Gabriela Vázquez
Contributor
Gabriela Vázquez (she/her) is an Angeleno and organizer born and raised in the neighborhood of Highland Park. Gabriela’s passion for organizing and social justice stems from her parents, immigrants who met in the United States while working as union organizers. She is the Deputy Director at La Defensa, an LA-based advocacy organization dedicated to shifting Los Angeles County’s reliance on criminalization and incarceration towards systems of care that center human dignity. Gabriela helped pass Measure J in 2020, a ballot initiative that earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars toward alternatives to incarceration and community-based services instead of law enforcement. In 2022, she led a criminal justice reform PAC to help elect the first ever public defender to the LA Superior Court, and in 2024 she helped elect another two public defenders to the judicial bench. She currently serves on the LA Steering Committee of the California Working Families Party and as a board member of the community organization LA Mas.
