‘Luz At Midnight’: Marisol Cortez Speaks Activism in Latest Release

January 31, 2021 - San Antonio

By: Valeria Torrealba - Senior Reporter, San Antonio Sentinel

Digging deep into the roots of her own climate activism history and upbringing in San Antonio, Marisol Cortez tells the story of an alternate present that encapsulates the climate change crisis, drawing back the curtains of the reality surrounding higher political powers and the ongoing struggle to rally for significant, evergreen change — all executed through a coincidental encounter that sparks a love story in ‘Luz At Midnight’. 

Cortez’s novel showcases the crisis of ditching fossil fuels for a new form of rare earth mineral, all while challenging the hierarchy and trenches of politics and activism. Officially donned as San Antonio’s first “rare-earth cli-fi love story” by Deceleration News, Cortez’s work leaves each reader with ever-pressing questions around fate, love, agency and the universe itself. 

“I’ve been an organizer and an activist around environmental and climate justice work in San Antonio — and other places [since] my college years,” Cortez said. “A lot of the story — the sub-plot in the book that deals with activism — is based on a lot of different struggles that I have intimately been a part of. I wanted to use the story to build an understanding for the reader and for myself of the anatomy and the logic of all of those different struggles.”

‘Luz At Midnight’ alludes heavily to the political climate in the U.S. With many empty promises and a cry for significant actions that fully acknowledge climate change across the nation, Cortez portrays the story of navigating through the rocky waters that politics are, leaving readers with the intention to question the political structures they are surrounded by in their local towns.

“Why do we see certain outcomes again and again whatever the issue is? Whether it’s water, whether it’s land use, whether it’s development, whether it’s housing, whether it’s fracking, nukes — we kind of see the same dynamics play out again and again,” Cortez said. “So, I made something up. That’s the fun part of fiction, right? I imagined a near-future or alternate present where the federal government did come around and say ‘Let’s transition really quickly off of fossil fuels.’ Given what we know about how environmental fights have played out in the past in San Antonio, you know, what would that really look like?”

San Antonio has a history of heavy activism regarding climate change. In October of 2019, action was taken in favor of these efforts, with the city implementing the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan (CAAP.) after two years of protests. Cortez portrays the inner workings of activism and demonstrates all of the cogs in motion through the story’s main character, Citlali Sanchez-O’Connor. 

“The internal dynamics of those fights are the same, because you’re not fundamentally trying to change the underlying thinking or the logic that has produced the problem of climate change to begin with,” Cortez said. “I guess I was really trying to wrap my head around what I saw when I did a lot of climate organizing here in the city. There’s this idea that it’s going to be just a technological change and we’re not really gonna have to get at the deeper structures [whether it be] economically or socially that are leading to climate change. We can leave those intact, it’s just this technological swap that has to happen.”

Throughout her novel, Cortez mixes the fiction, cli-fi, romance and non-fiction genres into a blend that provides thoughtful and remarkable characters throughout the story. She utilizes this combination to guide her through the pressing questions in her life, carving the answers within her own world with her own words. 

“There’s a lot of the elements of the book that are autobiographical, and then there’s a lot of stuff that I just made up. It’s all kind of mixed together. The fun thing about fiction is that I can take those parts of my own experience and amplify them or isolate them, and really problematize them,” Cortez said. “Lali, the figure of the academic, is somebody who’s grand motivation is to make everything fit into a unifying theory that’s going to explain everything. That’s her flaw as a character, because she realizes that there is a lot of stuff you can never anticipate in your life. There’s a lot of stuff that can’t be explained, and there’s the persistence of just the everyday mysteriousness of our comings and goings and crossings and partings. She’s me, but she’s also an invention that allows me to think through things that I don’t understand.”

Cortez mimics the challenges that the book poses back to her own personal experiences regarding activism in San Antonio. A city that has given her comfort and a place to call home, she finds the book alluding to her own history with the city and rallying for climate change. 

“I’m from here originally, but I also have this kind of weird relationship with San Antonio. Constantly over my life I’ve felt like I was either uprooted or torn from the city or had to move out. I’d come back, I’d leave, I’d come back and I’d leave — and then eventually I came back to stay, because this is what feels like home to me,” Cortez said. “But I started writing the book when I was in this period of life where I had gone back home after my older child was born, and had lived there for a couple of years. I went back really deeply into community organizing while I was looking for an academic job. I started the book when I was [working] in Kansas. A lot of what impelled the story was my own longing for home, which was a political longing, a longing to understand what makes San Antonio run the way that it runs. There was a lot that felt unfinished for me as an organizer, my understanding of where all of the forces at work that are thriving environmental justice in the city, and how can we respond to it?”

Throughout ‘Luz At Midnight’ , Cortez eloquently paints scenarios the protagonists are faced with. With a “longing for home” and wish to “understand colonial ecologies” back in San Antonio, Cortez honored her beloved city through a story riddled with vignettes that her world was surrounded by.

“Because I was writing about the activist communities that had been deeply a part of [me], I was just writing about those worlds and the folks that I love, that I work alongside,” Cortez said. “In a lot of ways, that part of the story is a collection of little vignettes of things that I experienced working and doing that work, the people that I knew, including the City people that we would encounter. I think of it as like I was writing a love letter to the city that shaped me.

“The intention is to speak to folks in the movement doing this work and dealing with these deeper questions — how can we be effective? Can we be effective? Is effectiveness even the thing we should be striving for, or are there deeper questions that we should be thinking about instead? In a lot of ways, art is really different from organizing, in that you can start and end with a question, whereas in organizing, it’s assumed that you’ve come to some conclusion in order to take action. You start with conclusion and end with conclusion.” - Marisol Cortez

The scenarios that Cortez poses each reader with parallel those of the current struggles and challenges the U.S. faces. Although ten years in the making, Cortez paves the way for an alternate reality to be formed — one in which the climate change crisis was fully addressed, with the government instructing the nation to transfer off of fossil fuels and adopt a new way of rare earth mining.

“I finished the first draft of it before the 2016 election, and so much changed after 2016. If I had been coming up with the story for it between 2016 and 2020, it would have to change. At the time that I was writing it, it felt contemporary — a couple of years later, it felt like a story rooted in a world from another time and place,” Cortez said. “Even the premise of the story, after 2016, that became unimaginable. Now, maybe it’s imaginable again, but definitely it’s rooted in this Obama-era time period where the power structure that you’re up against is more like a corporate Democrat: on the one hand, giving lip service to transitioning off of fossil fuels, and the other hand going about it in a [behind closed doors way] where the real decision makers were [corporate]. That’s still the case, but I think that after 2016, there is a very different power structure when it came to climate activism and so many other things.”

Regardless of the time period, ‘Luz At Midnight’ still remains relevant to this day. With a shift in activism regarding climate change and politics, the story’s main premise continues to press on in the minds and actions of those cultivating change within their own homes.

“I’m glad it’s still relevant in a lot of ways. It was worrisome to me that the political landscape [shifted] so dramatically five years ago, because I didn’t know if the story would be relevant to folks that are doing any kind of climate-related activism,” Cortez said. “The intention is to speak to folks in the movement doing this work and dealing with these deeper questions — how can we be effective? Can we be effective? Is effectiveness even the thing we should be striving for, or are there deeper questions that we should be thinking about instead? In a lot of ways, art is really different from organizing, in that you can start and end with a question, whereas in organizing, it’s assumed that you’ve come to some conclusion in order to take action. You start with conclusion and end with conclusion.”

Nevertheless, the ending of ‘Luz At Midnight’ can be up for interpretation. Cortez questions the inner workings of the universe, tempting fate and the coincidences in each other’s lives. With a love story that grips the reader throughout the book, Luz’s ending propels the readers to realize that not every question has a dedicated answer.

“There’s an open-endedness to the book, an unresolvedness to the story that I think is important for people doing activist work, because we don’t have all the answers. We don’t have everything neatly wrapped up,” Cortez said. “We can’t. Maybe victory, maybe success, maybe effectiveness — maybe that’s not the space that we want to act from.”

The themes raised throughout Cortez’s latest work touch upon raw human emotions, writing a love story intertwined with the circumstances of a crushing political force under the threat of climate change. An immaculate work of art, Cortez leaves each reader questioning their own purpose behind every action that they take.

“I would hope that folks in many cities around the world think through their own dynamics of their communities. I think that [any community] dealing with the powers that be — I think that story will resonate with them,” Cortez said. “I hope people will take away the questions that I raise about that, much more so than any conclusion that I draw. It is a political story, but it’s also a universal story about desire, and the problematic of desire, and what do we do with our own longing. How do we live beside longing? It’s a very human question. I would hope that anybody anywhere could relate to that, and that it would lead them to think about those questions.” 

‘Luz At Midnight’ can be purchased online from FlowerSong Press. Cortez is also giving away five signed copies, more information can be found here.

Valeria Torrealba is an opinions columnist and public relations assistant at the University Star, a student publication of Texas State University. Email her at reporter@sasentinel.com