Carolina Ortiz: A Conversation on Environmental Justice and Organizing

On a snowy Monday afternoon, we sat down on the fourth floor of the library to have a conversation with Carolina Ortiz, a member of COPAL’s (Communities Organizing Latine Power and Action) leadership. Not knowing what to expect, we organized our space and entered the Zoom call. What followed was a fascinating and enlightening conversation about intersectionality, organizing, and Environmental Justice across the Twin Cities.

Carolina has been a member of COPAL since 2018 and started as a member of the communications team before moving to her current position as the Associate Executive Director of COPAL. She is originally from Mexico but moved to the Little Earth community of East Phillips to escape extractive mining and environmental injustice in Mexico. It was her relocation to Little Earth, a community that is also impacted by significant environmental injustice and pollution, that brought her to action. Carolina said that while much of her work with COPAL focuses on legislation and advocacy, she feels strengthened by the background that she has with Environmental Justice. Carolina explained to us in detail the process of legislative work for COPAL and how she helped aid in passing the Cumulative Impacts and Drivers Licenses for All bill which allows all Minnesota residents to apply for a driver’s license despite their immigration status. However, these are not Carolina’s only skills as an executive director for COPAL; she also excels in public speaking and engagement. She uses her skills to foster relationships through COPAL with the wider community–work that we had the unique opportunity to learn more about.

After a brief greeting, one of the first things we discussed was COPAL, and how Carolina came to her work and what it typically entailed. She followed up by highlighting the breadth of social justice initiatives that COPAL supports. She emphasized how COPAL has been a vehicle for Environmental Justice through communication, programming, and education. Environmental Justice initiatives have not been historically accessible to the predominantly BIPOC and Spanish-speaking communities that COPAL works with, so through many ways of engagement, COPAL can broaden the scope of local Environmental Justice. We discussed a variety of programming that COPAL does to make Environmental Justice approachable. COPAL leads programming such as college tours for BIPOC students, leading delegations , and organizing outdoor community events and radio shows that focus on removing language barriers that are present with Latine and wider BIPOC communities in the Twin Cities. We also discussed the legislative action aspect of COPAL, with their campaigning for and community involvement in bills such as the Cumulative Impacts Bill and Drivers Licenses for All.

From this discussion, we pivoted to her motivations. She spoke on how inaccessible scientific language makes it impossible for community action, and how strongly she felt about this due to her experiences becoming ill and fleeing pollution in Mexico. She connects her life experience to her current work as a means to shield others from environmentally unjust practices through community action. Many of her fellow team members at COPAL have shared similar experiences of environmental injustices leading to displacement. These shared experiences have led to much passion from within COPAL–a feeling that Carolina has found to be something that provides a good mentality for change but also requires balance. She entered the Environmental Justice space with a lot of passion within her–she wanted to see action and immediate transformation but realized that this was not something feasible on a strictly individual level. She came to realize the importance of identifying the skills within yourself that you could offer, and how those skills, when applied to a team that can enhance them, would allow for greater effectiveness when fostering real change. The community she found in COPAL is a massive drive for her, considering her team and members are the main reasons she continues to feel passionate and supported in the work she does within COPAL. By working closely with members of her community, she can gather feedback and see how policy can lead to direct community impacts. Seeing change ripple through her community is one of many factors that keep her committed to the cause she is passionate about and fighting for.

With her work in Environmental Justice and community outreach, we asked about what barriers she has faced throughout her journey. She noted that her work requires her to be continuously creative. Currently, most information regarding local environmental injustice and pollution is conveyed in English, a major barrier for the predominantly Spanish-speaking community that she is trying to help. Outreach to these communities is another challenge, even with  COPAL’s excellently crafted and resource-abundant website. If a community member does not have viable access to the internet, This information and resources are lost to them. That is why COPAL focuses on many different forms of outreach, like the previously mentioned radio show and community events. Another barrier that Carolina faces within her work is funding.

With our final question, we asked Carolina about what she would recommend for young activists who want to get involved in Environmental Justice work. Carolina drew from deeply personal experiences in her response. When she was nine years old, she witnessed her brother being deported, an experience that is familiar to many members of her community. This occurrence, understandably hard to process, sparked passion from within her to see a concrete change to stop injustices such as this from happening. However, Carolina realized that the scale of change she wanted to see was not something she could undertake on her own, so she needed to find a space where the skills that she had could be utilized in harmony with others, which is something that she found with COP.

In all, this conversation was a particularly enlightening one that featured many important takeaways. We walked away with a better understanding of how community organization and outreach can occur–not necessarily in the sense of one reaching out to a specific group to connect, but as a mutual exercise in learning and partnership. Her discussion of the intersectional yet direct work that COPAL does to better the lives of others in communities not just impacted by strictly environmentally unjust practices, but also the dangers of a society based on white supremacy, land theft, and corporate overreach. Her retelling of the stories that motivate her to do the work she does functions as a call to action–we all have our environmental stories, it’s just a matter of what we do with them. In a world where environmental injustice and systems of oppression seek to disempower us through separation, the necessity of Carolina’s advice is more important and poignant than ever before.