By admin 
The Sacramento Bee and Nehemiah Leaders Programs are celebrating this year’s 60 Change Makers. Join them at our gala at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 13 at the Grand Sheraton in downtown Sacramento. Buy tickets at sacramentochangemakers.com.
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Clarissa Laguardia describes her first years in the United States after emigrating from El Salvador as an 18-year-old as “very scary.”
“That doesn’t even cut it, actually,” she said. “It was horrifying.”
Broke, without resources and experiencing intense culture shock, Laguardia often thought about returning home. What pushed her forward? A sense of responsibility to her community.
Laguardia stayed to pursue her education one class at a time as she struggled to afford school. To fund her education, she founded Laguardia Translation, a language service agency which now offers translation, interpretation and cultural consulting services to the Sacramento region in more than 100 languages. To her, the work is about making services accessible to people regardless of their native language and ensuring they are seen.
“I saw the power imbalance between people receiving language services versus those giving it to them,” she said.
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For the past couple decades, Laguardia juggled her education, her business and her advocacy. An alumnus of American River College and Sacramento State, Laguardia earned her associate’s degree in 2011, her bachelor’s in 2015 and her master’s in public policy and administration in 2021. She returned to Sacramento State this fall to pursue a doctorate in education.
Laguardia expanded her language access advocacy efforts to the city, county and state level, playing a pivotal role in developing the infrastructure in California to reach non-English speaking residents for the census, a challenge in the year that the Trump administration pushed to ask about citizenship status on the survey.
Now, Laguardia is the executive director of Cal Center, an ambitious civic engagement nonprofit that focuses on developing young people as community leaders. Throughout her career centered on language, she recalls a phrase her parents used to say: “deseo de superación.”
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“In the obstacle course that life is, I refused to give up,” she said.