she is a language justice consultant for foundations and nonprofits. She actively supports Arm the Girls campaigns that provide self-defense kits and trainings and cultural enrichment for transfeminine folk, and part-time serves as a barista at Hasta Muerte Coffee.

Previously DACAmented and now an asylum applicant, Jade is completing her undergraduate degree and plans to obtain a master's degree in Visual Fine Arts with the hope of becoming an educator. Her drawings document a range of everyday life from working class folks to queer life, and her artistic creations challenge the imposing cultural and structural systems of patriarchy, capitalism, race and religion, all while processing both grief and joy.