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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 the 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 US from Ecuador in 1998 and grew up undocumented in Queens, NY.

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 fought to stay afloat as Ecuador fell into a political and economic crisis. When she was 13, her family came to the US seeking a better life, landing in an overcrowded one-bedroom apartment in Queens, New York. Cristina lived in fear of deportation and ashamed of being undocumented, but eventually she discovered she was not alone. She made it into college when students and advocates won a change in the law, allowing undocumented students to access higher education. She was proud to be the first one in her family to go to college, but she felt out of place until she met professors and student activists who opened a new world where she found her calling within a community of social justice organizers.