Cris Izaguirre
Cris is an urban farmer, educator, trans/queer immigrant, and old school jaded New Yorker with a big laugh. He is of Black, Indigenous, & spaniard/basque descent, born in Nicaragua, raised in Brooklyn during the 80s and 90s. His early experiences as an immigrant child surviving the impacts of food insecurity, poverty, and a racist public school system has driven him to investigate and challenge the role systems of oppression play in our everyday lives.
Cris has worked for LGBTQ rights and anti-violence organizations including: El/La Para Translatinas, Lambda Legal and Community United Against Violence. After many years in the nonprofit world, he sought out landwork as a way to heal from trauma and the grind culture of advocacy work. He apprenticed on the Big Island of Hawaii at Ho’oli Farm where he learned permaculture from Indigenous Hawaiian elders. He studied Ecological Horticulture at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz. After seeing the intentional erasure of Black and Indigenous people and people of color in academia’s version of organic agriculture, it became a priority for Cris to center and uplift the work of Black and Indigenous farmers and landworkers. He also believes that landwork and food hold memory and ancestral knowledge that enables communities of color to thrive.
Cris has produced and directed theater shows for and by QTBIPOC folks on the Lower East Side of New York, using art and theater as another way to address, decolonize and dissect oppression while celebrating the genius of QTBIPOC folks. Cris also co-founded Interlocking Roots (a QTBIPOC collective of farmers), helped launch the QTPOC Farmers & Foodies listserve, teaches Propogation at Farm School NYC, and enjoys co-creating spaces where queer, trans, and GNC Black and Brown folks can be their most authentic selves. He is the former Farm Manager of KCC Urban Farm in Brooklyn, where for five years he taught Black and Brown students organic agriculture from seed to harvest through a social justice lens. When Cris isn’t farming or teaching, he is quietly writing poetry.
