Claudia De la Cruz is a mother, popular educator, community organizer and theologian. Being at the nexus of many different projects, organizations and social movements, Claudia connects different groups of people to link and merge struggles together in the overarching fight for justice.
Born in the South Bronx to immigrant parents from the Dominican Republic, she was nourished by the Black and Caribbean working class communities of the Bronx and Washington Heights in the 1980s and 90s. At an early age, she was already questioning the conditions of poverty, violence, and oppression in her neighborhood, and what she saw and experienced served as her first entry point to understanding working class consciousness.
When she was 13, Claudia began her political organizing work at her home church—Iglesia Episcopal Santa Maria (later the Iglesia San Romero de Las Américas–UCC), grounding her work on principles of liberation theology. She actively participated in campaigns to free political prisoners; to get the U.S. Navy out of Vieques, Puerto Rico; to end the U.S. blockade against Cuba; for the freedom of Palestine; against police terror—to name a few. In high school, she became a peer educator, conducting workshops on reproductive health and safe sex at community hubs and progressive churches, particularly for youth in the Bronx. It was through this work and her experiences as a working class Black Caribbean young woman that she understood there was only one solution to our collective problems: to fight for a better future, a socialist future.
She traveled to Cuba for the first time at the age of 17 during the Special Period of extreme economic hardship, and the resilience, conviction, and revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people transformed her. Seeing their resistance reaffirmed her commitment to fight for a world free from the domination of Washington and Wall Street.
As a young woman, she was exposed to many other communities in struggle from around the world: from the Puerto Rican independence movement, the Palestinian struggle, and the communities of exiles from Chile and Colombia; to the solidarity struggles with Haiti, peasant struggles in Brazil, and the grassroots leaders from Venezuela organizing the Bolivarian Circles; to Black liberation struggles, the progressive and leftist Dominican community. Seeing people from all over the world standing up for their dignity and sovereignty only fortified her commitment to build international solidarity and political organization inside the United States.
