Angélica Salazar (she/her/ella) is an impact/outreach producer, communications strategist, cross-cultural facilitator, and popular educator.
Angélica is the founding principal of Knowmadica Consulting, a multi- faceted communications consulting agency. Facilitating work in English and Spanish, Angélica specializes in building bridges across communities and cultures to advance social justice causes. Angélica has carried out this work by drafting policy recommendations, creating high impact communications campaigns, and facilitating experiential travel programs.
Through listening and being led by frontline movements, Angélica works alongside communities to organize from the bottom-up. Her lens is informed by work and travel to over 60 plus countries. Angélica has provided a dynamic range of services to organizations, projects, and individuals for over 20 years. She has worked closely with policy makers, students, movement leaders, and educators at state, federal and international levels.
Notably, Angélica has developed an extraordinary portfolio working in advocacy efforts to normalize U.S.-Cuba relations. She made her first trip to the island in 1996 and then returned to study there in 2001.
Following graduate school in 2015, she made the bold move to Cuba after being invited to direct Witness for Peace’s Cuba Program located at the Martin Luther King Memorial Center in Havana, Cuba. In her role, she designed and facilitated dozens of educational programs for hundreds of U.S. Americans.
From 2017 up until the start of the COVID19 pandemic, she directed semester-long study abroad programs for U.S. university students in Havana both with Arcadia University in partnership with the Center for Hemispheric and United States Studies at the University of Havana and lastly, for Brown University’s Consortium for Advanced Studies Abroad at Cuba’s prestigious Casa de Las Américas.
Beyond her work over the decades on the island, she’s been on the frontlines of legislative efforts in Washington, as well as mobilizing grassroots nationally and globally.
As the daughter of one of the founding leaders of the Chicano/a/x movement in New Mexico in the 1960s, Angélica is rooted and grew up in social movement building. She started in community organizing in high school and then in 2007, she was invited to join the global movement at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya.
She has since been listening, learning and documenting narratives of global frontline communities. In 2010, she was invited by Bolivia’s ambassador to the U.N. to coordinate a U.S. delegation of EJ/Climate Justice leaders to attend the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. This experience led her to join and support coordination of frontline global delegations to COP16, Rio +20 and Standing Rock. In 2019, her social movement community invited her to design a program and co-facilitate a “It Takes Roots” delegation to Cuba, which included mostly BIPOC environmental and climate justice leaders from Turtle Island and Puerto Rico.
Her most recent grounds for organizing are in her very own ancestral lands of northern New Mexico, where she worked for NM State Senate, including on policy advocacy and uplifting environmental justice issues. She is starting an organic community farm and her goal is to build a space where global frontline and fenceline communities can gather, rest, and strategize. She also loves to laugh hard, grow food and flowers, dance cuban-style salsa and learn alongside others.
Angélica's educational background includes a B.A. in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and an MPA from CUNY, as a National Urban Fellow.
To learn more about Angélica, check out the “Once a Stranger” podcast interview with her.
