Cristina Tzintzún

Biography

Cristina Tzintzún is bi-racial, her mother is from a rural farm working community in Michoacán, Mexico and her father is a white American who came to live in Mexico along with numerous other hippies in the 1960s and 1970s. Cristina Tzintzún was born and raised in the state of Ohio where her parents ran a fair-trade Mexican jewelry business. The family business required that the Tzintzun family live and travel to Mexico throughout Tzintzún’s life which gave her a unique perspective in living between U.S. and Mexico regarding the economic conditions that caused immigrant communities to migrate. Her parents were both progressive and encouraged their children to participate in various causes, especially with the Latino/a immigrant community. In High School, Cristina began organizing and working with the newly arrived Mexican immigrants in Ohio.

Background

Cristina Tzintzún began organizing with Latino immigrant workers in 2000 in Columbus, Ohio and then moved to Texas where she helped found Workers Defense Project (WDP) and served as Executive Director from 2006 until 2016.

Career

At Workers Defense Project (WDP), Cristina Tzintzún along with co-founder Emily Timm, led the organization to focus its efforts on the construction industry, the largest employer of undocumented labor in Texas. She helped spearhead the organization’s efforts to organize workers in one-of the most hostile political climates for worker and immigrant organizing in the country. Every 2.5 days a construction worker in Texas is killed on the job and one in five experience wage theft.

In 2006, Tzintzún served as the lead coordinator of immigrant mobilizations in Austin, TX on April 10 (30,000 participants, the largest public demonstration in Austin history) and May 1 (10,000 participants). May 1st was also a general strike, with the immigrant community told not to go to work, not to attend school and buy anything that day as a symbol of the economic strength of the immigrant community. It was estimated by some news reports that 60% of restaurants closed in Austin that day and 80% of construction sites.

In 2008, she helped co-found the Austin Immigrant Rights Coalition (AIRC) to bring together stakeholders across the city to advocate for the rights of immigrants.

Cristina Tzintzún helped lead the organization to pass over half a dozen local ordinances and state laws better protecting the rights of hundreds of thousands of workers by combining grassroots organizing, strategic research and smart communications strategies. She co-authored two reports on construction workers in Texas that resulted in a federal investigation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and led the agency to review 900 construction sites resulting in $2 million in fines

Cristina Tzintzún created and developed the organization’s Better Builder Program that won construction workers living wages, higher safety standards, training and on-site enforcement by Better Builder monitors against some of the largest corporations in the world . At the close of 2015, the Better Builder program had won agreements on nearly a billion worth of construction projects covering 10,000 workers. One-quarter of workers surveyed on Better Builder sites reported receiving a raise from their last job, 38% reported receiving safety training for the first-time and 30% reported receiving workers’ compensation coverage for the first time in their construction careers

Honors and awards

In 2013, Tzintzún was selected by Southern Living Magazine as one of four honorees who represent the next generation of leaders and named her as the 2013 New Hero of Civil Rights. As part of its 60th year anniversary The Texas Observer selected her as one of seven Texans who’ve helped change the state for the better.

Published Works

Cristina Tzintzún is also an author on issues of race, gender and immigration her work has appeared in the Huffington Post, The Dallas Morning News and Al Jazeera and in the following books: