Staff

Francisca Porchas Coronado is a Mexican immigrant, Chicana, Latinx, feminist, and anti-racist organizer with over 17 years of experience in social justice movements. Francisca has worked on issues of civil rights, environmental and climate justice, criminalization, and immigration at the intersection of race and class at a local and national level.  As former Organizing Director of Puente Human Rights Movement in Phoenix she has been one of the leading voices against deportations of migrants in the country. 

In 2017,  Francisca was the recipient of the Nathan Cummings Foundation Fellowship that led her to create the Latinx Therapist Action Network. She is the co-founder and lead trainer of Resilient Strategies, a healing justice project  transforming the impact of systems on our bodies, our behaviors, and the organizations we build as a critical part of the process to liberation. Currently she produces and hosts Mijente’s La Cura Podcast on decolonizing our health and reclaiming our healing.  She has been initiated into the ancient, indigenous Yoruba tradition of IFA for over a decade and is currently a priestess in training.

Jeanette Charles, is a proud daughter of the Haitian Diaspora and German working class, born and raised in a predominantly Central American and Mexican community in Los Angeles, CA. She is a historian pursuing her PhD in the African Diaspora of Latin America and the Caribbean at UCLA (M.A. ‘19). Jeanette is also an international solidarity activist, language justice interpreter, writer/editor, and independent journalist with background in radio, television, film, and multimedia production. She was based in Latin America and the Caribbean for nearly a decade leading people-to-people exchanges, organizing human rights programs, and covering grassroots news for alternative media outlets with organizations like the Chiapas Support Committee, Witness for Peace, and teleSUR English among others. 

Jeanette is the founder of Ìyá Global, a coaching, consulting, educational travel, and media hub grounded at the crossroads of storytelling, social justice, African spirituality, and international bridge-building. She became a certified life coach in 2020 and is a graduate of Scripps College with a B.A. in Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Hugo is a sociologist and archaeologist. He studied in Mexico and most of his career has been focused on social justice issues. For Hugo, empathy and equity towards all people can make a difference in any relationship, whether professional or personal. He has collaborated with several nonprofit organizations working on issues such as human rights, migration, indigenous rights, and youth in at-risk communities in central and southern Mexico, and some other historically marginalized populations. 

Hugo has deep knowledge of the cultural frameworks, needs and challenges faced by many Latinx people in the U.S., including the complex issues related to immigration. His own immigration experience, in addition to his work with BorderLinks, Inicia, and the Kansas Rural Center, have uniquely equipped Hugo to work with migrant communities in general, and Latinx communities specifically.

In his free time, he likes to cook, travel, eat new foods, garden, and watch sunsets in a hammock at the beach. He is also a cat lover and cannot live without Tacos al Pastor and spicy peppers.

B. Millicent León is a journalist, educator, and organizer based in New York City. She has a background in audio, print and broadcast. For over a decade she has covered issues related to labor, immigration, and health. More recently, she covered topics around the economy and markets, education, and criminal justice. Her work has appeared in NPR, El Centro de Periodismo Investigativo en Puerto Rico, The World, and other publications. She is most passionate about using media tools to tell stories that accurately represent working-class communities’ resiliency, healing, and joy. She speaks English and Spanish, some French, and is learning Nahuatl, her grandmother’s native language.  

Her artistic passions include performing Danza Folklorica and contemporary dance, writing poetry, and finding time to cook.