Taína Diaz-Reyes

Taína (she/they) is an Indigenous (Taíno/Huichol/Maya) Latina dreaming with communities about food sovereignty, liberation, debordering, and climate justice. She is a PhD candidate in the School of Sustainability and serves a Senior Global Futures Scientist in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory (GFL) - a title she was awarded as a first year PhD student thanks to her work alongside Dr. Melissa Nelson in developing GFL's Indigenous Knowledges Focal Area.

A “Sonoran Desert evangelist,” she encourages others to see deserts for what they are: devastatingly beautiful and bioculturally diverse landscapes. Her doctoral research involves the future of Indigenous food sovereignties in the US-Mexico borderlands, specifically across the Sonoran Desert region of Arizona/Northwestern Mexico. Much of this work involves tracing the relationships between humans and other-than-human beings as they adapted in interdependence, resulting in tremendous biodiversity and intimacies between people and place. Desert communities thrived because of these relationships, so she works to demonstrate how we can imagine thriving Indigenous futures as we reclaim our ancestral foodways and knowledges regarding the abundance of the landscape. Their hope is to continue doing research in the spirit of decolonizing foodways. 

She includes community advocacy and engagement in her scholarship to pursue a more sustainable connection to the Earth and each other, often through writing, short films, poetry, and mixed media art. Passionate about connecting communities through research and writing on food, justice, climate, and spirituality, she has the long-term goal of working with global desert communities to learn how ancestral food traditions, relationships to land, and TEK can help communities living in desert ecologies build and maintain food sovereignty in the places most vulnerable to climate change.