Shengxiao Yu, whose nickname is Sole, is a community advocate and social justice educator.

 

Sole's life has been deeply influenced by her experience with and love for languages. Immigrating to the United States at age 12 as a monolingual Mandarin Chinese speaker, Sole faced many difficulties while attempting to navigate through the complexity of an ELL program and the even more complex social world of pre-teens. Through her young eyes, Sole saw languages as barriers that stood in the way of human connections. It wasn’t until studying Spanish and Latin American history in high school that her views of language were profoundly changed from barriers to bridges – bridges into the richness of cultures and human experiences.

 

Sole has traveled extensively in Latin America and Spain and worked with grassroots communities and NGOs in Peru and Costa Rica. She has been an advocate for immigrant rights in Chicago providing legal services to unaccompanied immigrant children from Central America, Asia, and beyond.

 

Sole has worked with a variety of groups to tailor social justice education curricula, including community organizers, nonprofit professionals, educators, and beyond. Informed and inspired by the work of indigenous activists, grassroots community leaders, and all the intersectional movement ancestors who have come before her, Sole’s work is grounded in an historical understanding of social injustices at the systemic level, and believes that true, lasting social change will only come from actions that dismantle systems of injustice and work toward collective liberation. Sole is a first generation (technically generation 1.5) Chinese American and currently lives in Los Angeles.