Franklin Cruz combines his passion for ecology and environmental justice with poetry and dance through his work at Americas for Conservation + Arts, a Denver-based nonprofit that seeks to create a healthy environment through advocacy, education, and engagement of culturally diverse communities. The organization advances tools and platforms that empower diverse communities to provide long-term environmental stewardship, ensuring a healthy environment for everyone.
Franklin has performed throughout the country from the Southwest region, coast to coast, as an alumni of Minor Disturbance, an internationally recognized and award-winning youth poetry slam team. He is also part of Cafe Cultura, a collective that promotes unity and healing among indigenous peoples through creative expression.
Franklin has also taught and performed at universities across Colorado, including CU Boulder, University of Northern Colorado, Colorado School of Mines, CU Denver and more. His poetry reflects on being a first generation child of immigrant parents, being a brown queer child in a heteronormative patriarchy and recalling the traditional indigenous faith of curanderismo.
In this Q&A, Franklin speaks about his current work that merges his cross-disciplinary training using poetry as advocacy for social change, scientific education/awareness and personal mental health practices.
What is your primary charge at the Americas for Conservation + The Arts?
As an outreach specialist, my job is to reach out youth communities and organizations to build partnerships. We’re trying to extend our youth outreach, as we understand the nature of inheritance and being able to pass on the work to the next generation. In my work, I help with programs focused on young people under age 18, from elementary to early college.
We are a Latina-run organization that is inclusive of all people of color. The work is amazing, because we work hard at bringing together Latinos, people of color and others to pay attention to issues concerning the environment.
I help run the Grafico Movil, which is a 1948 milk van that has been refurbished into an art piece. The outside of the van is an art installation; inside is an art gallery; and there’s an art activity attached to it.
I am also a poet, so I help incorporate poetry in programming. We will go to a site, where the kids will have an entire day being outside, learning how to fish and canoe. They will learn about eco food webs and ecosystems, and how those systems maintain and help each other.
Then, I lead a workshop where the kids learn how to translate all that they learned into a poem. So, for example, we translate into a poem the relationship between the river and the ducks, or the mechanics of threading a fishing line into a fishing hook.
What is it about environmental justice work that inspires you?
When people ask me where I’m from, I tell them I was born in Idaho, raised in Texas and polished in Denver. In Texas, that’s where I had my connection with nature, in the small town of Troup, Texas, about six hours from the border of Arkansas. The whole town’s population was 1500. I found a lot of refuge and tranquility in nature, which was something that I really needed at that time.
In college, I studied Biology and was working on a lot of arts nonprofits. I was concerned that I wasn’t going to be able to utilize my Biology degree. This work lets me do the ecological and environmental justice work with my work in the arts.
What do you enjoy most about the work?
As an organization, the fact that we are so people-of-color-centric is really impactful for me. Through history, through colonization, through a lot of various influences, people of color have become removed from nature.
Originally, we were the stewards of nature across the world. You look at Polynesian people and the way they interact with the oceans. Or African people, and the way they interact with land. Or indigenous people here in the Americas, and the way they interact with their environment.
Every single one of us has a distinct, inherited, natural connection to nature. Seeing people attempt to create reconnections is super-moving to me, because this is what we need.
How do you incorporate your arts activism into the work that you do?
It happens on a lot of different levels. We have verbal art, which is poetry. We have sound arts: singing, music, instrumentals. We have visual arts: painting and sculptures. Then we have movement arts through dance and yoga.
I’m a poet and dancer, so I am in the verbal and movement arts track. Our festival theme this year is “Water,” so I have an entire poem about water. Working with metaphors allows me to apply arts to conservation education. The poem talks about how, at a molecular level, you are water. Just the inherent metaphors that you can pull out: being fluid like water, working the path of least resistance like water, how abundant the ocean is, and how abundant your life can be.
All the oceans together during the time of Pangea formed the Panthalassa. So, understanding that if you can connect your identity to water, then you understand that everyone is water. We all make the Panthalassa all over again, just within our own bodies.
Art is entertaining. Conferences and festivals on the science of conservation focus on facts. Facts can be hard for people to grasp, and frankly, it could be a little boring. But if you can incorporate a performance, people will tend to remember the live poet or dancers. Art could help people remember and retain information.
How does your cultural background impact you work?
I’m first-generation Mexican. In my poetry, I feel like my relationship to nature comes from my Mexican background. A lot of Mexican people are rural farmers. They have inherent connection with nature, because they are working in nature all the time. Having that perspective gives me a different understanding of the language that we use. Not looking at the rain as just weather, but looking at the rain as a blessing. Looking at the ground and seeing it as a lifeless thing, but seeing it essentially as a womb, where we get our food.
I feel that’s a perspective that many people can reflect on. If you come from a family of farmers, or if you are in nature all the time, then hearing me talk about the earth as a womb, then you will understand where I come from. I mix in Spanish in my poetry, so the message is culturally relevant to anyone who understands Spanish.
It’s important to do ecology work in a culturally relevant way. My presence would be received in a much better way by Latino communities, because I am Latin. I will never try to reach out to a Black community and speak on their Black struggle, because that is not my experience. Being aware of your own cultural inheritance, and knowing what you can and cannot speak to is important.
For example, there are certain events that we go to that are women-centric. I don’t speak at those events, because I am not a woman. I am happy to just stand back and provide support for a woman of color to speak and lead.
In your experience, why is spoken word an effective medium to start the conversation about racial and ethnic identity?
Spoken word is one of the best mediums, because it’s a verbal and conversational art. With dance or visual arts, you can get an emotive feeling, but with verbal arts, I am literally formulating a sentence for you to listen to. I have to use language to get people to understand a problem.
For example, I can create an entire painting about gold mining in a town in the Amazon, and how it’s destroying the forest. If you take a photograph, the town looks alien. But it may not capture the socioeconomic factors that are at play.
In my poem, I could describe the alien landscape that you would see in a photo or painting. But I could also describe the people and the choices they had to make. They essentially had to sell out the Amazon River and the forests in order to support their families. They are contributing to the destruction of their own homes, but it’s also a matter of survival. The gold mining companies are paying them more than any other industry out there.
Capturing that contentious relationship is hard to do in dance or in a painting. Because I’m able to use the words in a performance, I can capture those dynamics in a way that the people experiencing the piece understands what’s going on.
What do you find most challenging about your work as an artist?
The hardest thing is to get people to care. Everyone understands that climate change is a real thing. People understand that racism and discrimination are real for certain people. But at some point, most people don’t want to listen or hear about problems anymore because they feel powerless.
If I can come in with a poem, and try to inspire you on some level of emotive, humanistic level, and you feel this urge to do something, that’s what I’m aiming for. That’s also the most difficult thing to achieve, because you have to move people past all their fears, doubts and concerns about being powerless, or about being politically correct.