Dr. Jessica Hernandez recalls the papaya trees that once shaded her grandmother’s yard in El Salvador. How they grew stubbornly from tough soil, and how the fruit always appeared to find a way. It’s an image that lingers throughout her latest book, Growing Papaya Trees, a sprawling examination of Indigenous displacement in the Americas that refuses to separate intellect from lived experience.

Throughout Growing Papaya Trees, Hernandez—a Maya Ch’orti’ and Binnizá environmental scientist—argues that the climate crisis can only be addressed by embracing Indigenous science and leadership, rooted as it is in deep, reciprocal relationships with the land. Yet, while Indigenous knowledge offers vital insights into climate change’s causes and potential solutions, Indigenous peoples are being displaced at record rates as climate change accelerates—entire communities uprooted by the same forces they long warned about.

“You are exponentially closer to being a climate refugee than a billionaire,” she writes, highlighting the stark inequalities that climate change exacerbates. She goes further, arguing that the term “immigrant” oversimplifies and dehumanizes people from the Global South, stripping away their complex identities and histories. This dehumanization, she contends, is directly tied to the displacement and forced migration of Indigenous communities.

Across the six chapters comprising Growing Papaya Trees, Hernandez examines the paradoxes displacing Indigenous communities caught between climate and economic crises. She highlights examples like the Paiute in Nevada, whose waterways are threatened by a Bureau-of-Land-Management–approved lithium mine that also promises local revenue; and former Indigenous Oaxacan farmers, including members of Hernandez’s own maternal lineage, who have been forced into climate refugee status in the U.S. due to drought in their homeland.

Dr. Hernandez sits down with Atmos to discuss why connecting climate justice to every struggle against war, genocide, and displacement is more urgent than ever.

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