Natalia M Villarán-Quiñones

Natalia (ella/she/her) is a Queer and Femme Afro-Caribbean, an intersectional ecowomanist, youth organizer, and artist based in Borikén aka Puerto Rico. She believes in the transformative and healing power of the community and how important it is to preserve oral and written stories and traditions. As the Community Organizer for Q4CJ and Social Media manager of the instagram account @queers4climatejustice, Natalia has opened new conversations with climate justice organizers in Borikén about inclusion of LGBTQ+ issues, organized a Q4CJ Youth Roundtable for Pride month in 2022, coordinated a cohort of 12 queer and trans organizers from PR to attend the 2023 Creating Change conference in San Francisco, and expanded the reach and relationships of the instagram account @queers4climatejustice. Natalia is a Co Director for the documentary “Can’t Stop Change” :shares stories of queer and trans resistance, resilience, and brilliance in the face of rising seas, stronger storms, and escalating state violence. Through place-based interviews across Florida, the story maps a web of entanglements between the legislative violence to our bodies and lands, and uplifts the dreams, strategies, and joy of queer, trans, and two-spirit organizers. She is also a poet, published in the anthology Puerto Rico en mi Corazón in 2019, and now celebrating her first book published in October/2022: Desamor y Memorias de una Virgo (The Heartbreak and Memories of a Virgo).
Natslia is also leding Imaginario Afrocaribeñe, a collaborative project + fund of alternative spaces that operate as small scale community resilience hubs, to create strong, accessible, sustainable, quality, and inclusive spaces for the Black, LGBTQ+ community in Borikén aka Puerto Rico. They also aim to reduce the overall impact of overdevelopment on human health and the environment, lack of spaces for planting and drinking water as well as more spaces that encourage organization and education. Our main focus is the Northeast, East and South areas of the archipelago because these lack accessible and affordable spaces that can meet community needs. Most services are being concentrated in the metropolitan areas, which creates gaps when accessing quality health services, accesible housing, reproductive health services, self care tools, among other things. For the rest of March, we will be sharing more focused content on this project! We will delve into topics like landback, education, collective governance, and more. https://opencollective.com/q4cj/projects/q4cj-in-pr