Hispanic Heritage Month: Bamby Salcedo Is Empowering Transgender Latinas to Lead

Throughout Hispanic Heritage Month, PFLAG Los Angeles is honoring LGBTQ+ Latine leaders whose work, visibility, and advocacy have helped create a more inclusive world for our community.

For Bamby Salcedo, that work has always been rooted in community. She hasn’t simply advocated for transgender people from the outside. She has spent decades helping trans people—particularly trans Latinas—build the resources, connections, and collective power to advocate for themselves.

Salcedo is a Los Angeles-based transgender Latina activist and president and CEO of the TransLatin@ Coalition. The organization began in 2009, when a group of transgender, gender-nonconforming, and intersex immigrant women came together to address needs they weren’t seeing adequately addressed elsewhere. What started as a grassroots effort has since grown into an organization providing direct services while advocating for systemic change in Los Angeles and beyond.

That combination matters. Advocacy can sometimes become disconnected from the everyday realities it is supposed to address. Salcedo’s work has largely gone in the other direction, pairing policy advocacy with practical support for people navigating issues such as housing instability, immigration, health care, HIV, violence, incarceration, and employment.

One example is the Center for Violence Prevention & Transgender Wellness, which Salcedo helped develop in Los Angeles. Rather than focusing on a single issue, the center was designed around the reality that people’s needs tend to overlap. Someone looking for health care may also need housing assistance. Someone dealing with immigration issues may also need employment support or simply a safe place to find community.

Over the years, Salcedo has also taken those experiences into spaces where transgender people—especially transgender immigrants and people of color—have historically had little representation. She has spoken before government bodies, universities, human rights organizations, and national and international conferences, and has participated in White House discussions about issues affecting transgender communities.

Still, measuring Salcedo’s impact only by the rooms she has entered would probably miss something important about her work. Much of it has been about changing who gets to enter those rooms in the first place.

The TransLatin@ Coalition has worked to develop new community leaders and document the experiences of trans Latin@ people themselves. Its research and advocacy reflect a fairly simple idea: policies affecting transgender communities are likely to work better when the people living with those policies have a meaningful role in shaping them.

That approach remains visible in the coalition’s work today. In 2026, Salcedo and other advocates pushed Los Angeles to dedicate city funding specifically to programs serving transgender, gender-expansive, and intersex people. The resulting city budget included $500,000 for those services—a concrete investment in a community whose needs have often been acknowledged without being adequately funded.

For PFLAG Los Angeles, Salcedo’s story is also a reminder that affirmation doesn’t end with acceptance. People need families and communities that embrace them, but they also need safe housing, health care, economic opportunity, and a voice in the decisions that shape their lives.

This Hispanic Heritage Month, we honor Bamby Salcedo for spending decades helping build that kind of community—and for making sure transgender people aren’t simply included in the conversation, but have the power to lead it.