For Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latine community-based organization, spirituality and environmental activism are inherently intertwined. Yeampierre grew up in New York City with a mother who shared her spiritualism with her children. She has fond memories of her mother reciting stories about the orishas and learning about their connection to nature.
During Climate Week NYC in September, Yeampierre’s face adorned bus stops throughout the city, promoting the event wearing a headwrap over her curly dark hair and statement hoop earrings.
“[People come into UPROSE] seeing me with my beads and my bracelets and how extra I am, right? But they know that I can have a really honest conversation,” she laughed over the phone.
Yeampierre practices Santeria. Some practitioners also call the faith Lukumi (or La Regla Lucumí), Santeria is derived from a pan-African spiritual practice that centers on “orishas,” deities that originate in Yoruba religions from what is now known as Nigeria, Togo, and Benin. The practice was born in Cuba after enslaved people were brought from West Africa and Yoruba spirituality mixed with Catholicism. Adjacent practices intersect, and Santeria varies across geography. For example, Candomblé is an African spirituality developed in Brazil during the nineteenth century. In Candomblé, practitioners also worship and look to the guidance of deities, or “orixas.”
When Yeampierre started her career as an lawyer and activist, she was involved in police reform and criminal justice. She began advocating for environmental justice in the late 1990s when New York City planned to expand the Gowanus Expressway—a major elevated highway through Brooklyn that spews pollution into the immediate area. UPROSE helped the community fight against that expansion.
“Some people came into the [UPROSE] office and…they were concerned because they lived under the Gowanus Expressway. They would get up in the middle of the night to see how their kids were breathing. I realized that there was nothing more fundamental than the right to breathe,” she explained. “I could see the connections between how I grew up in our belief systems and this environmental thing.”
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