How Youth Activist 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.