🇺🇸Xiuhtezcatl
Martinez

There is a Nahuatl word, tlaltikpak, that means something close to "the living Earth" — not just soil and rock, but a breathing, relational presence that human beings are woven into rather than set above. Xiuhtezcatl Martinez grew up with that word, and with the cosmology behind it. He is the son of Tamara Roske, the executive director of Earth Guardians, and was raised in the Aztec traditions of his paternal lineage. By the time Xiuhtezcatl was six years old, he had already stood before a city council in Boulder, Colorado, and asked the adults in the room to stop using pesticides in public parks. He did not use notes. He spoke from a conviction that the adults he was addressing either shared his understanding or had failed in some fundamental way to think clearly about the world.

Earth Guardians was founded in Boulder as a youth-led organization committed to environmental and social justice. Under the direction of Xiuhtezcatl's mother, it became a training ground for young activists. But no one trained Xiuhtezcatl in the conventional sense. He was the training. He testified before school boards and town councils throughout his elementary school years, making the case for cleaner parks, pesticide bans, and pollinator protection with the methodical calm of someone who understood that the science was not in question — the will was. By the time he reached his early teens, he had spoken at more public hearings than most environmental lawyers attend in a career.

In 2015, at age fifteen, he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York, delivering a speech in three languages — English, Spanish, and Nahuatl — that drew a standing ovation. The Nahuatl portion was not a performance. It was a deliberate signal: that the knowledge systems and relational ethic of Indigenous peoples are not artifacts of the past but tools for a livable future. That same year, he became a plaintiff in Juliana v. United States, a landmark constitutional lawsuit in which twenty-one young Americans argued that the federal government's promotion of fossil fuels violated their constitutional rights. The case wound through the federal courts for years, becoming one of the most consequential climate-rights legal battles in American history.

What distinguished Xiuhtezcatl from many young activists was his insistence on reaching audiences through multiple registers. He did not only testify; he rapped. His music — released under his own name — combined hip-hop production with explicit environmental and Indigenous-rights content, reaching audiences that policy papers never would. His tracks addressed oil pipelines, the Standing Rock Sioux struggle, pesticide contamination, and the disproportionate impact of environmental degradation on communities of color. He was not the first activist to use music as advocacy, but he was among the most deliberate, treating the studio as an extension of the hearing room.

In 2017, he published We Rise: The Earth Guardians Guide to Building a Movement That Restores the Planet, a book aimed at young readers that combined practical organizing advice with personal narrative and Indigenous ecological philosophy. He described his grandmother teaching him about reciprocity with the land. He described his anxiety about the future. He described what it felt like to be fifteen and speaking to world leaders who were polite enough but showed little sign of urgency. The book was not a comfort; it was a manual.

By his late teens, Xiuhtezcatl had spoken on six continents, been named one of Time magazine's Most Influential Teens, received the United Nations' Mahbub ul Haq Award for Outstanding Youth Contribution, and appeared alongside world leaders at climate forums from Paris to Bonn. He continued releasing music and organizing Earth Guardians chapters internationally. His particular contribution to the climate movement was the insistence that environmental justice and racial justice are not parallel causes but the same cause — that the communities most harmed by pollution and extraction are overwhelmingly Indigenous and communities of color, and that any serious climate politics must center those communities rather than treat them as afterthoughts.