Our love for the world around us and our passion for protecting that world can come from many different places. It can come from a connection to the land, or a magical experience we had with other people in a particular place, or our sense of awe from the beauty of the living creatures that inhabit these ecosystems. But that love and passion can also come from seeing or experiencing the destruction of the same ecological web, from pollution in the air that rains down onto a playground, or the clearing of a wildlife habitat to make way for a fossil fuel pipeline.
Dave Cortez has been organizing for environmental justice in Texas for the better part of two decades. He lives in Austin now, but the love and passion that guides him came from the Rio Grande, the Sierra Madre Mountains and the high desert of West Texas. And from fighting a copper smelter and other threats to the land, air and water in and around his native El Paso. Dave has a fierce love for his El Paso Community. But cutting his teeth as an environmental justice organizer in his hometown wasn't easy.
Dave is now Director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, where he’s bringing his El Paso roots and years of experience on the streets and in the communities around Texas to the Sierra Club’s statewide campaigns.
I’ve known Dave for many years and used to regularly attend environmental justice meetings in Austin that he helped organize. I’ve seen him rise from an on-the-ground organizer to the leader of the Texas chapter of one of the oldest and largest environmental organizations in the world.
Our conversation tracks his education as an environmental justice organizer. From the playgrounds of El Paso to the gentrifying neighborhoods of Austin, his story reflects the changing nature of the American environmental movement and the exciting possibilities of more robust connections between community-based frontline environmental justice struggles and the large and powerful environmental organizations with nationwide influence.
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Dave Cortez
Dave Cortez is a 3rd generation El Pasoan now based out of Austin where he lives with his partner and six year old daughter. He grew up and learned organizing on the frontera, where industrial pollution, poverty, gentrification, racism and the border wall are seen as intersecting issues. Dave serves as the Director of the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter, and has been organizing in the Texas environmental movement for 18 years. Dave is supporting staff and volunteers across Texas who are organizing for power by centering racial justice and equity alongside frontline communities directly impacted by polluting industries.
Quotation Read by Dave Cortez
"There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. Malcolm knew this. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this. Our struggles are particular, but we are not alone. We are not perfect, but we are stronger and wiser than the sum of our errors. Black people have been here before us and survived. We can read their lives like signposts on the road and find, as Bernice Reagon says so poignantly, that each one of us is here because somebody before us did something to make it possible. To learn from their mistakes is not to lessen our debt to them, nor to the hard work of becoming ourselves, and effective.
We lose our history so easily, what is not predigested for us by the New York Times, or the Amsterdam News, or Time magazine. Maybe because we do not listen to our poets or to our fools, maybe because we do not listen to our mamas in ourselves. When I hear the deepest truths I speak coming out of my mouth sounding like my mother’s, even remembering how I fought against her, I have to reassess both our relationship as well as the sources of my knowing. Which is not to say that I have to romanticize my mother in order to appreciate what she gave me – Woman, Black. We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding.
We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not to lie to ourselves.
We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about – survival and growth.
Within each one of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust. If we are to keep the enormity of the forces aligned against us from establishing a false hierarchy of oppression, we must school ourselves to recognize that any attack against Blacks, any attack against women, is an attack against all of us who recognize that our interests are not being served by the systems we support. Each one of us here is a link in the connection between anti-poor legislation, gay shootings, the burning of synagogues, street harassment, attacks against women, and resurgent violence against Black people. I ask myself as well as each one of you, exactly what alteration in the particular fabric of my everyday life does this connection call for? Survival is not a theory. In what way do I contribute to the subjugation of any part of those who I define as my people? Insight must illuminate the particulars of our lives." - Audre Lorde
Recommended Readings & Media
Transcript
Intro
John Fiege
Our love for the world around us and our passion for protecting that world can come from many different places. It can come from a connection to the land, or a magical experience we had with other people in a particular place, or our sense of awe from the beauty of the living creatures that inhabit these ecosystems. But that love and passion can also come from seeing or experiencing the destruction of this same ecological web: from pollution in the air that rains down onto a playground or the clearing of wildlife habitat to make way for a fossil fuel pipeline.
Dave Cortez has been organizing for environmental justice in Texas for the better part of two decades. He lives in Austin now, but the love and passion that guides him came from the Rio Grande, the Sierra Madre mountains, and the high desert of West Texas—and it came from fighting a copper smelter and other threats to the land, air, and water in and around his native El Paso. Dave has a fierce love for his El Paso community but cutting his teeth as an environmental justice organizer in his home town wasn’t easy.
Dave Cortez
Two of my close family members worked at the plant. My dad's brother worked at the plant and then worked at Chevron on the other side of town. And then his brother in law, worked at the plant and retired. And here I was, this younger punk, you know, sort of just not super close to the family, showing up at events and they asked what I'm doing and, oh, they think I'm a paid protester, you know, forget my education, forget what's at what I'm actually saying. You know, it's, deep cultural assimilation. It's deep colonization, sort of this Stockholm syndrome that develops out of poverty and repression. It's horrific, and it's sad to watch. People fiercely defend the only thing that has helped them in their eyes and not be able to acknowledge the harm that's been done. It's not different from, you know, addiction in that way, or depression.
John Fiege
Or domestic abuse.
Dave Cortez
Exactly. It's heartbreaking. It still hurts me to talk about.
John Fiege
I’m John Fiege, and this is Chrysalis.
Dave Cortez is now Director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, where he’s bringing his El Paso roots and years of experience on the streets and in the communities around Texas to the Sierra Club’s statewide campaigns.
I’ve known Dave for many years and used to regularly attend environmental justice meetings in Austin that he helped organize. I’ve seen him rise from an on-the-ground organizer to the leader of the Texas chapter of one of the oldest and largest environmental organizations in the world.
Our conversation tracks his education as an environmental justice organizer. From the playgrounds of El Paso to the gentrifying neighborhoods of Austin, his story reflects the changing nature of the American environmental movement and the exciting possibilities of more robust connections between community-based frontline environmental justice struggles and the large and powerful environmental organizations with nationwide influence.
Here is Dave Cortez.
Conversation
John Fiege
Well, you grew up in El Paso in Far West Texas, and it's right on the border of Mexico and New Mexico. Can you tell me a bit about growing up there, and your family and how you saw yourself in relationship to the rest of nature.
Dave Cortez
I've got a little picture I'm looking at my my very first demonstration. It's a bunch of kids, kids meaning college kids, my my age at the time, about maybe 22, 23, and a big peace flag and we're hanging around what was called Plaza de Los Lagartos, Plaza of the Alligators. And we're there I think we're protesting, must have been continuing invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, but you know, I keep it up. And I keep pictures of the mountains of West Texas, the edge of the Rockies is what cuts into the central central part of El Paso, the Franklin Mountains. And then you have the Rio Grande, the heart and soul of that land. And on the other side of the river, those mountains continue into the Sierra Madres all the way down to the coast. It's majestic. It's, you know, that land is as colonized as is its people. You know, it's been, the river has been dammed up upstream in New Mexico, and two reservoirs to provide water for agriculture and farming and things like that, recreation. It was the only area of water that we we had access to when I was a kid. We would drive up to Truth or Consequences and load up on nightcrawlers and whatever other tackle and bait, and then take my dad's car and drive along somewhere, find a good spot. And fish from the shore for a couple of days at a time, camp, and, you know, that was a desert lake. It was wild for me, because we didn't have water, you know.
John Fiege
So tell me about what you did.
Dave Cortez
Well, we would just go up there. That was, that was our place to go get get access to water, you know, away from the desert, you know, growing up in El Paso, you just, it's It's dry, it's desert, we get, we used to average nine inches of rain a year, it's down now, you know, but the Rio was, it's always been sacred and it was special, it was a place you could go and see water. Not all year round, but most of the year and see it flowing and you look in any direction, away from the mountains, and you can see what feels endless, but it's actually you know, two or more hundred miles to the horizon, you see Thunder heads 30, 40, sometimes 45 or 50,000 feet high way far away, you think maybe you hope maybe those might come your way, maybe we'll get lucky and get a little bit of rain. Most times they don't. But with that sometimes you're blessed with the outflow that carries the smell of creosote, a native plant in the region that everybody's come to call the smell of rain. And, you know, even if you don't actually get the rain yourself, you might get some of those breezes and some of that wonderful smell. And it's, it's life giving, it's restorative. As a kid, you know, I was fortunate that my family made an effort to take us out into the desert quite a bit, we would go chase storms, we would watch lightning, my father would turn the AM radio to a blank station so we could hear the the lightning on the radio, the static pop. And we got a real kick out of that and we'd go off roading and find spots and park and you know, just hang out. And that was a pretty common thing for a lot of folks around town is just to get out into the desert. You know, my my heart and soul and my spirit is connected to that land, it is part of that land, I draw strength from those mountains, from that river. I worry about moving further away, what that might do to me, how how that might be a strain. Even just being here in Austin 600 miles away, it feels very far. You know, my family was middle class, I call it 80s middle class. And, you know, both my parents worked. I have two older siblings. And you know, we were all in public school and doing our thing. You know, everything seemed, you know, like The Wonder Years kind of situation. And you know, you don't when you're young, if you're fortunate, you don't see a lot of the issues around you. It wasn't until my teens, my parents split. And I was living with my mom and started to see a lot more other sides of life, some of the struggles, and just kind of notice more about the town, about the culture. But it was really when I moved back to El Paso after college, here in Austin at St. Edward's, where I studied political science and philosophy and environmental policy. When I moved back, it all started to come together how much I missed, how much I was removed from about my community and my culture in my youth. You know, so the language is the biggest example. We did not speak Spanish in my family. It was something my parents spoke to each other when they needed to talk about something that we didn't need to know about as kids.
John Fiege
Right, right.
Dave Cortez
You know, we didn't know about our indigeneity we weren't raised around that, we didn't know about the cultural connection to the land. I think in some way the spirit in my family drew us towards it. We would go spend time around those things, but we didn't really have conversations about it. And the biggest thing I didn't know about was how heavily polluted and contaminated the air was growing up. I tell a story about going into middle school. This time I was in in private school and Catholic school. Just being out on the playground it's a you know, concrete schoolyard kind of situation. And you run your hand on the on the railing and there's yellow chalk-like stuff and you don't think twice about it because it's like chalk. Or it's dust. Well, you know, in that part of town, downtown El Paso, it's because of the copper smelter. We had a 110 year old lead and copper smelting operation called Asarco that was less than two miles away from where I was going to school. And you know, you move on, maybe, you're a kid, maybe you wash your hands, maybe you don't. And it just, you know, when I moved back, I thought of that--I thought of all the times, I used to play in the dirt, like every other kid in El Paso does, you know, you don't got Barton Springs to go to or Greenbelt Creek, you play in the dirt, dig tunnels, and that stuff gets in you. And that's loaded with heavy metals, arsenic, cadmium, lead, you name it. It was it was a huge shock for me to learn that the land that I was around as a child, and the air that I was around as a child was just heavily contaminated. And I knew nothing about it.
John Fiege
But what was the experience like when you were actually in college and getting more heavily into activism? Like what was motivating you? And how did you see yourself in relationship to other folks?
Dave Cortez
Right on. Well, I can't leave out that the reason I came to Austin was because of my older brother and my older sister. I had never seen green, like this town, when I came to visit my sister in the summer. So I just was blown away, everything was green, there was water, it rained, I just felt like an oasis and I wanted to come here. So I went to St. Ed's, which ended up being, you know, expensive as hell, but really cool in the sense of, you know, an opportunity to learn, to be away from home. You know, and so, I didn't really know what to make of this town when I was here. I didn't know what to make of the people, the students, but by the grace of the Creator, in serendipity, I was thrown into a class on social movements. And that's a study in the 1960s. And so, you know, I developed a really foundational experience learning about the broader politic of American civil society, in that case, which blossomed into deeper learning around political theory and rhetoric, dating all the way back to some of the Greek philosophers, and modern day political thinkers, but I really got a ton of wild information into my head. In 2006, it wasn't here in Austin. It was on North Padre Island. The Austin Sierra Club was organizing a trip, there was a woman I liked at the time. And we were were fancying each other and were like, "Hey, let's go camping. I don't know what a crawfish is. But they're doing a crawfish boil. And they say they're going to clean up the beach." So we grabbed my SUV when we went and set up, and it was awesome to be out there around all these people we didn't know, you know, offering us free food and beer and just, you know, associating on this beach. And that, I really loved. Folks might not know this, it's like 60 plus miles of primitive Beach, outside of Corpus Christi. But I didn't quite understand what we're really doing until the next morning, right at dawn, when I was awoken by these huge sounds of tractor trailers hauling right by the water right in front of us. Just a caravan of them driving down to the other end of the beach to do gas drilling. You know, we get out of the tent, and we're watching this and I mean, you just want to, you know, throw something at those trucks, you know, and go put your body in front or something like "What the hell's going on?" And you're just watching the rubber, the plastic, you name it just fall off these trucks. And in their wake is just a mass of debris, and trash. And this is all in endangered Kemp's ridley sea turtle habitat, its nest a nesting area for the Kemp's ridley sea turtle. And that's why we were there. And so, you know, right after that we all commiserated and got to work and picked up more trash than I think, you know, I've ever picked up. And I'm still shocked that that was allowed. But that's really where I started to take a turn and understand more about how the state facilitates this destruction, the destruction of the land and for the profits of few. And shortly after that I graduated, and that was it for my time in Austin.
John Fiege
So after you graduated from college, you went back to El Paso, and you became an environmental justice organizer for El Paso, ACORN. And it was shortly after your time there in 2009, that right wing activists did a big hit job on ACORN and brought down the organization in the US for the most part. An ACORN was was a powerful community organizing group at its height, and it had this unique community based organizing model. Could you talk a bit about the ACORN organizing model and how it, possibly, I assume, became part of your organizing DNA?
Dave Cortez
Just like learning about the 1960s is a pillar of my practice. The work with Acorn is right there with it. You know, it shaped me, maybe it's just because it's one of the first things I learned about, but it'll be with me, as long as I do this work and have breath in my lungs. You know, some people were quick to point to that it's built out of the school of the Industrial Areas Foundation and Saul Alinsky model of community organizing, and yeah, that's true. But, you know, I didn't know any of that. I didn't, you know, I was, I was just taken in by these folks. There was a guy, recovering addict, just trying to make his money doing his canvassing while I was hanging out at a coffee shop, kind of where I was living in El Paso, the university. And there's my day off and I'm out there hanging out. There's this dude, his name was Ken. Ken let me know how they were planning to reopen the ASARCO copper smelter, the big 120 820 foot tall smokestack that I grew up around, and I was shocked. And, and that's, you know, like I studied all these things. And I was like, wow, I cannot believe that that's right there, my mom lives over here, you know, she works there, I live over here. And, you know, I told them, whatever I can do to help: get more letters, spread a petition around, whatever I can do. And they invited me in to meet the team, which was a small team. And the first task they gave me was actually nothing to do with that it was just to go distribute information about free tax prep, helping people in a really poor community, not far from where I went to middle school in which is not far from the smelter, get access to tax prep, in English and Spanish. And at the time, I had a, I had a mohawk. I covered that thing up real fast. I wore a straw cowboy hat and went door to door knocking on people's doors, let them know about this. And Jose Manuel, the the lead organizer at the time, the director saw me and, you know, was into it. And, you know, they offered me a job after a few days of that. And the job was doing the same thing, plus inviting people to come to a community meeting about the reopening of ASARCO. So here's a way that we can help you. With some, you know, with your money, basically, your your bottom line, and also, there's a situation happening, that can affect and will affect your your health and well being, and the safety of your family. At the time, I didn't realize that there was a very intentional strategy there. But that strategy is essential to the work that we do as environmentalists and in climate justice activists around the country, and here in Texas, people are struggling, and you got to find ways to help them directly with what they're struggling with day to day, which is often their pocketbooks. And so if you can do that, you're going to build some trust, you can build some relationships, and then you might be lucky to talk to them about another bigger, more complicated issue.
John Fiege
That seems to be, like, a really beautiful definition of the difference between environmental justice organizing, and traditional environmental organizing, where environmental justice organizing, you have to start with the community, and make sure everybody you know, you have to deal with everything, you can't just isolate an environmental issue. Would you agree with that?
Dave Cortez
Absolutely. Absolutely. I don't know where that came from. I again, I'm not a I've read all the books about these things, but that, the model that was picked up by so many organizations and NGOs is is you know, it's it's almost like counter revolutionary, it's almost counterproductive. Like you're intentionally trying to marginalize your base in silos, you know, so, so whatever we do, you know, I try to espouse that in folks, some of the work we've done around Austin and other parts of Texas, that's the route we go, talk about bills, talk about bills every time and then, you know, start to figure out what else is going on, you know. With ACORN, a major flaw in the national model was that they would want to sign people up to be bank draft members, like you, you'd push a card onto them, "Hey, send this card in with your bank info or something. And we'll sign you up, you know, so you get access to our help." And obviously, I didn't do that. And as the work evolved, and we got more people canvassing and doing the work, we didn't do that either. It went against our values. Now, if there were middle class people, people with more means, yeah, we'd asked them to do that, too.
John Fiege
To contribute a certain amount each month.
Dave Cortez
Yeah. But we also did things differently, in the sense of, we organized, we found, you know, folks who are highly motivated by the issues, students, artists, residents in the nearby communities who wanted to contribute, and contribute their time, That theory in the ACORN model of, you got to get people financially bought in to be committed, I think can be challenged and there's lots of ways to get people plugged in. And so, one other key here was, you know, I wasn't brand new, this work wasn't brand new. There had been people fighting ASARCO before I was involved, obviously, and it had ebbed and flowed in terms of how much community opposition from just, like, working class people was centered. There was a lot of wealthier folks, politico types, you know, people who worked for legislators or senators or city people, you know, academics, things like that. And there was a handful of working class people in a smattering of workers from plant workers. So our job was really to find more just like students and people in the impacted communities, but it had been going on for so long that people were really drained. You know, parents who, whose children had MS as a result of this or had other health problems, they eventually backed off because it was just too exhausting to go up against the machine of the Texas State Government and go testify, and struggle, and they just couldn't do it anymore. You know, so we had to find new people and inject new life. You know, we made it a point to work with some of the younger folks to start a--not really an acorn chapter--but just a group on the campus called students for reform. And those kids are amazing, a couple dozen students, Chicanos, for the most part, all going off to do awesome things in their lives. But for three, three years, four years, they they led the fight, they're on campus challenging the administration to disclose more information and trying to represent student opposition to the reopening of the smelter.
John Fiege
I was looking up some articles about ASARCO. I found this this one 2010 article from John Burnett, who's a NPR correspondent based in Austin. So he talks about in 2009, the US Justice Department announced the settlement of one of the largest environmental bankruptcies in US history, in which ASARCO would pay a record $1.79 billion to settle claims for hazardous waste pollution in you know, at 80 sites, as many as 20 states, including the copper smelting operation in in El Paso. And he quotes some interesting community members like an 82 year old former maintenance worker named Miguel Beltran, who says, "you can't get a job here in El Paso compared to ASARCO, ASARCO is the best place to work. We were just like a family." And John Burnett, also quotes an anti-smelter activist named Debbie Kelly, who says, "They marketed very well. And the people of El Paso were brainwashed believed that this was the most wonderful thing El Paso could possibly have, this tall polluting contaminating smokestack." And this is this classic tension and environmental justice organizing. The big polluter in town is often the biggest and best paying employer as well, especially for folks with limited education. And these working folks often side with the company in some ways, and then at some times, kind of accepting the environmental problems for the economic opportunities. And the smokestack itself is this shining symbol of progress and prosperity that goes way back to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. What was your experience with this tension between economic opportunity and environmental health in the organizing, and how that was represented in the media?
Dave Cortez
Well, let's take a few cracks at it, because it's a big question. You know, I'll start with my family, two of my close family members worked at the plant, my dad's brother worked at the plant and then worked at Chevron on the other side of town. And then his brother in law, worked at the plant and retired. And here I was, this younger punk, you know, sort of just not super close to the family, showing up at events, and that's what I'm doing and "oh," they think, "I'm a paid protester," you know, forget my education, forget what I'm actually saying. You know, it's, it's deep cultural assimilation. It's deep colonization, sort of this Stockholm syndrome that develops out of poverty and repression. It's horrific. And it's sad to watch, you know, people fiercely defend the only thing that has helped them, in their eyes, and not be able to acknowledge the harm that's been done. It's not different from, you know, addiction in that way. Or, or depression in that way.
John Fiege
Right. Or domestic abuse. Don't talk about it.
Dave Cortez
Domestic abuse. Exactly. You know, it's heartbreaking. It still hurts me to talk about. But, you know, that was the case. And you know, in that situation, just try and make peace with your family just, you know, get through the gathering. And you go on in, you know, some of my family was very supportive, you know, like, "yeah, that stuff's bad, and we should do better." You don't get investments in the well being of a community that like say, in Austin and all this money flooding here and STEM education being invested in and, you know, pre K access and, you know, nature based education and Montessori education, things like that. All of this is part of that, that conflict that pushes you to try and find the best thing you can for your family. And any of the workers that I organized alongside say the same thing. They were so proud and happy--Daniel Adriano another sort of lead visible face against the reopening of smelter, he's a former steel worker, you know, he tells a story about like, his dad worked there, his uncle, his cousins, you know, it was just like a family thing, like everybody, if you could get a job at ASARCO, you knew you'd be okay. You could raise a family, maybe even your wife or your spouse, your partner wouldn't have to work. But, you know, behind that, that Golden Gate, there was a lot of things that people weren't being told. You know, things like, maybe you shouldn't be taking your work clothes home and washing them. Right. They sent people home to wash, and that's very common in heavy industry in the 80s 70s 80s and 90s, you know, these these companies do that. In Danny's case, his kids got sick, you know, and they developed health problems. And he points to that as part of the reason washing his clothes in the same machine with, as his kids clothes. His wife feels guilt about that. Heavy guilt.
John Fiege
Yeah. That's hard.
Dave Cortez
You know, it's violating. You know, they had them--that settlement came because they, well, in part because ASARCO was caught for illegally incinerating hazardous chemical weapons waste materials from Colorado, in the smelter in these men weren't told about it. And they shoveled this stuff in there and were exposed to, you know, not recycled waste, just direct waste from the Rocky Mountain Arsenal Wow facility, a weapons manufacturing facility, Dow Chemical weapons manufacturing facility. That stuff was burned and they were exposed. You know, it's infuriating. And once they learned that, and they were falling ill and they had some evidence, they tried to organize other workers, let them know former workers let them know what was going on. And, and they encountered the same thing that I encountered with my family: just like this, this wall of acceptance, this willful ignorance. You know, I don't know about that, you know, just like denial, denial. And that was really hard on them. They got ostracized, they lost a lot of friends. You know, and so they found allyship in other people whose families had been sick, residents on the other side of the river in the Colonias, whose children had been severely sick, who were bleeding every night because of bloody noses and heavy metal contamination. You know, they found allyship with Debbie Kelly in the current place, which is sort of a wealthier neighborhood, you know, the educated, more white affluent folks who didn't want the smelter around. And this, that's how the "Get the lead out" coalition really came together it was--you just had these different interests aligned around this lack of justice, but the worker piece was always--and the economic piece was always always, you know, the straw that would break our back. And when ASARCO hired a PR firm, Teresa Montoya, to build their campaign, their marketing campaign to reopen the smelter, that was their big thing. I want to work for ASARCO I want to work for ASARCO and they march out all these Chicanos and throw them in front of a plant in their hard hats and talk about the good jobs and the pay. You know, it's tough to compete with. I know the people in Port Arthur, in Corpus Christi, even down in Brownsville, you know, and you name it.
John Fiege
It's the same story everywhere. It's the same story.
Dave Cortez
In Appalachia, as well, with the coal miners. Absolutely. The amount of energy it takes to fight Goliath. You know, you never have enough you never have enough resources. You got a PR firm In, you know, this facility was owned and run ASARCO, Grupo Mexico owned by Carlos Slim, at the time the wealthiest man in the world, you know, like, you're never going to have enough just to stop the bad thing. How are you going to strategize and organize in a way where you're talking about building the good, and replacing it with something better and taking care of these people? It's doable, it absolutely is. But at the time, when you're in the sock like that, it's very hard to pivot. And it's very hard to motivate people who have resources to give you those resources to bring on people to pay them to do that work. It's a boxing match, take your hits, and wait for the time to throw a punch. You know, and I think one thing that really hurt people hurt ASARCO a lot, was when it came out that at their operations in Arizona, El Paso and elsewhere, in the 70s and 80s, they had been using health standards, health assessment screenings that were based on a false standard that black men and brown men had a 15% higher lung capacity than white men, therefore, they could be--they could work 15% longer, they could be exposed 15% more than white men. And that came out. And you know, we had some incredible, dedicated educated volunteers who were digging this information up, who were, you know, putting it to the to the news outlets. And without the news outlets putting that information out there, like the New York Times that put it out about the hazardous chemical weapons waste, you know, we wouldn't have been able to really punch back. But that stuff came out and then we could organize with it. We made materials out of it. I made sure everyone knew that, you know, this is the kind of crap that this place was built on, no matter what they say now you can't trust them.
John Fiege
Right. Yeah. And this--another thing that John Burnett brought up in this NPR story is, he quotes some longtime community members who said that when the winds were blowing to the south toward Juarez in Mexico, the smelter would crank up production and send pollution directly into Mexico where they could, they could do nothing to regulate it or stop it even worse than in the US. And that's a pretty insidious and cynical route around US environmental regulations. American companies have this long history of sending their polluting factories and jobs overseas. But in El Paso, they could just send the pollution directly to Mexico while keeping the plant and the jobs in the US. Were you able to do any cross border organizing in El Paso to combat this kind of flagrant disregard for air pollution in Mexico?
Dave Cortez
I wasn't able to myself, or it wasn't a choice I made to do myself on the broader scale. Marianna Chu, who worked at the time for the Sierra Club, and as an independent activist and organizer did a whole hell of a lot and deserves a ton of credit. Marianna, and others were also were able to build relationships in the Colonias and get to talk to people that were, you know, the definition of directly impacted, right on the other side of the river. You know, you drive through, you pass on I-10, and you look to the left where you're passing through downtown, and it's just colonias and that's Colonia Felipe and some students who we'd found and became acquainted with at UTEP and were filmmakers and they were able to get over into the colonias and document the lived experience of some of these folks, and it's horrific, and they made a short film, I'm happy to share called The Story of Cristo and it's a little boy, you know, who's like that, he's bleeding, bleeding every night, because he's got heavy metal contamination, two years old. You know, and that story spread. You know, it was similar to other families all throughout the Colonia. Dirt roads, just full of metal, not a lot that could be done unless there was funds provided for it. And part of that settlement in relation to the chemical weapons waste was that ASARCO would give money to an outfit in Mexico to pave those roads. You know, that's it. Accept no wrongdoing. No, no responsibility. We don't admit nothing but, here, take this and leave us alone.
John Fiege
Literally, sweeping it under the rug. They're just laying asphalt over the dust.
Dave Cortez
Absolutely. I mean, that's that's absolutely right. And, you know, one interesting intersection here with with the colonias there was, as we marched towards the end of 2007 and 2008. You know, we're still fighting the plant, it started to become more and more dangerous and people were less responsive, and less receptive to being interviewed on camera with our comrades, and the gangs, were starting to move in to the Colonia and control things more. And that was that it wasn't safe anymore you can, the last thing you should be doing is driving over there with a camera. And so those stories sort of drifted away, those folks. And we weren't able to really work with them a whole lot more, because the narco war was starting to take root.
John Fiege
Because it's, it's how it's the same thing they do to fight you, they give your neighbor a job, and then and they get your neighbor working against you.
Dave Cortez
Absolutely, I mean, you know, you're not going to go toe to toe with the same weapons, you got to find a way to find their weak spot and cut them at that weak spot. And, you know, I learned that, I learned that in this fight, you know, we weren't scared of these people. We weren't scared of their minions. We weren't scared of the, you know, the former workers who wanted the plant to open. We weren't scared of them. They tried. Everybody tried to intimidate you, you know, but I'll start with, with that part, first, as a critical strategy. My, you know, 23 year old high energy, Mohawk wearin' self, right, like, I thought I knew it all and was ready to go, just like against that jerk down on Red River Street in Austin. And, you know, the first public meeting, debate, whatever, that we helped organize, some of those, those workers were there outside and they were, you know, they pick a smaller person, a woman to argue with, and she ain't scared of them. But you know, soon enough, there's, there's four or five of them around her and oh, man, you know, machismo is something all of us from the border suffered from and that kicked in hard. You just get into it with these guys. But, you know, that is not the way, that is not the way. You know, arguing and fighting, especially with the people, even though they're trying to get you to do it. The people who want a job in these facilities, the community members who just want a better way for their life, you cannot let the people at the top pit us against each other. That's why it's so important to be anchored in community talking about the nuance, you know, how to step and where, what to look out for, and really trying to build together, it has to be at the forefront.
John Fiege
Isn't that the history of American industrial capitalism, that for it to work, the, the industrialists need to pit various groups of people against one another, whether it's along lines of race, or income, or religion, or geography, or immigration status, or, or whatever. Like, that's, that's how it works. You need to divide people by those things, so they don't get together and they don't, they don't form a allegiances.
Dave Cortez
That's right. That's right. I mean, it's, but it's not something that's created by the oligarchs and the industrial capitalists and the power holders. It's something that they exploit, right? It's a, it's a wound that's already there. And, you know, it's something that concerns me greatly about broader civil society, and our failures to build community, in relationship in brotherhood and sisterhood. You know, in a true spirit of mutual solidarity, the more that we neglect doing that work, the easier it is for something to divide us or someone to exploit it, we see it, there's an endless amount of examples we can point to. But if you start your work in trying to build something better, and build through a positive relationship, it's going to feed in the long run, it'll help you endure all of the struggles that are going to come the conflicts, you know, the the infighting, the personality disagreements, whatever, you got to have some foundation and I learned that from that, that night outside the UTEP Library arguing with these guys that, "No, we got to we got to find a way to work with these workers. We got to really center the fact that people need work in jobs." And and that's where, you know, I really started to become close with, not the guys I argued with, other workers who were already disaffected, Charlie Rodriguez, and Danielle Riano and Efrain Martinez and others. You know, they became, in some ways they already were but from my work, they became the center of what we're trying to do and focus on, that this is actually not what we want these, these jobs are not the kind that we need, because look what they did to me. And so that's one piece. We've got to find a way to get people more meaningfully involved with the policies we're trying to change, so there's just a far greater number of people pushing for positive investment in something that is, you know, not just like NGO staff, you know, like, the less NGO staff and those boardrooms, the better. You know, get every day, people in their meeting, pressing for these decisions, and calling for it, and that makes it much harder for the special interests to push push their own agenda.
John Fiege
Well, that's a good transition to Occupy Wall Street. So in 2011, Occupy Wall Street began in New York City in Zuccotti Park. And then the movement quickly spread around the world, including to Austin. And I know you were heavily involved in Occupy Austin, and its campaign to get the city to divest from commercial banks. I participated in a couple of those occupy Austin Bank actions. And I don't think I'd met you yet. But, you know, as many people might remember, one of the big discussions and debates around Occupy was whether and how to organize and whether to make formal demands, which always makes me think of Frederick Douglass who famously said, "power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did. And it never will." But those words from Frederick Douglass, were not the guiding light of many occupy organizers and participants, I'd love to hear you talk a bit about your experience with Occupy Austin, and the internal debates and conflicts about what it was and how it should operate. And what you brought away from that whole experience that you put into your organizing work after that.
Dave Cortez
Yeah, it was one of the most exciting times of my life so far, you know, to be able to three, four, sometimes five nights a week, meet up with 50 to 60 people not at a general assembly, but a working group meeting, and everybody's there ready to, you know, talk and break out and figure out the next step for getting people to close bank accounts. And, you know, organizing the rally and building the art and all those things. It was organic. I'm so happy that, I'm fortunate to have that experience in this city, and in this country. It was real, you see the romanticized version of uprisings in film, in writing, and on the news, different ways around the world. But, you know, this was that, at least the closest I've been to it, and it wasn't just the, you know, the sign holding, and, you know, petition gathering, we did all that. But it was, I mean, like people were, people were in, you know, the sacrifice time away from whatever they had going on around them to contribute to something better, and I have never seen an appetite, so large for participating and contributing to something that can change the world. I've seen it tried to be engineered a whole lot by NGOs. And it's laughable. It's insulting, you know, but for me at the time, it was it was like a dream come true. I remember a week before occupy launch, there was a meeting happening at Ruta Maya, and the room was full of people, and, you know, a bunch of white dudes, hippie yoga types on stage, you know, talking about some stuff, but I'm up there front row, just, you know, like, eager. And just like listening, I'm like, "This is great," you know, so they open the mic for everybody to come up and have something to say. And it was awesome. I'd just never seen it. You know, I was like, "wow, this is the Austin I always wanted to see," you know. Sure enough there was a meeting after that the next day, and the next day after that. And that kind of continued on for a few days. And then and then there was the day of the launch and lots of people packing City Hall. I mean, you couldn't move there were so many people out there and there were people talking for hours. Everybody was just willing to stay. And you know, I can't, I just can't believe how patient people were for weeks. And just like hanging out. You know, I think they just wanted something different. And they wanted to be part of something, like I said, Now, me, day one. I'm like, "yo, if we're gonna be out here, we need some data." And I got my clipboard. And my dear friend and former partner Betsy had been working for a group that was doing foreclosure organizing and getting people to move their bank accounts or close their bank accounts. And so, you know, I got some, some materials from her and took up like six clipboards, to the to the rally. And that was my whole shtick was just like, "Hey, y'all, we should close our corporate bank accounts," and people loved it. You know, it was like, "hey, here goes, put your name down, if you want to help out," and I mean, I filled up pages and pages of this thing, people who wanted to help out or close their bank accounts. And from that, you know, like, you'd find more people that were like, "Hey, I used, you know, I can help with that. And I used to work at a bank," or, you know, "I've got some time on my hands," you know. And so we, it was rad, because while all the noise was happening, the day to day that people were more familiar with Occupy Wall Street. You know, the the General Assemblies, the infighting, the conflicts with the unhoused folks and things like that, we had this parallel track of our bank action crew, which was doing, building switch kits, and, you know, trying to reach out to people to, you know, help walk them through how to close their bank accounts and stuff like that, or organize marches on the bank, so people could go in and come out and cut their credit cards, so we could all celebrate, you know, like, that was, that was great. That's classic organizing. I, you know, if you weren't down in City Hall, every day for that first month, you're missing out on something, you know, I don't think people appreciate enough how much work people invested into trying to maintain a space, like, maintaining a physical encampment is, you know, the people with the most knowledge on how to operate a small, little civil society is the people have been doing it before, which is our unhoused folks, you know. And there was a huge class conflict, that really emerged quickly, that the police and the city manager and others began to exploit, you know, by trying to bring more unhoused folks down to City Hall, allowing some to sell and distribute drugs, not enforcing any oversight, you know, we had women attacked, you know, and attempted assaults and things like that, that they were just looking the other way on. Because they wanted this to go away. And it was up to us to figure out how to manage that. And that really became the core of the non-bank action, kind of conversations. You know, everybody wanted to do solidarity with everything else. But it was really about, like, how do we keep this thing going? And how do we maintain our presence here? You know, do you negotiate with the city? Who negotiates? Who's responsible? Do we just say, you know, F-U, we're not going to talk to you all, you know, but like, through all that, like, some amazing friendships were developed, and I mean, like bonds, true, real friendships, and people may not be super close anymore, but all it would take is a phone call or text to bring people back together. You know, it's something I'll just value for the rest of my life.
John Fiege
Yeah, totally. And in 2015, The Austin Chronicle named you the best environmental activist in Austin for your work as, "The heart and soul of Sierra Club's 'Beyond Coal' campaign in Central Texas." And I know you've done all kinds of work with the Sierra Club. But I wondered if you could talk about what the fight has been like to transition from dirty energy to clean energy in Texas, which, of course is the oil capital of the country. And looking over the years you've been doing this work, what stands out? What have you learned from this massive campaign?
Dave Cortez
Like you said, it's Texas, we're the number one carbon emitter in the country, and a huge one in the world and the United States cannot meet the modest two week goals in the Paris Accords unless Texas gets its act together, you know, and we got some real problems here, not just from fossil fuel pollution, but from industrial and toxic pollution and just from our livelihoods, you know, there's another story out yesterday, you know, are we going to have power next week, because we're going to hit hit the peak of the summer. You know, it's hard to think about the fight for clean energy in Texas without thinking about the power of the fossil fuel and industrial industries. There's there's been a battle since 2000 and 2005 to stop new power plants and advocate for clean energy. The fuel type changes and you know, back then it was coal and then it is gas and and now, it's like, oh my god, we just don't have enough power. Now, how do we get it? But it's still the, you know, trade associations, the Association of Electric Companies in Texas, you know, Oncor, which is an electric distributor company, NRG, you go down the line, Energy Transfer Partners, all of these fossil fuel corporations, making billions and billions of dollars, still call the shots, they still influence, and basically direct, decision makers on what is going to be acceptable in terms of, even, discussion. You can't even get a hearing in the state legislature on flaring reduction, which is a very modest thing. Because they have enough influence to make sure that that conversation is not even going to happen. And their members, like Energy Transfer Partners, and others are some of the biggest donors to politicians in the state. So, you know, why shouldn't we listen to those people? Kelsy Warren, Dakota Access Pipeline CEO, behind Energy Transfer Partners, gave a million dollars, his largest donation ever to Governor Abbott, right immediately after the legislative session. And this is after his company made well over a billion dollars, I think it's closer to $2 billion, coming out of the winter storm, Energy Transfer Partners. While people died, these people decided it would make better financial sense and profit sense to go ahead and withhold supplies of gas to power plants and gas utilities, and let the price go up before they would deliver that gas and therefore make a ton of money. Forget that more than you know, some say 200, some say 700 people died, many of them freezing to death, many of them carbon monoxide poisoning during the storm, forget that. It's all about the money. And that's the biggest takeaway here, just like we would be fighting Carlos Slim, and ASARCO and other folks, you got to look at what the interest is, you know, why are people supporting this? Why are they facilitating this? I know, it's easy to just say, well, we just got to vote these people out. Well, you know, we've got to come up with strategies that will allow us to do that. We've got to come up with strategies that will make it so, in this state that's so heavily corrupt and captured by corporate interests, fossil fuel interests, industrial interests, that we're going to find a way to cut into their enabling electorate. Their enabling base. And it's more than just a voter registration strategy. It's more than just a mobilization strategy, or getting people to sign a petition, it gets back to what we started talking about with ACORN. What is their base? Where are they? What are their interests? And where does it make sense to try and make some inroads, and cut away? And unfortunately, we just don't have enough of that happening in Texas. There's an effort to try to build coalitions with, you know, some social justice and some youth focused organizations. But we're all part of that same progressive "groupthink" or Democratic base, that we're not actually doing much to expand, other than registering some new voters. And there's a lot of unpacking that needs to happen. You know, can we go talk to some steel workers or some people on the Texas-Mexico border, who started to vote more for Republicans and Trump, because they were worried about the Green New Deal? They're worried about losing their oil jobs. Why, I mean, like, to this day, we haven't made that pivot collectively as a movement, and it's hella frustrating.
John Fiege
Yeah, it gets back to what we were talking about earlier with, you know, kind of the DNA of environmental justice orientation to this work, the work has to be intersectional if you want to transition Texas, the oil capital of the world, to to non-fossil fuel based energy, you know, you need to deal with, with voting rights, you need to deal with the bad education system, you need to deal with healthcare issues, you need to deal with police brutality, and you know, it's like it's all connected. To think that we can remove this issue of decarbonizing our energy source from all of that other, you know, what some people see as messy stuff is delusional, it just doesn't doesn't work, doesn't make sense. Especially, and it's so obvious in places like Texas, where, you know, what are they doing? They're just trying to, they're trying to suppress the vote, like, they know what the deal is, you know, they're they're losing numbers. They need to disenfranchise more voters in order to maintain this system.
Dave Cortez
You know, there's an important caveat and distinction for environmentalists, environmental justice folks, or whatever. You know, if you talk to John Beard with Port Arthur Community Action Network, you know, he's a former steel worker. His whole pitch in Port Arthur is about youth engagement jobs, investing in the community. He's willing to talk to the companies, things like that. It's not environmental-first type of thinking. But the enviros, and you'll see this any legislative session, if you pay attention, we are on the far losing side of the losers. Okay, the Democrats being the losers, you know, Democrats in Texas carry House Bill 40, which is the ban on fracking bans. You know, Mrs. T, Senator Senfronia Thompson out of Houston, she authored that bill, Black Democrat, you know, revered for her work on voting rights and reproductive justice. You know, enviros, we are way, way out of the mix. And so even if we got those organizations doing the work you're talking about, to speak about climate change, speak about the grid, you know, pollution, things like that, we'd still be part of that losing side. And I'm not saying we need to need to be building out into red country, or rural country. It's a critique of the broader progressive movement that we aren't doing enough to find people, the greater majority of people that don't participate in our process, in politics, in voting, except in presidential elections. We are not doing enough to reach people who are just going about their lives and do not give a shit about the things that we post online about our petitions or positions, or our op-eds, or whatever. That is where the fight is, we've got to draw more people in while the right wing tries to keep more people out. That's our only pathway. And so--
John Fiege
What does a just transition mean to you?
Dave Cortez
It's what we've been talking about, it's a whole shift in, you know, the operating system of a of a community, whether it's a town of 50,000 people or a state of, you know, 25 million. Just transition means that we're taking into full consideration, our triple bottom line, you know, our health, and shelter, and food, you know, our economics, our jobs, and ability to put, you know, bring income and get the things that we need. And, you know, just the land and our ecology. Just transition has to anchor that we are--that those things are connected, and that they're not--they can't be separated, that in order for our families, and our children and our neighbors and all that, to have a future and have a livelihood, we need to be concerned about our air quality, concerned about our water quality, but also about the quality of their education, the access to healthy food and grocery stores. If you were to talk to people and ask them to envision what, you know, their dream society looks like, which is a hard thing for people to do nowadays. You know, you'll hear some of these things and just transition is the process that we take to get there. It's not about you know, getting a worker from a fossil fuel job into a clean energy job.
John Fiege
Well, and speaking of that, you know, in addition to your beyond coal and just transition work, you've done a lot of work with low income communities of color in Austin around a whole assortment of things: illegal dumping, access to green space, community solar and solar equity, green gentrification among among a bunch of other stuff. Can you talk about gentrification and how Austin has changed in the time you've been there and the tension that's emerged about Austin becoming one of the greenest but also increasingly one of the least affordable cities in the country?
Dave Cortez
Yeah it's tough. People in Austin are largely still here to just party, have fun, make money. You know, they're really eager to do what they moved here for, you know, go do the cool thing and the restaurant, and the corporate soccer game and whatnot, you know, fine, whatever, I'm not trying to harp on people who want to have a good time, the problem is that there's no thread of the greater good of civil society, of trying to care for those in town that struggle and have the least. That doesn't exist here. It's just, it has lessened every year, it might be new people moving here might be more money here, and people being displaced. But you know, for the most part, with gentrification, the white wealthy middle class here is strong, you know, median family income is close to $90,000, you know, qualifying for affordable housing, you can make a ton of money and still qualify for affordable housing. And the people that move in, my brother calls them the new pilgrims. They're not super interested in learning what was there before, they're interested in what's around them now, and what might come in the future. And we do have a responsibility to make sure that we not just offer up but press on people at the doors, at community events, you know, cool, fun, shit, barbecues and things like that, to learn what was there before they came, you know, sort of an onboarding into the neighborhood. And we did some of this in Montoplis, my old neighborhood that I lived in before I moved to South Austin, you know, people who I was like, "man, they're never going to help us," they're just, you know, part of that new white, middle class "new pilgrim." When I learned the history of the community, and the issues that were going on, I said, "Hell, yeah, whatever I can do," from, you know, cooking funding, speaking, writing letters, coming to meetings, you name it, you know, but we had to keep on 'em. And we had to give them a meaningful task. There is a lot of power, gentrification sucks. But I've really tried to work with myself on not being--automatically hating folks for just trying to move in into a home. But you do have to challenge folks on how they behave after they've moved in, you know, in Austin with our urban farming and desire for new urbanism and density and things like that, the culture of I know what's best is so thick, and it's really hard to stay patient. But I try to, even when I get mad and angry and frustrated, I try to remind people of what's called the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing, and the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond's Principles of Anti-Racism, encourage them to read them, and to do everything they can to just shut the F up, and go listen to the people that they're talking about in affected communities. And get a sense of where you might be able to build some common ground.
John Fiege
I actually wanted to spend a minute on that because, you know, you started, or you were one of the organizers, who started environmental justice group in Austin years ago, and I went to a bunch of the meetings. And I feel like that's where, you know, we got to start hanging out a bunch for the first time. But you would always start the meetings with the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing. And, you know, those came out of this meeting hosted by the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice and Jemez, New Mexico back in the 90s. Can you talk more specifically about the principles and why they're important to the work you're doing?
Dave Cortez
So when you're thinking about undoing racism, or being an antiracist or antiracism work, you know, you're acknowledging that you're confronting a built system, something that's built under a false construct, race, you know, and when you're going to combat that, there's, you know, there's a lot of issues to it or whatever, but the Jemez principles will help you see, how do you approach people and talk about it? You know, for example, listen, let people speak is one of the principles, you know, listen to the people on the ground. Don't barge in there don't don't come in with your your petition and your fancy stuff and, or be online and be a dick. You know, go try to introduce yourself and get to know people. You know, ask questions. That's okay. You know, people were very generous for the most part, whether they're Black or Brown or or Native or Asian, or you name it, you know? If you're able to ask questions and listen about an issue, people will likely talk, you know. Trying to work in solidarity and mutuality is another big one for me, you know, it's not just about like, "I'm here to help you," versus, "I'm here because our struggles are connected and intertwined. And for me and my family to be successful and get what we need, it depends on your family, and your people being successful and getting what you need. How can we work together to make sure that we everything we do reinforces that and that we lift each other up?" A lot of things that we see is very transactional in the advocacy and activism world, you know, sign this, and then we'll go do that for you, or will tell the person to do the thing and change? It's not so much how can what can we do to help you directly, like we talked about bills and taxes and things like that. But also, we have to know that, what is it we're gonna get out of it, it's not just this potential policy outcome. There's tremendous value in human relationships. And in culture and community building, you're going to learn about the people in your community, you're going to learn about the history, you're going to learn, you know, and make new friends and maybe some recipes, maybe, you know, some new music or something. It's limitless. You know, humans have tremendous potential in beauty. But we we rob ourselves of that by, you know, retreating into our silos in our, in our four walls. You know, Jemez can give something--these are short, short, little principles that can give people something to read and reflect on, they can be kind of abstract and theory based, but when you're advocating for change, and then you look at these and you ask yourself, "sm I doing this?" There's tremendous potential for learning, and changing how we do our work.
John Fiege
And the Sierra Club is one of the oldest large-scale environmental groups in the world. And it's traditionally been a white organization. Its founder John Muir made racist remarks about Black and Indigenous people, and in 2020, the Sierra Club officially apologized for those remarks and the white supremacist roots of the organization. In Texas, with your work and your presence, I feel like you've really helped the Sierra Club evolve there, where you are, and you thrive there, despite the structural and institutional challenges. Can you talk about what it's been like to come into the Sierra Club as a Chicano or organizer and from El Paso?
Dave Cortez
Yeah, thanks for that. I mean, there's a crew. First and foremost, there's a crew of brilliant and dedicated people within our team and our staff that have pressed and carried the torch for, you know, we pushed for that, what you just talked about. Bryan Parras and Bekah Hinojosa and Shane Johnson and Christopher Basaldu, and Vanessa Ramos and Misti O'Quinn, Natalie Martinez and others of our Black, Indigenous and Persons of Color caucus, in our staff, and others who came before, we've pushed for these acknowledgments. And it's, it's been tough, it's wonderful to be surrounded by so many rad folks right now in the staff. Because I remember when that wasn't the case, you know, Texas is unique in the Sierra Club universe, because we, you know, it's a chapter, and we're not the national organization, so there's a lot more room to mold and break apart and reshape things. The national organization, you know, is a lot more difficult just by sheer size and numbers and geography, you know, but I still remember when I was doing the Blue-Green Alliance stuff, and working with Sierra Club, you know, the countless numbers of boardrooms I'd walk into being the only brown person. And on top of that, you know, not being a policy person or someone with advanced degree, just an organizer, the number of years that I was described as being the rabble rouser with them with the bullhorn, you know, are the one who could give a speech or something like that, not acknowledged for any thing else: the critiques the strategy, the ideas, you know, that just recently begun to break away from that as I've been around more people and done more things. The environmental world is white, it's classist, it's racist. And, you know, it's gonna take time for that to really shift, you know, and I really just, again, admire and appreciate not just in Sierra Club, but all across the movement, the BIPOC folks and the Persons of Color that are holding it down and doing the work. You know, I look at groups like Southwest Workers Union in San Antonio that has stayed on steady course in the last few years just to look at the whole picture of just transition at community building, and taking care of their people in the whole, and I'm so grateful to see that that's a thing and that they're still carrying that mantle. Our membership in Sierra Club, as most folks who know the organization would know, is older and whiter, mostly male, mostly middle class, and upper middle class. So to have folks with these different backgrounds and demographics, working there, speaking loudly, calling for change, inevitably causes conflict and tension. And it wasn't until a few years ago, where I started some of the things I've been telling you today about building and understanding and culture building really started to take root because before then I was very similar to how I was at ASARCO, like, screw you, shit or get off the pot. And that wasn't really working, you know. And, for me, the solution to the pollution, as Bobby Seale said, of this problem of racism and classism in the environmental movement, it is dilution, but it also is people's uprising and revolution. There are so many folks out there who care about the future of the land, the air, the water, and our grid in Texas. And we need to do better to afford them opportunity to be leaders in this work. There's a belief in environmental circles that I do not understand at all, that only folks who have been around for a while who know the stuff, know the issues can be the ones that are the leaders and the chairs and the board of directors and things like that. And that's just way off base. You know, if we don't invest in cultivating new leadership and letting folks have the mantle to make decisions and make mistakes, then all those folks are just going to die off and run this thing into the ground, which is happening in a lot of ways. And you know, that's a that's a constant struggle for me and for others in trying to get the folks, who've held power in Sierra Club and environmental spaces for, many times more than 20 years, be willing to let go of that power.
John Fiege
Well, years ago, you wrote a Facebook post that you titled "Earth Day Reflection on Privilege in Environmental Justice Organizing, I want to just quote from you for a second, you wrote, "The world's a different place when you see a tower of death every day, from most every part of your city. When you can run your hand across your school railing and see yellow chalk like particulate pollution on your fingertips. When plant workers complain of excruciating pain and illness while showing you scars and tumors on their arms. I personally hold a tremendous amount of internalized anger and oppression inside my body, and my heart that fuels my organizing and at more times than I'd like to admit my pure hatred." While you acknowledge the importance of anger and organizing you go on to say, "but I've learned that anger only carries you so far, that without a crystal clear symbol of oppression like an 828 foot tall smokestack, a dying husband or wife or ill child, you have to rely on more than anger to build a movement. Humans have a history of forgetting our history, we move on." So this is just a short Facebook post, but it feels like there's a lifetime of experience behind it. Can you talk a bit about what you were getting at here, and how you've come to now view the relationship and tension between anger and movement building?
Dave Cortez
You know, more often than not, people are compelled to action in a fight or flight mode, run away or challenge without much thinking, you know, it's our natural reaction. And it becomes more and more difficult to reflect on what caused us to take action. And to think further ahead about what are we trying to actually build and do. As I've mentioned several times, we don't give people the opportunity, nor the space to have those kinds of reflections, and then listen to others and take that and actually use it to inform how we're going to do the work that we're setting out to do. I have a lot of guilt around the ASARCO work, because, you know, I had the opportunity to leave. And I did, and I feel like I left folks behind. Any community I've organized in, I carry guilt, because, you know, I've moved on with my life, every single one, it's a tough thing, you know, and it's a testament to the need to leave behind infrastructure as best you can. I believe, just like, we need social workers and firefighters and electricians and plumbers, we need organizers available at scale, to support communities in their--in this work and in their infrastructure, building and maintenance, you know, and without it, I think we just depend on people to do it. And that's not sustainable. You know, in through all of that, we can look back on things, we can learn together, we can look back on our--what we did our struggles, or our tactics or strategies, our demonstrations from the KKK rally to the Iraq war to Occupy, Save our Springs, whatever, and try and find ways to share that knowledge in alignment in, in spirit of the indigenous peoples of the land, and the culture and the and the lifeways that they've carried, and that we've moved away from so much. You know, it wasn't until the water protectors work that I became involved in, in 2016, that I really, and my brother, ___ Ward, really began to realize how much harm the anger was doing to me, spiritually and physically and mentally, it was always easy to get angry, and then use that, you know, but I found myself spread thin, people around me telling me I gotta slow down, I was doing too much, I gotta get some sleep, I couldn't sleep, I was drinking a whole ton, you know, and, through that work and through prayer and ceremony, and time in the lodge and around the fire, and in listening to various elders in the community, I was able to really, you know, let go of some of that and still hold it but let go of the tension and try to move towards, what is it I want to build in my life? What I want to work on in my life and, and bring into the world, you know, and without all of that I wouldn't have I wouldn't have crossed paths with my partner, we wouldn't have gone camping at the launch of a pipeline camp in West Texas and come across some sacred red tail hawks, a whole family of them, we wouldn't have had that trip together, we wouldn't have had our daughter, and all the things that have come since.
John Fiege
There's an Austin American Statesman article from 2016 that talks about you and Pete Rivera door knocking around various low income neighborhoods of color in Austin, talking about energy efficiency. And Pete Rivera is is the president of the Springdale Airport Neighborhood Association. And he's quoted in this article talking about educating low income residents on lowering energy usage and accessing energy rebates and subsidies from the city. He says "it's just a lack of us reaching out to people where they are, actually at their homes. Nobody has gone house to house." And part of the work you and Pete are doing here is countering that classic narrative from fossil fuel interests, that environmental protection, and a transition to clean energy will hurt poor people. But I also just love the sentiment of the story: Let's go house to house and start conversations with about these important issues. An that's what you've been talking about. It's just, like, true community organizing and having known you for a long time now, I'd say that this act of walking around the neighborhood and starting conversations, which I've done with you and I've seen you do it, and, you know, learning from people and sharing your knowledge, I'd guess that that's kind of your your sweet spot and where you're happiest. What do you think about that?
Dave Cortez
Going door to door in a way where you're not just, like, trying to get something quick and hit a certain quota of doors in a certain amount of time, otherwise some, you know, aspiring politician or political staff member is gonna get on your ass because you didn't hit it, you know, like, it's wonderful man. It's just talking, you know, it's been around people getting to know and through it all. The more tactics and cards you have up your sleeve to deploy, you know, about, I'm talking about the houses in the neighborhood going up for sale, or the loose dog you saw or the chickens running around, or whatever it is, you look around, you know everything around you, and that's all of your material to use to chat, you know, to get to know somebody. It's just, it's beautiful it's authentic. And people may invite you into their home, before the pandemic, they might invite you into their home, they might offer you some food, or water, show you around, I mean, you could spend an hour in one house, on one door, and learn so much there. And it's just such a wonderful experience that I want as many changemakers as possible to be afforded the opportunity to do that. And then to come together and talk about what that experience is like, what they learned, you know, and then to strategize together about how do we actually, you know, as strangers in the neighborhood that don't live there? How do we make a plan to cede the space to these folks and support them, so they're the ones going around, like Pete, and talking to their neighbors, and building some infrastructure, like the Springdale airport Neighborhood Association, and help them you know, supply their meetings, if we need transport, to their meetings, food at their meetings, you know, whatever it is. And, you know, the wild part about all that work is, technically it wasn't really, you know, what I was "funded to do" by the Beyond Coal campaign, I was supposed to shut down a coal plant.
John Fiege
Right, I always noticed that you always had your hands in so many different things. And I would always be like, "this isn't a Sierra Club work." This is like, you're involved in so many different organizations, and so many different people and communities. But that's, that's what community organizing is.
Dave Cortez
That's right. And that'll be my role going forward and talking to funders and other other folks about, you know, defining the "work." You know, I made the case, and I laid it out for the coal people in Sierra Club, why that strategy mattered, in terms of their city council votes and the need to build a base in city council districts where we had, you know, sometimes 10, or fewer members, we had a strategy for actually doing it, and doing it successfully. And we did it in a way, John, that, yeah, in the end, we got those council members to vote against the coal plant and vote for clean energy and all that stuff. Sure. But all along the way, we were providing direct help to people, and letting them know about smaller trash bin sizes they, they could easily, we could help them apply for, in some cases, they could save $30, $40 a month, right then and there. Or get an additional recycling bin, then learn how to recycle.
John Fiege
That's awesome.
Dave Cortez
We helped advocate for safer routes for the kids to go to school, so they wouldn't have to crawl under the train to go to school. And most visibly, most known is the cleanup of the Red Bluff Vista. 50 years of illegal dumping of oil and construction materials, atop one of the most beautiful views in all of Austin. You know, working alongside Pete and his brothers, you know, as we did all this, we talked to people about what do you know about La Loma? What do you know about Red Bluff and the hill up there? You know, Hungry Hill, how do your kids get to school? You know, what do you think about that new house that got built, rent and things like that, you know, we're not talking about coal, we're not talking about solar, you know, we're helping on things that they need and that they know. And everything that we touched around there was highly successful because it was community led, it was the concerns of the community put front and center. The only thing that we couldn't confront and that I hold some guilt around is the displacement and gentrification because that is just a tsunami that's incredibly tough to fight back. And now we're seeing Springdale airport be targeted for some incredibly insane redevelopment.
John Fiege
Sp we're wrapping up here, how does environmental organizing in the environmental movement need to change to quickly and effectively address the mounting ecological crises we're facing around the country and around the world? What are you seeing from Texas?
Dave Cortez
You know, we need to acknowledge right away and be fully clear that even with our, you know, C3 and C4 and different funding pots, we need to acknowledge that the root of the problem here is the political system that is operated and controlled by fossil fuel and corporate interests, and is going to continue to prioritize the needs of those corporations and companies over the needs of the people, and that we need to defeat them. And then we can work backwards to figure out the strategies to defeat them. We're going to see that, you know, we need to do as much local work in Texas as possible, you know, cities, towns, school districts, around some of the positive things like clean energy, like bill savings and energy efficiency, the winter storm and the grid collapse has presented us an incredible opportunity to do that kind of organizing and talk about what people can do to make sure that they don't suffer from that, again, that we hold people accountable. And just continue to drive on this economic lens, front and center, and build as much infrastructure as we can, but really try to tie people back to that, that larger reform that's needed, and do so in a way, most importantly, that is bringing folks that generally participate politically every four years, or maybe don't participate politically every four years, focusing on those two constituencies to bring them into the fold. So when we have our local races, and our, you know, State Representative and Senator races, that those folks are activated, and they're ready to challenge any, you know, Republican or Democrat to hold the line on grid and climate and environmental justice issues. We're not doing much of that at all right now.
John Fiege
How has your relationship with the rest of the natural world changed since you were a kid growing up in El Paso?
Dave Cortez
I think it's oddly similar, and you know, like I said, my dad would get us out all the time, I talked to my daughter about how we used to, you know, throw open the garage door and bust out the lawn chairs and watch the rain every time it happened. And more often than not run out and grab the trash can lids and go for a ride down the curb down the water, you know, and make our way down to the creek or whatever the Arroyos that were out there, you know, our time in the desert, hiking in the dry Arroyos. You know, a lot of times as a kid, I was very, "I don't want to be out here," you know, typical kid stuff. And now I you know, yeah, I love it. And I, I'd rather spend my whole day in it. You know, I think I'm more in tune with the ecology and the impact of various things on our ecological balance from, you know, drought, to invasive species pollution, and, of course, the the changing climate patterns. But, more than anything, the deepest change would be something like my spiritual connection with that land. I wasn't aware of that as a child, you know, and even just giving thanks to the pecan tree that shades my house, every day. The value of that, you know, praying to the river and giving gratitude to the cottonwood trees, it's a core part of who I am now.
John Fiege
So I've asked you to bring a quotation to read that's been particularly meaningful in your journey in life. Could you end the show by reading what you brought and telling the story of its significance to you?
Dave Cortez
Yeah, let me let me start off by reading it and then I'll we'll get into it. This is from Audre Lorde, radical intersectional, feminist, poet and author. And it was written in the 1980s, in reflection on on the 1960s and Malcolm X. And the most famous part is the first line and then I'm going to read quite a bit more from the speech afterwards. "There is no such thing as a single issue struggle, because we do not live single issue lives. Malcolm knew this, Martin Luther King Jr. knew this. Our struggles are particular. But we are not alone. We are not perfect, but we are stronger and wiser than the sum of our errors. Black people have been here before us, and survived. We can read their lives like signposts on the road and find, as Bernice Reagan said so poignantly, that each one of us is here because somebody before us did something to make it possible. To learn from their mistakes is not to lessen our debt to them, nor the hard work of becoming ourselves and effective. We lose our history so easily. What is not pre-digested for us by the New York Times, or The Amsterdam News, or Time Magazine, maybe because we do not listen to our poets or to our fools, maybe because we do not listen to our mamas and ourselves. When I hear the deepest truth, I speak coming out of my mouth, sounding like my mother's, even remembering how I fought against her. I have to reassess both our relationship as well as the sources of my knowing. Which is not to say that I have to romanticize my mother in order to appreciate what she gave me, woman, black, we do not have to romanticize our past, in order to be aware of how it seeds are present. We do not have to suffer the waste of amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past, rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding. We know what it is to be lied to. We know how important it is to not lie to ourselves. We are powerful because we have survived. And that is what it is all about: survival and growth. Within each one of us there's some peace of humaneness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis, and is grinding all our futures into dust. If we are to keep the enormity of the forces aligned against us from establishing a false hierarchy of oppression, we must school ourselves to recognize that any attack against Blacks, any attack against women is an attack against all of us who recognize that our interests are not being served by the systems we support. Each one of us here is a link in the connection between anti-poor legislation, gay shootings, the burning of synagogues, street harassment, attacks against women and resurgent violence against black people. I ask myself as well as each one of you: exactly what alteration in the particular fabric of my everyday life does this connection call for? Survival is not a theory. In what way do I contribute to the subjugation of any part of those who I define as my people? Insight must illuminate the particulars of our lives." The first line in that, the single issue lives and single issue struggle, you know, I didn't learn about that until the House Bill Two protests at the State Capitol against, you know, Wendy Davis, and abortion restrictions in in Texas, and there were two young women holding a sign that had that. And that's around the same time, I was going through some antiracism training classes, and, you know, it fit, right, like, I was carrying a sign that said something about like, we don't have to take this crap, the same people behind this are the same ones that are polluting our air, you know, putting our kids in prison, you know, whitewashing history, etc. And so it was exciting to learn about Audre Lorde, and what, what was she talking about? Deeper than that, as you hear in the in the quote, it's, you know, one, we have a responsibility. And two, we have so much that we can tap into that we ignore. And if you go on to read the whole piece, she'll get in even deeper, something that should resonate with a lot of activists around, and lefties around the country, you know about our own infighting about how much we do to minimize each other's identities and contributions in order to prop ourselves up, or make us more of a visible or vocal authority in a space. There's so much to unpack from this. And for me, it's part of that deeper level of power and culture shift that we need to get to, when so much of what I've talked to you about today, and changes in the movement is more of like, how do we march towards that place?
John Fiege
Yeah, well, what often strikes me about these brilliant thinkers and writers and reading their work decades after it was written or said, it often strikes me how present it feels.
Dave Cortez
And not just the relevance in that way, but I mean, she's reflecting on 20 years before then. Right? It's 40 years since she said this and wrote this. And you have, like, you know, I really grill into people as much as I can: reflect on the amount of time that it has taken the right wing and the corporate elites to build their power, and what pushed them to. They responded to the 1960s. They responded to Nixon signing, you know, the Clean Water Act and all those other transformative Earth policies, Earth Day policies, and they took their time, and they used the culture wars, the Christian conservatism, and the right wing stuff in the 1980s to build a formidable machine and base and they're reaping the benefits now.
John Fiege
Well, thank you so much. This has been amazing.
Dave Cortez
I'm grateful for the space and the time to process some of these things and talk about them.
Outro
John Fiege
Thank you so much to Dave Cortez. Go to our website at ChrysalisPodcast.org, where you can find the quotation Dave read from Audrey Lorde, plus book and media recommendations.
This episode was researched and edited by Gabriela Cordoba Vivas. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.
If you enjoyed my conversation with Dave, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Contact me anytime at ChrysalisPodcast.org, where you can also subscribe to our newsletter and support us with a donation.
12. Dave Cortez — The Education of a Chicano Climate Warrior