Isaias Hernandez grew up in Sylmar, California, a low-income neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. He tells Daily Kos that living in affordable housing, eating using food stamps, and having his home near toxic industries launched his journey into curiosity about climate and the environment. But what he found was a world of environmentalism dominated by white cisgender activists and educators who didn’t speak to the world he came from and weren’t open to his questions.
“When I was about 14 or 15 I was working with my dad, cleaning up and gardening in rich, affluent homes. That’s when I started learning about pesticides, learning how to dig, and how to create a monoculture,” Hernandez, 27, tells Daily Kos, adding that it was in high school where he first learned the term “environmental injustice” and how a zip code is the most significant indicator of whether you’re living in a toxic environment. He became determined to learn as much as he could. He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in environmental science to “change the world,” he says.
Today, Hernandez runs the Instagram account @QueerBrownVegan, aiming to educate his over 100,000 followers and counting about environmental justice, veganism, and a zero-waste lifestyle.
Hernandez says he launched the Instagram account largely because of what he realized as a student at Berkeley—in addition to being dominantly white, the world of environmental justice is also what he calls “privatized.”
“I was paying thousands of dollars to learn about food sovereignty in these private articles that most people can't even access. When in reality, the people who live in those communities, like myself, knew what environmental racism was. We knew we were being poisoned, we just didn’t have the financial resources to defend ourselves,” he says.
Hernandez says all he wants is for people to use his account to learn about the environment, climate change, and veganism in an open and diverse landscape.
“What we see in a lot of digital media spaces is often celebrities—white celebrities—and white folks at the forefront of these environmental movements. In reality, it's always been Black, Indigenous, and people of color from different cultures, countries, and areas; land defenders who are killed in different countries throughout the world. These are the people who we should be platforming,” Hernandez says.
He adds: “We should be having conversations to expand our solidarity with these folks. So I wanted to ensure that it's not so much that environmentalism is a white thing, it's that society often caters to whiteness. We have to dismantle that notion, and what better way to contribute to that narrative than by inserting myself in these conversations and to hopefully inspire those younger kids and younger students to create their own projects?”
When it comes to veganism, Hernandez frames it using what he calls “localization” and urges people to remember that the roots of this new trendy diet have a long history in Black and brown communities. He mentions the Black Panther Party, which recognized decades ago that animal exploitation and industrial agriculture were serious problems. There were a lot of Black vegans: Angela Davis, for example.
“My cultural stories, talking to my parents about what life was like in Mexico and going to the land where they grew up in the rural parts. Foraging was an essential tool for localization to understand that when we talk about the edibility or the option to eat food, it also comes from the land. I think that for a lot of Black and Indigenous communities, there's always been this understanding of animal liberation and value for sentient life,” Hernandez says.
Ultimately, Hernandez says eating a plant-based diet isn’t about being ethical, but an “extension of compassion.”
“Rather than saying I'm ethical or pure because I don’t eat animals (because I don't believe that ethicality can be achieved within this capitalistic structure), we must remember that we're still contributing to someone's oppression down the line of the supply chain,” he says.
Hernandez says it wasn’t easy growing up gay in a “homophobic household,” but he’s found peace with his parents and they with him. He relates his environmental work to his parents’ ability to learn to accept him, just as we all need to accept and cherish the world we live in.
“It’s not so much about them living this lifestyle, but it's more about that deeper sense of me being able to validate their hearts, to know that they've always been environmentalists. I think their relationship with the land was that it's not that we own it, but we're a part of it. And I think for them, moving away from the land was heartbreaking,” Hernandez says.