Civil Rights Leader
Cristina Tzintzun Ramirez has spent the last twenty years taking on some of the most powerful special interests in her home state of Texas. Cristina is a civil rights leader and former 2020 U.S. Senate candidate. She has organized construction workers, immigrant mothers and young voters to build a government and economy that works for all of us.
Cristina has led on some of the most important issues of our time, including climate change, student debt, runaway inequality, immigration and voting rights. Her work has led to the passage of legislation at the state and local level on student debt and workers’ rights.
Today, Cristina is the Executive Director of NextGen America, the nation’s largest youth voting rights organization. NextGen has registered and mobilized millions of young people to the polls, with the goal of harnessing the power of young people to reshape the political outcome of our country – not for an election cycle but a generation.
Previously, Cristina founded two of Texas’ largest voting and civil rights organizations. She founded Jolt, a statewide organization focused on mobilizing the Latino vote, when she was six-months pregnant and in the wake of the 2016 election. Under her leadership, Jolt mobilized tens of thousands of young Latinos and developed some of the nation’s most creative strategies to engage young Latinos, like #Poderquince that supports young quinceañeras to use their sweet 15 birthdays as a platform to register and mobilize Latino voters.
Cristina launched her first non-profit, Workers Defense Project, while still an undergraduate student at UT Austin. She built WDP from a small volunteer project into a statewide organization that was named “one of the most creative organization’s for immigrant workers in the country” by The New York Times.
Cristina has been named “Hero of the New South” by Southern Living Magazine, one of Texas’ top ten changemakers by the Texas Observer. She is also a JM Kaplan Innovation Prize winner and a Roddenberry Award winner.
Cristina is an author on issues of race, gender and immigration, and she is the co-author of “Presente! Latino Immigrant Voices in the Struggle for Racial Justice” published by AK Press (2014).