Language(s) spoken: English – fluent, Spanish – conversant
Cristina Dominguez
Executive Director, La Semilla Food CenterBiography
Cristina Dominguez (she/her/ella) is a co-founder and Executive Director of La Semilla Food Center in the Paso del Norte region of southern New Mexico and El Paso, Texas. Cristina oversaw the transition of 12 acres of farmland into La Semilla Community Farm, an education and demonstration farm guided by agroecology principles. Cristina serves as Co-PD for La Semilla’s USDA BFRDP supported farmer training program “Training Agroecological Farmers for a Hotter, Drier Future in the Chihuahuan Desert: Increasing Representation & Opportunity.”
Led by Chicane and mixed-race women, femmes, and non-binary folks, La Semilla seeks to transform the food system away from an oppressive, extractive, and environmentally detrimental system into one co-created by community, grounded in human rights, biodiversity, and healing of soil and people by addressing root causes of inequity at multiple levels. La Semilla is a hybrid organization of frontline, land-based programs and systems-shifting policy and narrative change programs.
Cristina serves on the HEAL Food Alliance Steering Council. She studied ecological horticulture at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California- Santa Cruz. Prior to La Semilla, Cristina worked for Heifer International. She is a native of the El Paso frontera and attended St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, TX. Cristina and La Semilla have been profiled in Ecoliterate: How Educators Are Cultivating Emotional, Social, and Ecological Intelligence and The Color of Food: Stories of Race, Resilience and Farming.