Activist, speaker, author, student

Xiye Bastida is a 21 year old climate justice activist who is from the Otomi-Toltec Indigenous community located in Central Mexico. She is an organizer, author, speaker, and student who is driven to make the climate movement more inclusive and diverse.

Xiye grew up in a small town called San Pedro Tultepec. She moved to New York City in 2015 when her parents got a job at the Center for Earth Ethics. Once in New York, Xiye became heavily involved with the existing climate movement. She was in the Administration Committee of People’s Climate Movement, where she organized a two month long Activism Training Program. She attended her first United Nations climate conference in February of 2017, in which she was able to bring in Indigenous knowledge into decision making spaces. Her participation led her to win the Spirit of the UN award in 2018. Later, she started organizing with Fridays For Future NYC, for which she became one of the lead organizers. The biggest strike Xiye was involved in organizing brought together 300,000 people to the streets of NYC. In April of 2020, Xiye co-founded Re-Earth Initiative— an international youth led organization that focuses on highlighting the intersectionality of the climate crisis. Her notable participations include COP25, COP26, COP27, and COP28. Xiye was invited as the only youth speaker at the Biden Climate Summit in 2021, where she spoke to 40 heads of state. She is the opening essayist in the anthology All We Can Save, and has written numerous op-eds. She has spoken alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, Jane Fonda, Al Gore, Christiana Figueres, Greta Thunberg, Mary Robinson, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Malala, Jane Goodall, Bill McKibben, and others.

She is currently a student at the University of Pennsylvania where she is studying Environmental Studies with a concentration in Policy. Her favorite classes include Environmental Ethics, Energy and Environmental Economics, Sustainable Development and Culture in Latin America, Physics of Global Warming, Geology, and Hispanic Literature.