How Xiye Bastida Became a Leader in the Climate Fight

At President Biden’s Leaders Summit on Climate last April, 40 virtual squares pop up on a screen, showing an array of presidents and prime ministers flanked by brightly colored flags. The focus shifts as each leader delivers the technical language of energy transitions and emissions targets mixed with universalist platitudes. There’s a dissonance to the proceedings: warnings of blood-chilling disasters—fires, floods, drought and crop failure, ecosystem collapse—delivered with globalist detachment. Then, halfway through the presentation, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken introduces a teen climate activist. Like everyone else, she is straight-faced. But her words vibrate with anger, fear, desperation. She tells the leaders that they are in denial. They’re talking about cutting back on coal and gas and oil. “You need to accept that the era of fossil fuels is over,” she says. Then she makes her most searing indictment. “The people here are mostly from the Global North,” she tells the leaders. “The systems that uphold the climate crisis rely on the existence of sacrifice zones.” She means that wealthy nations have picked out certain groups to bear the consequences of their pollution: poor countries in the Southern Hemisphere, Black and brown neighborhoods in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

The phrase youth climate activist tends to be synonymous with one person: Greta Thunberg, the teenager who began striking outside the Swedish parliament in 2018, sparking a global movement. But Thunberg has never acted alone. This Leaders Summit speech was delivered by Xiye Bastida, a 19-year-old member of the Indigenous Mexican Otomi-Toltec people, who has lived in New York City since she was 13. It was in her home country that her words went most viral, especially among a younger generation who appreciated the contrast she drew with the Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who’d used the summit to boast about his plans to extract more oil. Afterward, Bastida tweeted a link to her speech, noting that the Mexican president “lacked ambition.” The writer and climate activist Bill McKibben chimed in, “Might be a good idea to put [her] in charge of a continent or two.”

Bastida got so many calls that her phone crashed. She deleted WhatsApp. “Now,” she says, “I roast in Mexico.”

Bastida taught herself English in middle school and doesn’t always get every idiom. “You mean you...blew up?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says, laughing. “I blew up in Mexico.”

We are in her dorm, a residential tower at the University of Pennsylvania, where she leads a double life as a college sophomore, majoring in environmental studies with a concentration in policy. (Penn Today ran a feature calling her “the climate girl” on campus.) She does most of her reading on the Megabus, shuttling to New York for planning sessions with other activists, speaking engagements, and photo shoots. That sounds hard, I tell her. “It’s actually really therapeutic,” she says. “It’s a double-decker, so I go up on the top, in front, and I have this amazing view.”

Seated on a standard-issue dorm sofa, she’s wearing her long black hair in a high ponytail, a blue cable-knit sweater, and white straight-leg jeans that I recognize from her appearance in a Levi’s campaign. Talking to her, I’m struck by both sides of her personality: In person, she is very much the soulful activist who delivered that harrowing speech in April. But Bastida is also a chatty 19-year-old who talks excitedly about her classes—every teacher’s dream. “It was really hard for me, because I love being in the classroom,” she says of remote schooling during COVID. “I love participating. I love when the wheels turn in my brain, and my professor says, ‘The class is better because you guys are here.’ ”

Her shelves are full of fiction (One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) as well as history books on the labor and Civil Rights movements. In her coursework, Bastida is gathering lessons from the past, and has been struck by how many of the concepts that her generation is currently abuzz about—Indigenous wisdom, environmental justice—were first raised years ago, in academia. “It’s crazy how long it takes for these ideas to reach the public,” she says. As an activist, she sees her role as “bridging the gap, so that knowledge can be embedded in mass movements.”

It’s hard to pinpoint when climate change stopped seeming like a distant threat that Al Gore was warning us about and became a frightening part of daily life. Certainly by last summer, we were in the thick of it. The scary-weather news came so fast you could barely keep track: floods in China and Germany, a heat wave in Canada that reached 121 degrees. Hurricanes on the East Coast, droughts and fires out West, flash flooding in Tennessee. But by the fall, a darkly familiar pattern had taken hold in Washington, D.C. Biden’s most ambitious measures were being thwarted by West Virginia’s Joe Manchin—who, with his Exxon connections and his multimillion-dollar family coal business, seemed to be the human personification of the fossil fuel industry. It would seem like a moment for despair—if not for the youth climate movement, and especially young people like Bastida, who have managed to clarify the moral stakes of the crisis and bring it into the mainstream.

Part of Bastida’s authority comes from her life story. She grew up in San Pedro Tultepec, a small town southwest of Mexico City, until her family moved northward in the wake of a series of climate-related disasters: first, a multiyear drought—crops failed, food prices spiked—followed by days of torrential rain. Without adequate drainage systems, “our street was a river of water,” Bastida says. “Brown, brown, brown water.” In news reports, she’s sometimes described as a climate refugee—but that’s not technically true. Her parents are both environmentalists. Her father, Mindahi, is a leader of the Indigenous community in the region, and has campaigned to preserve its wetlands. Her mother, Geraldine, is an ethno-ecologist. (They met at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, where nations signed the first framework agreement on climate change.) When the floods struck, they were already planning to move to New York City, to take jobs at the Center for Earth Ethics, a program founded by Gore’s daughter Karenna Gore, at Union Theological Seminary, in Harlem.

The family arrived in the fall of 2015 and squeezed into a cozy two-bedroom apartment provided by the seminary. Xiye shared a room with her brother, Danzaki, who was 10 at the time, and her parents enrolled her in a public middle school on 130th Street—a big adjustment, Geraldine told me. In Mexico, Xiye had been a star student. She loved school and was passionate about animals. “She was so full of energy,” Geraldine said. But in New York, she struggled with the language, and had a hard time navigating her social world. Many of the students seemed resentful and disengaged. Then, in class, she learned about the United States’ history of slavery and racial discrimination—and became aware that New York had one of the most segregated school systems in the country, with institutions like hers woefully underfunded. “There was not one white person in my whole school,” she tells me. “It sounds very naive now, but the idea that because of who you are, the color of your skin, you can be discriminated against, was totally shocking to me.”

Bastida put herself through a self-imposed English boot camp—listening to music in English, watching Hollywood movies on repeat. “I was basically forcing my brain to learn,” she says—and gradually, school got easier. By the end of her eighth-grade year, she was valedictorian and class president, and she won admission to Beacon, a selective public high school in Hell’s Kitchen. In Mexico, she’d dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, but, Geraldine told me, Xiye’s thinking expanded once she arrived in New York. “I think she was realizing that she could do something to help animals and nature on a larger scale.”

She got the chance during her sophomore year, when Mindahi was invited to speak at the World Urban Forum in Malaysia. He couldn’t make it, but he asked the organizers if his 15-year-old daughter could go in his place. Surprisingly, they said yes. In February of 2018, Bastida found herself onstage in Kuala Lumpur, part of a panel of experts in sustainable development. “This whole time I’m thinking, What do I say?” she remembers. In the end she decided to tell a story from her childhood in Mexico, about officials at the university where her mother taught deciding to build a new building at the edge of a wetland—against the advice of the Indigenous community. “The community was like, ‘This is a wetland. The building is going to sink.’ ” The university proceeded anyway, hiring engineers, conducting tests, and deciding, wrongly, that it was safe to build. “Every place has its own story, its own people,” Bastida says. “So you have to ask them before you build.” This was a lesson she’d heard her father repeat many times, but it seemed to land differently coming from a 15-year-old. It was a breakthrough moment: “I realized that my voice, as a young person, is important, and people hear it.”

When she returned to New York, she joined Beacon’s ecology club, which was busy doing what most high school ecology clubs do: developing the school’s recycling program, screening documentaries, swapping vegan snacks. Bastida was convinced they could do more. She applied for a leadership position. “I got everyone together and was like, ‘Okay, we’re going to start lobbying in Albany.’ ” Environmentalists in New York State were working to pass the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, one of the world’s most ambitious climate laws. Bastida’s club took a bus to Albany, met with legislators, testified at hearings, and held rallies at the statehouse. “I remember one day, we were chanting and singing in the bus, and it felt like camp,” she recalls. “It just changed the way we saw our role. We could change our city, we could change our state, we could change the education system.” Marilyn Vasta, who is on the steering committee for New York Renews, the coalition of groups behind the law, told me that Bastida stood out immediately from other youth activists. “She’s incredibly charismatic, and she was quite fearless.” She was especially good in front of a camera. Some people seem a little too drawn to it, but, Vasta recalls, Bastida remained focused on the goal. “She neither pushed herself forward, nor did she shy away from it in any way.”

By 2019, Bastida started to feel disillusioned by her lobbying efforts. (The New York climate bill eventually passed, but state officials have still failed to put it into action or allocate funding.) “It was like, What are we actually getting out of talking to politicians, if they’re not doing anything?” Around that time, the world was taking note of Greta Thunberg’s climate strike outside of the Swedish parliament, and Bastida was electrified by her example. “Since our civic duty, as students, is to go to school, the only way we’re going to get adults to pay attention to us is by disrupting our civic duty,” she says. She organized a walkout at Beacon, which involved reassuring her principal that the action wouldn’t generate bad press. In the end, she managed to persuade 600 students to strike. They stormed into Columbus Circle, stopping traffic and holding a banner that said BEACON 4 CLIMATE. More strikes followed: marches to the Museum of Natural History, a die-in in Times Square as part of a coalition called Fridays for Future. Swiping through photos on her phone, she says how amazing it felt. “I’ve never felt so in charge of our own destiny.”

That summer, Thunberg sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to give a speech to the United Nations General Assembly. In August, Bastida, along with another climate activist, Alexandria Villaseñor, who was then only 13, were chosen to meet her when she disembarked. As Bastida describes the whirlwind of attention that followed, one moment stands out: She and Villaseñor were in Washington, D.C., for a panel discussion, when she checked her Instagram account. There was a blue check mark by her name. “And then my friends started calling me: ‘Xiye, Xiye, you just got verified!’ ” From that point, her followers grew by the tens of thousands. It was another lesson. “A lot of times people think that you need a platform first to enact change, but that’s not true,” she says. She started to think about how to distinguish her message from Greta’s. “It’s just the emphasis on the people who are the most affected,” she says. “And also on voices that are not being heard because you’re not inviting them to decision-making tables. So diversity, inclusion, all of the things that Greta wasn’t representing because she couldn’t represent them. But then obviously, she was very well aware about that—and her presence brought all of this attention on us.”

Bastida also wanted to bring an element of positivity to the discourse. “At the time, Greta’s famous speech was ‘Our House Is On Fire.’ The message was, ‘Adults are destroying the planet and our future. We, as youth, have to rise against you.’ And my thinking is, like, Yes, all of that is true. But every single person in a position of influence is an adult.” So she tried to talk about collaboration, and intergenerational solidarity—learning from her parents and grandparents. “We got people’s attention, and now we need to make this into a sustained thing where the adults won’t be like, ‘Oh, shut up. You’re just yelling at us. We’re not listening to you!’ ”

I ask Bastida to show me around her dorm room, which is cheerful and girly. There is a blue Penn pennant on the wall, and Polaroid pictures of friends and family, which she’s hung from a string with clothespins. The bed is made, with a heart-shaped pillow and a red polka-dot pillowcase—all ethically sourced cotton, of course. “I did a lot of research on it,” Bastida says. Like many activists in her generation, she scoffs at the notion, common in my youth, that individuals can head off environmental catastrophe by doing little things like recycling and changing our light bulbs. (“We should just ban plastic entirely,” she says.) Nevertheless, she’s put herself in charge of the dorm room’s recycling. Bastida’s roommate Sri Narayanamoorthy tells me that Bastida does this cheerfully. “She leaves Post-its next to the recycling, saying, ‘Remember, you can’t recycle soft plastic!’ And there’s one next to the bathroom light switch that says, ‘Turn me off!’ ”

Bastida’s roommates are all environmentalists in a Gen Z way. Narayanamoorthy is a student at Wharton, Penn’s business school, studying sustainability retail—specifically, the clothing industry. “My focus is on extending the garment life cycle,” she says. And in her spare time, she makes clothes from reused fabric. She was working on a tongue-in-cheek Halloween costume for Bastida: “hot earth.” Narayanamoorthy shows me a sketch: a chic blue minidress, with green continents licked by flames. “I’m thinking the base material is probably going to be denim,” she says. “Xiye recently worked with Reformation, and they do a great denim minidress.”

Bastida used to be wary of corporate partnerships. “I always thought, Oh, companies are so evil, they’re literally destroying the planet. But it’s not like in the future we just can’t have companies, or the economy.” So she tries to support the ones that seem to be successfully changing their business practices. She asks for their sustainability plans, and tries to assess whether their executives seem genuinely committed to action. Still, she says, “It’s a very fine line, and I feel like I cross it sometimes.” She mentions taking part in a Nike campaign last year, for instance, confessing that she didn’t think about their association with sweatshops until someone commented on Instagram. “I looked it up, and it was, like, 30 years ago,” she says. But she regretted it all the same.

Her other roommate is studying to be a vet. “She’s living my dream,” Bastida jokes. “I had it all worked out, when I was six or seven. I was going to learn French, become a veterinarian, and then move to Paris, open up a boutique-slash-veterinary clinic.” (The boutique would sell dog clothes.) I ask if she has regrets about the road she’s going down. “It’s not that I’m unfulfilled by my choice,” she responds. “But I’m always asking the question every activist asks themselves, which is, ‘What would we be doing if we didn’t have to deal with injustices?’ ” It might be a generational question. “Our potential is not realized because we are fixing things that are broken.”

In September, I went to see Bastida speak at a Fridays For Future march in New York City, where crowds of people filled Battery Park. It was a gorgeous warm evening, and the sun cast a golden glow across the lawn. Bastida talked about the beauty of the world she’s fighting to save, and delivered a warning “for world leaders and industries” about what they can expect from the youth climate movement: “We will not stop striking, mobilizing, studying, and challenging your actions.” Afterward, two budding climate activists approached her for a picture. They told her that they were in middle school. And Bastida got nostalgic. “I got to New York when I was in eighth grade,” she told them. “Time goes by so fast.”

She mingled with the other speakers, and the air was filled with youth-activist-speak: “What’s your org?” “How long have you been with Zero Hour?” “Are you going to COP?” That was a reference to the U.N. summit in Glasgow. Bastida was going, and she had one extra ticket, which she’d gotten from the TED organization. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said. She’d decided to give it to Ayisha Siddiqa, a 21-year-old Pakistani climate activist who was at the event. The group she cofounded is called Polluters Out, which works to exclude fossil fuel companies from climate negotiations. Oil companies are all over environmental events as sponsors—as are the banks and insurance companies that finance their operations. Bastida struggles with how to respond. “Sometimes I think that polluters have to pay. They caused this crisis, and they have to pay for the solution.” But, she says, “There’s also guilt.” It’s hard to remain pure when you work on climate change. “Everything is tied to fossil fuels in some way,” she says. “It’s hard to be part of the solution without touching any of this.”

That points to the intractability of the problem. It’s inspiring that Bastida’s parents met in the climate movement—but it’s also ominous. The world has known about climate change since the middle of the last century. COP-like gatherings have been happening for 30 years, and emissions keep going up. When I asked Bastida’s mother, Geraldine, if she worries about how her daughter will handle the prospect of failure, she told me, “We have not taught our children that life is about success in that way. It’s not about winning. It’s about doing the best you can.”

Bastida seems more optimistic. She draws on her readings of history. “Often people were starting to mobilize long before anything happened. In the Civil Rights Movement, people started organizing in the 1930s.” This movement could be the same. “I imagine it being written in history books: ‘It started in 2019 with 600 kids or 5,000 kids in New York. Then there were 300,000.’ Then I want to read 2021, 2022, 2023, it was millions and millions of people around the world.” She went on, “When you think about it in a historical framework, I think we’re actually moving really fast.”