Xiye Bastida Looks to Her Ancestors to Fight the Climate Crisis

Xiye Bastida’s climate activism has taken her across the globe, but there’s no place like home for the 22-year-old. She grew up in central Mexico’s highlands in San Pedro Tultepec, which rests in the Lerma Wetlands outside of Mexico City. Her Otomi-Toltec Indigenous community hugs the north side of Chimaliapan Lagoon, an ancestral body of water that helped sustain Bastida’s family over generations. Her abuelita Hermila went there to harvest mushrooms and small crayfish. Her abuelito Lucas spent his time on the water gathering tule, a long grass native to the laguna that Indigenous communities in the region use to weave baskets, bags, and figures. He wove chairs. Nothing is considered more advanced.

This portrait of the land’s abundance became especially vivid whenever Día de los Muertos arrived. The family’s cream-colored kitchen would overflow with salsas and chocolates and tamales and mole. One year, Bastida’s grandfather insisted she help him weave the ear of a little horse instead of helping her grandma prepare the holiday’s staple sweet bread. She sat there, merely seven years old, her lower back growing sore, in awe of her aging abuelito whose fingers moved with the grace that only decades of experience could provide.

These memories served as parables, laying a foundation for the young activist’s climate work. “Something that my parents taught me very early on was that our culture is only possible because of our ecosystem and our biodiversity,” Bastida tells me over a video call. “Without the lagoon, without the fish, and without the tule, we wouldn’t be who we are.”

Over the last year, however, Bastida has had to contend with the finite web of life. On November 25, 2023, her grandmother died. Less than a year later, her grandfather followed. Her community spent nine days mourning them. There were mariachis and bottomless pots of coffee. When the time came for burial, their neighbors walked with them to the cemetery. Together, they cried and sang. They chanted and clapped. “We celebrate my grandmother and grandfather, and we just tell them, ‘Thank you,’” Bastida says.

With their deaths, her grandparents left Bastida with a final lesson she brings to her advocacy: People need time to mourn a loss—but they must also be fed with love and celebration to get through it. They need balance. That’s one area where climate groups can sometimes miss the mark: Every day can feel like a loss when oil and gas companies continue to release carbon pollution. How does a movement repair to successfully surmount the next challenge? How do its leaders recharge while grieving?

Well, they can start by listening to Indigenous peoples.

“Indigenous communities who have experienced extraction, they are already rebuilding,” Bastida says. “We are not seeing the climate crisis as this big end and this big apocalypse because we have already experienced the big apocalypse. So when you’ve experienced the end already, anything that comes after that is a blessing. It’s already us persevering. It’s resiliency.”

Bastida was raised with such stories. In the fifties, her people’s worlds began to end. The Mexican government developed an exploitive water system with irrigation canals, dams, water pumps, and pipes to divert water from the Lerma watershed into urban centers. The system led to the construction of a water pipe “so big, people say a horse and a person could fit inside of it,” Bastida recalls. As a result, the lagoon her family had relied on for generations began to run dry. To ensure she had the resources to send her kids to university, Bastida’s grandmother traveled to Mexico City at 4 AM every day to sell quesadillas. Bastida’s aunts still maintain that stand. The water eventually returned, but the trauma remained. “There’s lots of new people and lots of knowledge that was lost,” Bastida says.

These cautionary tales seeded an impregnable sense of guardianship over the water throughout the community, especially in Bastida’s household. Both of her parents committed their lives to studying the community’s watershed and protecting it. Her mother, Geraldine Patrick Encina, remembers how Bastida became an official water protector in kindergarten. She kept a little ID card in her pocket that allowed her to turn off the tap for her classmates and ask them to be more mindful. “These little acts of hers came naturally,” Patrick Encina says. “She had this charisma and this initiative to take on responsibility for everything that provides life.”

When Bastida moved to New York City at thirteen years old, she had to adapt to new languages and foods, to reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at school every day, and to a new competitive environment—but that culture shock seeded the fruits she now bears. “That way of standing in the world that Xiye thought was natural in everyone, she realized soon that it was not the case,” her mother says, “but that she could instill this sensibility in other people that we should care and that nobody’s going to come and do that for them.”

And so she did. The next year, Bastida joined her high school’s environmental club. She testified at New York’s City Hall to demand the declaration of a climate emergency. By fifteen, she was speaking before the United Nations in Malaysia. She organized a climate strike. All before turning eighteen. “If I got the popular kids at my school to strike, anything was possible,” Bastida laughs. Her dedication was driven by her culture, which taught her that every single element in nature is a being. “That’s how I taught her to see the world,” Patrick Encina says.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Bastida co-founded her nonprofit Re-Earth Initiative to create an inclusive and accessible space for frontline young people like herself. She has since been busy with her studies at the University of Pennsylvania, but she’s finally finished. Now, she’s returned home to Mexico. “I was always supposed to return,” she says. “I feel a duty to my land and the fight in Latin America.” She’s ready to focus on her nonprofit, which redistributes funding to frontline communities across the globe. Lately, the organization has been experimenting with documentaries. Bastida sees storytelling as an avenue to engage new audiences in the environmental cause. “We become so attached to our echo chamber, we forget that there’s over a billion people on the Earth who have never heard the words ‘climate change’ at all,” she says.

She’s working on several film projects she hopes will captivate the interest of people who don’t yet know much about climate change. The Way of the Whale, which she’s executive producing, follows the five-thousand-mile-long migration of gray whales in the Pacific Ocean—and the threats these gentle giants face. Bastida joins the whales on their journey, visiting with scientists and advocates from Baja California to Alaska. The film will premiere next year.

Francisco Campos-Lopez Benyunes, the documentary’s director and writer, knew Bastida was special from their very first conversation. “It impressed me, that amount of wisdom and ability to communicate,” he says. She spent about a year, on and off, on the road for the project. “We put her through all sorts of climates and glaciers and deserts,” Campos-Lopez says. But Bastida knows how to handle herself. “She’s a force of nature,” the director adds. “She’s an absolute storm of energy.”

She doesn’t rush. She listens—to whatever is calling out to her.

These days, her heart seeks the voices of her ancestors. She knows they’ll guide her as she takes on the climate crisis. And when she can’t hear them, she turns to ceremony and ritual. She’s learning to weave belts for traditional dresses. And she’s practicing how to bake the sweet bread her abuelita used to share every Día de los Muertos.

Bastida’s Otomi-Toltec practices instilled in her an intrinsic love for the natural world, but she doesn’t do this for her community alone. No, she mobilizes for all the people of the world. She wants everyone to join her in this struggle. “This is your world, too,” she says. “This is your Earth, too.”