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Cristina Jiménez

Biography

Cristina Jiménez

Cristina Jiménez is an award-winning community organizer and a leading voice in movements for social justice. She is Co-Founder and former Executive Director of United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the country. A Distinguished Lecturer at the City University of New York, Jimenez received a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship and a spot on the 2018 TIME 100 Most Influential People List. She came to the U.S from Ecuador in 1998 and grew up undocumented in Queens, N.Y.

Cristina Jiménez

Books by Cristina Jiménez

Dreaming of Home: How We Turn Fear into Pride, Power, and Real Change
by Cristina Jiménez - Memoir, Nonfiction

Cristina Jiménez’s family fights to stay afloat as Ecuador falls into a political and economic crisis. When she is 13, her parents courageously decide to seek a better life in the U.S., landing in a one-bedroom apartment in Queens, New York. With deep candor and humor, Cristina opens the door to what it’s like to grow up undocumented and the reality that being a “good” immigrant doesn’t shield you from systematic racism, danger or even the confusion of falling in love. Through personal stories and historical truth telling, Cristina invites us to acknowledge the America that never was and to imagine the America that could be when everyday people build power and fight for change. And she reminds us that home is more than a physical place on the map, offering each of us a roadmap for finding the home within even when the world around us seems to be crumbling.