Staff

Co-director & co-founder

Jose Yair Castellanos Gallegos (he/him) was born in Guanajuato, Mexico, and lived there for the majority of his childhood before immigrating to the United States with his family. He is currently based out of Raleigh, NC. He was certified as a Community Interpreter from Surry Community College and has played different organizing roles across the state of North Carolina. As someone who grew up interpreting and navigating big institutions for his family, he remains passionate about language justice and immigrant community empowerment.

Yair co-leads the Southern Regional Program and the Language Justice Network and is part of Wave’s Operations and Communications teams.

LJ Network Organizer

Roxy Chang (she/her) is a cultural worker, community organizer, and language justice interpreter from Hong Kong. She is a member of Gongming Collective, a group of Chinese interpreters for social justice based in NYC.

Co-director & co-founder

Allison Corbett (she/her) is a Spanish-English interpreter, language justice consultant, and oral historian from Tidewater Virginia who has been based in NYC since 2013. She has over 15 years of experience interpreting in settings ranging from hospitals as a Certified Healthcare Interpreter, to grassroots community meetings and workshops. Guided by the principles of language justice, Allison partners with institutions to transform their relationship to language and power, and build their capacity for serving and engaging multilingual communities. She is also one half of the collaboration Circular, which creates work at the intersection of language justice and oral history.

Allison co-leads Colibrí Academy for HIV and Language Justice, and is part of Wave’s Communications, Development, and Operations teams.

Co-director & co-founder

Gloria Delgadillo (they/them), is a queer Mexican immigrant raised in Texas currently living in Brooklyn, New York. They’re a trained linguist, with a MA in Spanish-English interpreting & translation, and a Language Justice (LJ) worker. Gloria’s work is led by their deep, complicated and curious relationship with language(s) throughout their life —from having to interpret for their family at a young age to finding the words to describe their queerness in Spanish and English. In 2019 they co-founded Comal, an LJ collective in North Texas as a way to organize interpreters working in movement spaces, and to increase language access in the area. Gloria’s work includes collaborating with people and organizations who have an interest in dismantling linguicism in their spaces.

Gloria co-leads Colibrí Academy for HIV and Language Justice and the Language Justice Network.

Co-director & co-founder

Tony Macias (he/him) is a native of the US south, and an interpreter/translator and popular education trainer with over 20 years of experience in the labor, migration, and international solidarity sectors. He served as one of the coordinators of the 2010 US Social Forum Language Justice Team, and co-founded the Austin Language Justice Collective, the tilde Language Justice Cooperative, and Wave. He is inspired to do this work because of his family’s language loss through immigration and colonization (some of his ancestors crossed the US/Mexico border, others saw that border cross them, and others left their ancestral European languages behind to assimilate into white American life.) Working as a Spanish<>English interpreter is one of the ways he gives to movement, and is a form of personal and ancestral healing.

Tony co-leads the Southern Regional Program and is part of Wave’s Development team.