In the not-too-distant future, San Antonio is scrambling to go carbon neutral. They’re turning refineries into apartments and closing coal plants to build mixed-use developments. But progress is slow. Poor people are being displaced, left vulnerable in a time of increasingly frequent heat waves and extreme weather events. All the while, profiteers are seizing on the vacuum left by the fossil fuel industry to vulture minerals from the South Texas landscape. In an unequal transition away from fossil fuels, could this be the future?
In her debut novel, San Antonio-based author Marisol Cortez teases out this scenario, documenting environmental politics in San Antonio through a lens that’s half-real, half-hypothetical. From small South Texas publisher FlowerSong Press, Luz at Midnight unfolds from the vantage point of Chicano community activists including the soft-spoken but steadfast protagonist Citlali Sanchez-O’Connor (Lali for short). The story follows Lali as she works long hours for an environmental nonprofit between academic jobs and finds herself in a whirlwind of utility rate hikes, political theatre, and artistic grassroots protest. Lali’s job is organizing actions at City Council meetings and canvassing for signatures to fight a utility rate hike after a huge storm—a storm that resulted in “rolling blackouts” (hint: they weren’t really rolling) in lower-income neighborhoods. Cortez says she based these scenes on the Texas polar vortex of 2011, but as I read her book in my darkened Austin home in February, they felt shockingly prescient. Her idea of rare earth mines in South Texas, too, is also partly coming true: One of the first rare earth processing facilities in the United States is opening in Hondo.
