Cristina Jiménez

Cristina Jiménez is Executive Director & Co-founder of United We Dream (UWD), the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the country. Originally from Ecuador, she came to the U.S. with her family at the age of 13, attending high school and college as an undocumented student. She has been organizing in immigrant communities for over a decade and was part of UWD’s campaign team that led to the historic victory of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017. At the Mesa, she worked on her memoir, a story of a young immigrant woman of color as she finds her power to open new horizons for millions of young people nationwide.

In the spring of 2020, she’s been vocal about how the pandemic has exposed the lack of a safety net and is disproportionately affecting Latinos, and is quoted in this April New York Times article.