ABOUT

MUSIC

Ceci comes from a familial lineage of singers and musicians rooted in Mexican Ranchera and music from Abya Yali. At an early age, their paternal grandmother showed them the power of song to hold and transform emotions. Ceci uses song to channel the ecological crises we are moving through and to hold a musical container for emotions of grief, anger, despair, faith, love and gratitude. Ceci writes songs for cultivating community, weaving collective liberation, climate reckoning and calling forth different worlds. Through their performances,  they create a sentient space where we can connect to our relationship with land, feel the suffering falling upon our human and more than human kin, and move into prayer, healing and action in community. 

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Ceci began composing and performing music in 2010. Ceci has performed their original work at the Brooklyn Museum, Poster House, Downtown Art;  community events including Bed-Stuy Pride, Colombia County’s Latinx Festival, Audre Lorde Project’s Tribute to Audre Lorde; and at several community gardens and farms including Soul Fire Farm, Avena Botanicals, and community gardens in Brooklyn, the Hudson Valley and Puerto Rico. They have shared their music through community radio stations in Brooklyn and Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, México to support community struggles against extractive projects. Ceci was an art resident in the Strange Foundation’s Earth 1.0 Decelerator in 2020 and a 2023 Fellow at Antenna Cloud Farm’s Experimental Institute.

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Ceci's first album, Tlalli, is forthcoming in 2024.

EARTH CARE

Ceci has a decade of experience collaborating with BIPOC-led community gardens cultivating medicinal plants, growing food and maintaining healthy compost piles.  They deepened their relationship with plants and soil through farming  apprenticeships at Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, NY, Avena Botanicals in Rockport, ME and Las Cañadas in Huatusco, Veracruz, México. Ceci has also collaborated with agroecological farmers and soil caretakers in Puerto Rico and México. Ceci is committed to cultivating medicinal and native plantitas and trees to nourish a thriving ecosystem. They carry the conviction that when we support healing our ecosystems in community, we not only create a more vibrant ecosystem that helps buffer climate impacts for all species, but we also heal our relationships to land and can develop healing, reciprocal relationships with each other and more-than-human kin.  When we weave interdependent relationships, we create a foundational fabric for healing and resilience. We receive great gifts when we remember how to belong to our ecosystem.

FACILITATION

For nearly a decade, Ceci worked in service of NYC-based nonprofits with environmental and climate justice missions. From 2017-2019 Ceci worked to strengthen community resilience to climate change through policy, community organizing and workshops at the Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES). At GOLES, Ceci worked closely with LESReady!, the Lower East Side’s disaster response and preparedness coalition, and also partnered with the Energy Democracy Alliance, NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, and NY Renews to advance policies that strengthen community climate resilience.

In 2016 Ceci began volunteering with BK ROT, a youth-powered composting project. Ceci became more deeply involved with the project over the years and became a certified NYC Master Composter. Under Ceci’s leadership as the Executive Director from 2019-2021, BK ROT expanded their composting services; launched a Youth Leaders program where youth learned about and practiced environmental and climate justice; increased wages for youth staff to a minimum of $20/hour and created more entryways for decision making and leadership among youth. In 2021, Ceci was recognized as one of GRIST’s 50 Fixers; a list honoring emerging leaders from across Turtle Island working on solutions to Earth’s biggest challenges.

Over Ceci’s time in Brooklyn, Ceci also organized within a QT*BIPOC collective against violence to our communities through community based strategies; facilitated workshops for their communities to learn about the climate crisis and build an analysis that reflected our truths and experiences; co-created spaces of connection and sharing for QT*BIPOC foodies and earth workers; and facilitated learnings of and connection to ancestral earth care practices for BIPOC communities.