Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez

Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez is the President of NextGen America, the country’s largest youth voting rights organization, which helped mobilize one in nine young voters across the country in the 2023 elections. Named “Hero of the New South” by Southern Living Magazine and People of the Year by Tribeza Magazine, Cristina has spent the last twenty years founding and leading some of the most creative organizations to raise wages, tackle the climate and student debt crises, and fight for immigrant rights. 

Cristina began her social justice career when she was a college student and co-founded Workers Defense Project (WDP), a workers’ rights organization with the mission to win better working conditions for immigrant workers in Texas. She built WDP from a small volunteer project into a statewide organization that was named “one of the most creative organizations for immigrant workers in the country”, by The New York Times. She helped lead the organization for over a decade, taking on two of the most powerful special interest groups in Texas – the construction and real-estate industries.  

After the 2016 election, when Cristina was 6-months pregnant, she founded Jolt — a Texas-wide organization that lifts up the voice, vote and issues impacting Latinos. Founded in 2016, Jolt seeks to win the nearly 11 million Latinos living in Texas the power and respect they deserve. Jolt’s work has reached tens of millions of Americans, mobilized thousands to action, and built the leadership of young Latinos across Texas.

Cristina is an author on issues of race, gender and immigration and was a 2020 U.S. Senate candidate. She also taught at the LBJ School of Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin.