These Latina Climate Activists Remind us that Environmental Justice is Deeply Intertwined with Culture and Human Rights
Latine Heritage Month 2024
Meet 6 Latina climate activists advocating for intersectional climate justice. Their stories reflect the intersection of culture, environmental justice, and activist; their leadership in protecting ancestral lands, challenging extractivism, and advocating for marginalized communities paves the way for a brighter, more equitable and sustainable world.
is a climate justice activist who is from the Otomi-Toltec Indigenous community located in Central Mexico. As an organizer, author, speaker, student, and co-founder of the Re-Earth Initiative, she is driven to make the climate movement more inclusive and diverse.
is an environmental and Indigenous rights advocate from the Kichwa Sarayaku people in the Ecuadorian Amazon. She is the co-founder of Polluters Out and Indigenous Youth Collective of Amazon Defenders. She works to protect the Amazon Rainforest from extractivism such as oil and mining, and raises awareness about the impacts of climate change in her community.
is a queer woman, a child of Salvadoran immigrants, and an environmental journalist who has been covering climate and environmental justice for nearly a decade. She serves as editor-at-large at Atmos, publishes her own climate newsletter called Possibilities, and is a founding member of The Uproot Project.
is a cancer survivor and student who led a coalition to permanently shut down a toxic oil drilling site in her South Los Angeles community. Her continued organizing against urban oil extraction led to both the Los Angeles City Council and Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously voting to ban new oil exploration and phase out of existing sites. This year, she participated in the "KEEP THE LAW” campaign working to hold oil companies accountable for creating a public health crisis, especially for communities of color.
is a Colombian human-rights and environmental activist and lawyer, who is the current Vice President of Colombia and the country’s first Black VP. Born in Yolombó, a village in the Suárez municipality in Cauca Department, she previously organized the women of La Toma and stopped illegal gold mining on their ancestral land.
is an environmental writer, poet and speaker whose work recognizes culture as an expression of our relationship to land, and advocates for the accessibility of diverse stories available to rising generations. She serves as the Impact Director at Intersectional Environmentalist.
