11 Black-Latinx-Owned Vegan Businesses to Put on Your Radar

There’s nothing quite like feeling good about the way you spend your hard-earned cash. When you buy from vegan businesses, you’re helping to spare animals harm. These vegan Black-Latinx-owned businesses offer unique products and services that you’ll feel good about purchasing:

Bomba Curls

Bomba Curls doesn’t believe in any of that “taming” nonsense. Instead, the Black-Dominicana business owner Lulu Cordero made her cruelty-free hair care products to emphasize the natural beauty of curly locks, encouraging people to embrace their authentic selves. The all-vegan brand works with lots of different hair types, from tight curls to loose waves.

Bubbly Moon Naturals

The products we lather onto our skin every day matter—especially if it’s something as important as soap. Marshalla Ramos-Inde, a Black–Puerto Rican herbalist, knew this when she created Bubbly Moon Naturals. The vegan wellness business uses all-natural ingredients to make organically fragrant soaps, lotions, and deodorant.

Cuerpa

The Black-Dominican-owned brand Cuerpa aims to empower women through holistic beauty, which is the driving force behind its luxurious vegan facial oils. The company’s website offers a rainbow-colored assortment of potions for various skin-care troubles, including dryness, skin damage, fine lines, and dark spots. The ingredients do not include synthetics, which means you’ll be quenching your skin with gentle, animal-friendly products.

Kalani and Wolf

Tired of the fashion industry’s relentless exploitation of animals and the environment, Joanis Duran created Kalani and Wolf, a vegan, sustainable accessory business. The company’s items are unique, using upcycled materials for the creation of handmade kimonos, turbans, headbands, crowns, and, more recently, fashionable face masks.

Coco Verde Vegan

Coco Verde Vegan is a Black-Dominican-owned catering business run by Cecilia Flores and her family. She was inspired to create the business after learning about the benefits of plant-based eating, and she wanted to encourage others to go vegan as well with delectable Latinx-inspired dishes. Services include catering, cooking demonstrations and classes, and a blog that offers a variety of vegan recipes and cooking tips.

Bobel Cay

Bobel Cay is a handmade and recycled clothing line from Aiyana Crump that focuses on ethical and sustainable fashion. The designer, based in Chicago and New York City, hand-makes trendy matching sets, scrunchies, and tops with love, so you can have a one-of-a-kind statement piece in your closet that’s kind to animals and the environment.

LaRayia’s Bodega

Black-Latinx activist LaRayia Gaston believes that food is love, which is the core value behind her plant-based Los Angeles store, LaRayia’s Bodega. The café and boutique offers affordable vegan meals, snacks, clothing, and gifts that are made and served with compassion. Her mission to give as many people as possible access to wholesome, plant-based food is exemplified by her business model. Each food item is offered for $5 or less, and eventually, she aims to provide homeless people and veterans with job training and employment opportunities.

A Dozen Cousins

Ibraheem Basir’s Caribbean-inspired bean company A Dozen Cousins sells packaged, ready-to-eat beans that are soulfully seasoned to perfection. They will add a kick of flavor and plant-based protein to any meal.

La Voûte

Vegan leather handbags, wallets, and clutches with a sleek and modern design—these are all the gems you can find at La Voûte, Adrienne Bailon-Houghton’s cruelty-free accessory line. The former “Cheetah Girl” is looking ahead to a brighter future in which animals aren’t sacrificed for style, and her company proves that you can be both fashion-forward and animal-friendly.

Solana Wellness

Vegan activist and herbalist Jovanka Ciares created Solana Wellness, a motivational wellness blog, to inspire others to follow more holistic lives. It offers vegan lifestyle tips, reminding people that in order to achieve the best version of yourself, you need to be kind to animals and the planet.

Woke Foods

Woke Foods is a Black-Latinx-owned co-op focusing on food justice for humans and other animals in need. Using kind donations from people in the New York City area, it provides people of color, essential workers, the elderly, former prisoners, and other vulnerable members of the community with free plant-based meals. The co-op also offers classes and workshops focused on plant-based cooking as part of its mission to raise awareness of the benefits of being vegan.

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If you want to support other intersectional businesses, check out PETA’s picks for vegan Latinx-owned brands, LGBTQ-owned brands, and Black-owned food brands.

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Georgia State Fair Misses ‘Tiger King’ Takeaway: Animals Are NOT Entertainment

Even after Tiger King revealed the sordid underbelly of breeding and exploiting tigers for profit and even though they knew about the public safety risks and the termination of Michael Todd’s exhibitor license, Georgia State Fair operators still permitted Todd to operate his cruel tiger show, All Things Wild (aka “White Tiger Discovery”). And we aren’t having it.

white tiger in an All Things Wild cage

Even through his seedy menagerie’s name, exhibitor Michael Todd proves how out of touch he is: Tigers are not “things,” and the ones he exploits for profit know nothing of the “wild.”

We’re calling on the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to investigate Todd for exhibiting tigers at another event—the Alabama State Fair—last month as well as for this month’s rash appearance in Georgia. We’ve requested that the USDA act with urgency, as exhibiting tigers across the country at crowded fairs while allowing public feedings puts these susceptible big cats at risk of contracting SARS-CoV-2.

All Things Wild guests feeding tiger meat

Despite the USDA’s physical-distancing guidelines and the fact that big cats can contract SARS-CoV-2, All Things Wild handlers at the Alabama State Fair in September failed to require that the public stay 6 feet away from tigers. They also allowed fair guests to hold tongs and feed tigers directly without wearing gloves, and there was no clear sign that the tongs were disinfected between uses.

We’re also urging the Georgia State Fair to shut down this miserable exhibit immediately and bar all cruel and dangerous wild-animal displays from future fairs. The Georgia State Fair employed Todd and his tiger exhibit despite being fully aware that his federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA) license was terminated last month—meaning that he cannot lawfully exhibit tigers—a fact that we point out in an urgent letter sent to Universal Fairs founder and President Mark Lovell. (Universal Fairs owns the Georgia State Fair.) The reason federal authorities terminated Todd’s license was because he employed disgraced animal exploiter Marcus Cook, who was cited for nearly 100 animal welfare violations—including for using a cattle prod on a tiger and keeping cubs in a trailer with urine saturating the subflooring—before Cook’s exhibitor’s license was permanently revoked. Todd has a history of racking up citations for violating the AWA, too, including for inadequately training employees and failing to have safe barriers between tigers and the public.

tiger sleeping in tiny, barren All Things Wild cage

While tigers roam up to dozens of miles a day in nature, this one and others trucked around for gigs and forced to be on display by Michael Todd and his exhibitor cohorts are given just a few feet of space.

Todd and Cook have proved they have about as much respect for the law as they do for the animals they exploit—and that’s none at all. Tigers used for displays like Todd’s are carted around the country in small, barren cages and displayed in front of rowdy crowds. They are torn away from their mothers as babies and spend their days locked in cages. It’s standard practice to use physical violence and psychological domination to force them to perform. As a result of such mistreatment, big cats and other wild animals have been known to lash out—biting, mauling, or otherwise attacking members of the public.

A tiger attacked one of Cook’s employees and severed his ear, a cub bit a woman at one of his exhibits, and tiger cubs under his “care” injured children.

By denying these big cats the opportunity to run, climb, and swim—all the things they enjoy doing in nature—Todd is knowingly causing them psychological and physical distress.

Act With Urgency, Too—Speak Out Against This Unfairness

We’ve scored multiple victories for animals exploited for state and county fairs—such as when we persuaded Los Angeles County Fair organizers not to include any wild or exotic mammals in last year’s fair. And we achieved these wins with the help of kind supporters like you. Now, we (and more importantly, tigers) need your help again: Click below to join us in urging the Georgia State Fair to do right by tigers and other animals.

Tell the Georgia State Fair to Leave Animals Alone

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Billboards Announce That ‘ThanksVegan’ Is Coming

As vegan foods are selling like hotcakes, Thanksgiving is fast morphing into “ThanksVegan”—which is being announced via a new PETA billboard that just went up near the Safeway store at the intersection of 100 Street and 115 Avenue as part of a national ad campaign that encourages everyone to give turkeys a break and celebrate this year’s holiday with a vegan feast.

ThanksVegan billboards have also recently gone up in Edmonton, Lloydminster, Lethbridge, and Red Deer—and across Canada, Sobeys, Safeway, and other grocery stores are teaming up with PETA to showcase their ready-to-roast vegan turkeys and other animal-free offerings for the increasing number of Canadians who are leaving dead birds off the menu for the holiday and every day.

“When it comes to having feelings, loving their families, and valuing their lives, turkeys are individuals, just as much as humans are,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA offers tips, recipes, and more so that everyone can have a delicious ThanksVegan meal that leaves gentle birds off the table.”

Turkeys are caring parents and spirited explorers who can live up to 10 years, but those raised for food are normally slaughtered when they’re between 12 and 26 weeks old—and millions are killed each year for Thanksgiving alone. The young birds are hung by their feet from metal shackles and dragged through an electrified bath, and they’re often still conscious when their throats are slit and they’re dumped into scalding-hot defeathering tanks.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview—offers a ThanksVegan recipe guide, which can be accessed here. For more information, please visit PETA.org.

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Urban Outfitters Will Be ‘Closed for Cruelty’ by PETA

On Tuesday, PETA activists and an “alpaca” will surround the Urban Outfitters at Downtown Commons and block the entrance as part of the group’s new international campaign demanding that all Urban Outfitters, Inc., brands—which include Anthropologie, Free People, and Urban Outfitters—stop selling alpaca fleece and anything else cruelly obtained from animals. The protesters will hold signs showing the terrified faces of exploited animals and reading, “The Face of Fashion Is Fear.”

When:    Tuesday, October 6, 12 noon

Where:    Urban Outfitters, 500 J St., Downtown Commons B-120, Sacramento

PETA launched the international campaign after Anthropologie was implicated in a first-of-its-kind PETA investigation into the alpaca industry revealing that workers at a farm in Peru tied crying alpacas to a rack, pulling their legs so hard that they nearly came out of their sockets, and left them with bloody wounds from rough shearing. The mutilated animals spit and vomited in fear.

“Urban Outfitters brands want to appeal to open-minded and progressive young people, but they’re missing the mark by selling fleece taken from animals who get beat up, cut up, and killed in the process,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “Anything forcibly taken from an animal is a product of fear, and PETA is holding Urban Outfitters to its consumer pledge of sustainability and ethics by calling on the company to sell only vegan materials, which would be easy for it to do because it already stocks them.”

PETA and its affiliates have released dozens of videos revealing that during shearing, workers hit, kick, and mutilate gentle sheep for their wool; leave sensitive goats with bloody, gaping wounds at mohair and cashmere operations; burn, electroshock, beat, and slaughter cows for leather; yank out the feathers of ducks and geese by the fistful for down; and boil silkworms alive to produce silk.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”— opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.

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Reduce Your Anxiety: See This Dog’s New Life After the Beirut Explosion (PETA Video)

A University of Leeds study shows that watching “cute” videos of animals can lower stress and anxiety, so here’s one for you.

When PETA U.K. rescuer Theodora (Theo) Iona landed in Beirut after the August 4 explosion, she soon met Arrow, an elderly, malnourished, and desperately thirsty dog who was tied up outdoors with no food or water and living in a hole that he’d dug under a metal shed in order to escape the burning hot sun. But as a new PETA video released today shows, Arrow’s life changed when Theo persuaded his owner to let her find him a new home—and what a home it is.

After providing Arrow with vaccinations and deworming and flea treatments and getting him neutered, Theo took him to his new adoptive family high in the mountains above Beirut, where he now relishes running and playing with three other dogs in a spacious yard—and where he’ll never again be chained up or miss his dinner.

“A life on the end of a chain is no life at all for any dog, and thanks to a PETA U.K. rescuer, this dear old dog has a real home at last,” says PETA Vice President Colleen O’Brien. “PETA hopes his story inspires people everywhere to speak up when they see a neglected animal—you can make a world of difference for a dog in need.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. More information about the group is available at PETA.org.

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