By: Grace Thorburn
Photos: Bolivar Hope
As the water continued to rise around her, flooding her beloved hometown of San Pedro Tultepec, Mexico, Xiye Bastida was just 13 years old. At the time, she remembers the flood being a once-in-a-100-year flood. For Bastida, it was a moment in which the philosophical and the spiritual connected with the real: she realized that our disconnect from earth systems was not only going to impact her town, her generation, and her country, but that it would impact the whole world.
“So that’s how it happened.” The flood she experienced in her younger years served as a preview. She remembers the river spilling over with contamination from the nearby factories supplying Mexico City and the rest of the country. “The shock of the realization that the climate crisis was manifesting itself in flooding, in contamination, in pollution, in unjust, very unjust ways in which it affected people.”
Change has always been second nature to Bastida; she was raised by two parents who met at an Earth Summit in 1992 and spent their early years together as activists. “I was so ahead in the understanding of interconnectedness, of interrelation, that my being indigenous, teaching and the upbringing of, of indigenous philosophy was a way of being.” Bastida, 23, considers herself lucky that her parents were so connected and went against the norms of their generation.
The same year of the flood, Bastida’s university professor’s parents landed a job at The Union Theological Seminary in New York City, which is one of the master’s school programs for the study of theology at Columbia University. They made history by teaching the first class ever of its kind in a theological center, ethics from an indigenous perspective. New York was where Bastida found her true calling for activism.
Migrating to a new country, learning the language, and going to a massively underfunded high school in Harlem with a 95% black and Latino population exemplified to Bastida a new perspective. “We didn’t have a science professor for five months. There were food fights, and I thought that’s what school was like. But then I realized it was this process of segregation that made certain schools underfunded over others. So that’s when my understanding of social justice and injustice started to appear.” She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Environmental Studies with a concentration in Policy.
Bastida calls herself a climate justice activist because she feels that anything else is too short to describe the work she’s doing. Her goal and pursuit is to reimagine systems so that people who are most affected by climate injustice are also part of the solution, and that they benefit from the new world they’re working to create. As one of the lead organizers of the biggest climate strikes ever in New York City, Fridays for Future, Bastida is just getting started.
“It’s such a gift to be interconnected because we don’t have to travel somewhere to see the realities… we can know the stories of our peers right through our phones. Like, I can see the floods happening in Pakistan. I can see the wildfires happening in Brazil, in Australia, and I know people there, and I can hear their stories, and we can work around that,” said Bastida. She believes that there’s a beauty to modern technology, as it has democratized the youth movement. We now know where the most unjust places are and how to come together for campaigns, said Bastida. She refers to technology as two sides of the same coin, because artificial intelligence can help us solve problems like waste management, and how to have a circular economy, but artificial intelligence also uses massive amounts of water. Bastida explained that the data centers that are being built are making companies that had net zero targets be thrown off because of artificial intelligence’s water and energy use.
“Out of all of the philanthropy in the world, two percent goes to the environment. And of that two percent, .76 percent goes to useless movements,” said Bastida. The next order of business? Funding the youth climate movement. She says that to shift climate, adaptation, and net zero goals, the UN estimates that we need $1.3 trillion. “We don’t even need the profit of the polluting companies to shift everything,” she said.
To say Bastida is just a climate justice activist would be selling her body of work up until this point, well, short. She has been recognized as a TIME 100 Next honoree, recipient of the UN Spirit Award, a Forbes Changemaker, and is currently a 776 Fellow, continuing to scale youth-led climate leadership globally. Her notable participation includes COP25, COP26, COP27, and COP28. Bastida was invited as the only youth speaker at the Biden Climate Summit in 2021, where she spoke to 40 heads of state and has spoken alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, Jane Fonda, Al Gore, fellow climate activist Greta Thunberg, the late Jane Goodall, and others.
As the founder of the Re-Earth initiative, an international youth-led organization that focuses on highlighting the intersectionality of the climate crisis. Bastida has watched the narrative shift and the climate movement be reinvigorated by thinking globally and acting locally. Re-Earth runs a program called ‘Reground Things’ that is used to fund youth in the Global South working on regeneration, protecting their ecosystems, cultural projects, storytelling movements, movement-building marches, and anything else youth are campaigning on around the world.
“If so much money is going into destruction, money should also be going into the people working on solutions. So we’re trying to redefine what it is to be part of the movement and to say that you can work on this.” The impact that youth can make from one $5,000 grant is beyond what you can imagine, said Bastida. People are able to train 200 youth a month on how to plan for tentatively, whole ocean-protected areas, and give resources for activism.
In another vein, Bastida acknowledges that her generation is not all made up of activists who want to change the world; her generation is also made up of some of the world’s biggest consumers. Bastida, on the other hand, prefers to make her clothes her own and to wear them again and again. She can be found wearing a unique jacket that represents everything that she is: one half represents her Mexican side, and one half represents her Chilean side. It has climate strike written on it, whales and mushrooms, and her organization, Re-Earth Initiative, across the front.
“If we can take all of these things that my generation cares about, like fashion, like food and make a way to make them meaningful, to connect with the deepest parts of ourselves, then we can change how people come into the movement. So that’s why the jacket is special to me…it’s a way of saying “own, own your rebelliousness, own your activism, show it to the world and make sure that you feel like standing out is good.”
As Bastida continues to do everything she can to change and share stories through running her initiative, sharing her fire with the world, she is living in Mexico City, where she says they are now seeing a 100-year flood every year. In a report that came out by UNAM, it was said that by 2030, parts of Mexico City will be uninhabitable because of the flooding. Bastida knows that the fight for the Global South is not over, that they can keep on shifting finance flows and fight for the transition globally.
Ten years from now, Bastida wants to have the “same heart, the same fire, the same hope, the same determination, the same optimism, the same energy to move things to, to empower people to change the world. I don’t want to fall into complicity, into complacency. I just feel like, you know, when you just meet somebody who has a fire, that’s who I want to be for the rest of my life.”