Meet the Latinx Climate Warriors Giving Our Generation Hope

Yessenia Funes is a Salvadorian-American activist, poet and journalist that specializes in covering the intersection where race and the environment meet."The systemic racism that fuels police brutality is the same beast that puts polluters in the backyards of BIPOC communities. It's the same monster that has ended too many lives too soon amid the coronavirus pandemic. Racial justice is climate justice," she explains on her Instagram feed.

In 2018, this Afro Colombian activist won the Goldman Environmental Prize Goldman Environmental Prize — like the Oscars of environmentalism — for her work on preserving the Cauca department in Colombia, focusing on women's rights and ending gold mining practices in her home country.

Cindy is the founder of Podcast and Instagram account Circular.Fashion. She is also a PhD student in apparel design at Cornell University and an expert in fabrics. On her podcast and Instagram feed, she highlights Latinas leading the sustainable fashion movement, like Carmen Gama, Head designer of Eileen Fisher's Renew line, and Maria E. Eisenberg, founder of Marimole, a textile waste recycling company based in NYC.

Xiuhtezcatl Martínez is a climate activist and hip hop artist of indigenous Mexican descent who, at 20-years-old, has already spoken multiple times at the UN's General Assembly, made the TIMES Next 100 list, and is now the director of Earth Guardians, an environmental, climate and social justice nonprofit founded by his mother in 1992.

Colombian-American Jamie Sarai Margolin founded Zero Hour, a climate crisis student-led movement, when she was only 14. "Youth don't have any hidden agendas. We're not organizing or speaking out for money. It's not our job. We're not required to take action by anyone. We are doing it because our lives depend on it. That's truly powerful and that's what makes people listen and finally create change," she wrote on an essay for Assembly, a blog under the Malala Foundation umbrella.

Faith Florez was inspired by her abuelos and parents, farmworkers who migrated from Mexico and were affected by the heat and extreme conditions of working in the fields. Her activism focuses on using technology to improve these working conditions that affect the Latinx community in particular. That led her to create Calor, an app that helps protect farmworkers through weather alerts, safety information and emergency prevention tools.

Liliana Madrigal is the co-founder of Amazon Conservation Team, a nonprofit that for 25 years has partnered with indigenous and local communities in South and Central America to protect tropical forests and their traditional cultures. Part of their work focuses on creating new protected areas, like the Alto Fragua Indi Wasi National Park, in Colombia, or Ulupuene, in Brazil.

Follow Claudia's Instagram to learn practical and cheap tips to avoid plastic, reduce waste and, as she explains on her bio, "decolonize environmental conservation and sustainability."