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When Rudy Espinoza speaks on economic justice, his words bring both conviction and vulnerability.
As the president and CEO of Inclusive Action for the City, Espinoza has spent his career creating pathways for economic opportunity for people who have been left out by the economic system, including street vendors, small business owners and working families across Los Angeles.
But his fight for justice began long before his work at Inclusive Action. It started in his own home.
“I grew up in a single-parent household,” Espinoza said. “My dad was an alcoholic, he was really abusive with my mom.”
Because of this, Espinoza said that his mom had to work much harder to take care of him and his younger brother. A restaurant server from Zacatecas, Mexico, she worked long hours to make ends meet while living in the country undocumented.
“Growing up, I had a vision that I wanted to get money to support my family,” Espinoza said.
That vision evolved somewhat when he went to college. Although he majored in business, it was an elective in ethnic studies that he said changed his trajectory. The first in his family to go into higher education, he realized his story of struggle was not unique.
“There were a lot of people in our community, the people that look like us, that were struggling in a similar way and I got really passionate about trying to fix that,” he said.
Espinoza now leads Inclusive Action, a nonprofit that focuses on economic justice by pushing for policy changes to help small businesses flourish and, at times, providing direct financial support.
He said he believes that it is necessary to advocate for systemic changes and to educate lawmakers on how they can support underserved and marginalized communities.
“The systems that currently exist don’t work for us,” Espinoza said. “The systems are actually designed to keep us poor and to keep us disenfranchised, that laws are put in place to keep us behind.”
He added that the pathway Inclusive Action created for the legalization of the street vendors has been one of his and the group’s biggest successes.
Inclusive Action gained national attention for its role in legalizing street vending in Los Angeles, turning the street vendor economy into a legitimate one.
But Espinoza’s work hasn’t ended there. Julie Jung, the vice president of people and operations at Inclusive Action, has witnessed Espinoza’s leadership up close.
“I’ve always known Rudy to be really passionate,” said Jung, who has worked with Espinoza since 2018. “He’s the type of individual that really brings their full selves into the work.”
Jung said that at Inclusive Action, the voices of community members are a critical center to the mission and help guide the direction of where the organization focuses its attention.
“We try our best to have community voices centered,” Jung said. “We’re really out in the field asking our community members what type of products that they are in need of.”
Fighting for justice
Jung said that inequities like the ones Inclusive Action has been fighting against often show up during moments of crisis — times when the organization must step in fast to support the people most affected.
Some of the programs that they’ve established were not what they expected to provide, but the needs of the community warranted unexpected pivots.
“There are new needs that come up every single week, sometimes every single day,” Jung said. “Like when the wildfires were happening, or during the ICE raids.”
Last year, Inclusive Action helped sue the IRS to stop them from sharing information of undocumented immigrants with ICE.
“Undocumented immigrants pay almost $100 billion in taxes every single year, and you probably know that they’re not getting none of that back because they can’t qualify for any of the services that are out here,” Espinoza said. “Now ICE wants to go to the IRS and say, ‘Give me the data of all those people that are using [ITINs] to pay their taxes.”
Espinoza compares his work of advocating to fighting back against a bully who takes advantage of those who look vulnerable.
“When you get bullied at school, you’re being threatened and attacked, and then you have all of these other classmates that maybe have your back,” Espinoza said. “And there are others that are like ‘F–, I don’t want to say anything because I might get bullied next.’”
Despite the fight and the fears that may come with it, Espinoza said that the community grounds him and helps keep his head in the game.
The vision for the future
For the young advocates fighting for change despite the risk coming with this kind of work, Espinoza shared some advice.
“We have to be anti-racist. We have to be coalition builders,” Espinoza said. “We have the ability to shape our reality and if we don’t use this power then we allow other people to put their own imprint, and that imprint might not be good for us.”
Espinoza said the initial goal and spirit when starting the organization was to work himself out of this job.
“If we could get to a place where our communities are honored, where they have resources, where they’re not worried about being displaced, where our businesses are funded in the way that they should be, at that point then we won’t need to exist anymore,” he said.