“A visionary, leader, mentor, teacher, guide and Shaman.”
Xuy Leyba was born in 1939 in Starkville, a small mining town near Trinidad, in the Colorado Rockies, and grew up there with two siblings. His father, a Mexican native exiled for serving as one of Pancho Villa’s bodyguards during the Mexican Revolution, died young of black lung disease from the coal mines. His mother was born in Saudi Arabia and later moved to Mexico, where she met his father. Both parents carried Toltec and Mayan tradition, which they passed on to him.
He left home as a young man for California’s agricultural heartland, where he became a farmworker organizer — working alongside Cesar Chavez to secure rights for Mexican workers. Drafted into the Vietnam War and recruited into Army Intelligence, he came home and turned to anti-war activism.
