Interview of Mike Hernandez
UCLA Library, Center for Oral History Research, University of California, Los Angeles Interview of Mike Hernandez

Transcript

SESSION ONE (August 8, 2018)

NICOLAIDES:

So this is Becky Nicolaides, and I'm here interviewing Mike Hernandez on August 10, 2018, at his home in Los Angeles. So the first question that we always start with is, when and where were you born?

HERNANDEZ:

I was born in Pleasanton, California, on December 4th, 1952.

NICOLAIDES:

And that's in--

HERNANDEZ:

Northern California, by Hayward, San Jose area.

NICOLAIDES:

So can we kind of start out by you telling me a little bit about your family background?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, and that's kind of important to--on my mom's side, I'm an Espinoza. She's Beatrice Espinoza and my grandfather is an Espinoza, and in California, the Espinozas are part of the actual trust, the initial trust that was given by the King of Spain to create the first city in San Jose. So the Espinozas have a long history in California, is what I'm trying to say. My mom met a soldier at Fort Ord and she was five years older than him, and they ended up running away and getting married. My grandfather basically disowned my mom for doing that. We separated from the family. She came from a family of ten. And my grandfather was so upset at her that he took her out of his will and everything else. So all the other relatives ended up with their own homes up in Fremont, because that's where my grandfather's land was. In fact, the Fremont hub, the city of Fremont, was built on his orchards, my grandfather's orchards.

NICOLAIDES:

On your mom's side.

HERNANDEZ:

On my mom's side. When I say my father was five years younger, I found out after the fact. I didn't understand the dynamics of their relationship. So they got married, and then two years later, my brother was born. Now, my brother was born in Austin, Texas, and he was born two years after me. I don't remember Austin at all, so I was a baby at that time. And my sister was born in Oceanside, so we came back to California. Now, I don't know why we came back to California, except we ended up in Tijuana without my father, and it was my mom and three kids.

NICOLAIDES:

So what year did your parents get married?

HERNANDEZ:

I couldn't tell you when they got married. I don't know that right now. So those first four years of were kind of--I don't remember them, except I remember being in Tijuana. I'm the oldest. So we found ourselves in Tijuana.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you know where your father was at that point or what was happening?

HERNANDEZ:

I know that I had a baby sister, and this all came out afterwards when I was in rehab. I'm an adult dealing with my addictions and going through therapy. I also remember that my baby sister, Faith, and I had forgotten that. I had stuffed it and forgotten all about it, and the reality was I think that was the first time my dad had left us. Years later, I met my dad as an adult, retired, and I asked him about it and he said they drove from Sunnyvale down to Tijuana and my mom fell asleep on the baby and the baby died of suffocation. I was holding the baby. I remember me holding the baby. So that was kind of a shocker for me when that came back. But that happened in rehab that I made that realization. That's when my father first left us, I remember my father first leaving us.

NICOLAIDES:

Around that--

HERNANDEZ:

Around that time.

NICOLAIDES:

--incident.

HERNANDEZ:

We were left to live with a great-aunt on the Espinoza side, and I was there till about I was, I guess, eight, nine years old. We lived there.

NICOLAIDES:

In Tijuana?

HERNANDEZ:

In Tijuana.

NICOLAIDES:

So just to back up a little, can you tell me a little bit about your father? Like, where was he born and what was his background?

HERNANDEZ:

He was born in Texas, Austin, Texas. And you should know I met my dad about ten years ago, and we have a new relationship, so I got all this history from him, trying to figure out what was going on back then. He basically explained to me that, one, my mom was five years older than him, so he was twenty-one, she was twenty-six; two, my grandfather hated him with a passion, so they couldn't live up in Pleasanton, and that's why they went to Texas. He was an orphan himself. His parents had died in an automobile accident or a fire of some sort, and they were brought up by a great-grandmother or great-aunt or something. And I say "they" because there were several of them, my Uncle Eddie (Carrion) and my Uncle Charlie (Carrion). I found out they weren't uncles by blood, but they were uncles because they all grew up together. So when they came to California, they all came to join the military. My Uncle Charlie ended up in the Marines at Camp Pendleton. My dad ended up at Fort Ord. And my Uncle Eddie ended up no place, but he had polio, and he thought--but in his mind, he served. When my Uncle Eddie died years later, that's how I found my dad again, because my Uncle Eddie put me in charge of his life before he passed, and so I had him in hospice and I would visit him every week and we would talk and I got to find out more about my history on my dad's side.

NICOLAIDES:

So these were like really close friends of your father, you think?

HERNANDEZ:

They grew up together, and in their mind, they're cousins. In their mind, they're cousins.

NICOLAIDES:

And this was in Texas? Or where was this?

HERNANDEZ:

In Austin, Texas.

NICOLAIDES:

So they grew up in Austin?

HERNANDEZ:

They all grew up--

NICOLAIDES:

And your dad, did he come from like a--was it a working-class background or what was his--

HERNANDEZ:

It was a poor family. They were poor.

NICOLAIDES:

The people that were raising him?

HERNANDEZ:

That were raising him. I don't know much about him except what he told us or told me, shared with me.

NICOLAIDES:

Like, do you know much about your dad's earlier life in Texas or like what he did before he came out to California?

HERNANDEZ:

No. He was a bright man. He was an electrician. He came back, and I guess I was ten, eleven, and he came back and tried to be super dad, lasted about six months, and then he left us again. And he had several marriages since then, and so I have these half brothers and half sisters who I've met and they're all part of my family now. We're very close. But I met them as an adult, like eight, ten years ago. And on my mom's side, I had a brother and a sister still. But my dad basically left us. My mom decided to come to Los Angeles, and it took almost two years for us to get here from Tijuana.

NICOLAIDES:

So let me stop you on that point, because I definitely want to hear about that, but just kind of going back to this really earlier family history, so you were saying that your mom's side of the family wasn't very welcoming of your father. What was driving that? Do you know?

HERNANDEZ:

He was a Texan.

NICOLAIDES:

So was it strictly that or were there other things at play?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, and my grandfather's a Californian and there was a Texan. There was politics between the Texans and the Californians because of--

NICOLAIDES:

Can you say any more about that?

HERNANDEZ:

Part of its history. I always laugh at the national politics that are going on and the issue of immigrants, and everybody forgets that California wasn't part of the union in 1776. The reality was we were our own country and there was a war going on between the French and Mexico, and the Californios kind of stood out, particularly in Northern California. And my grandfather was part of that legacy. The reality is when I looked up the Espinozas, they used to hang them in El Monte. They were hanging Espinozas, because they had the audacity to think they were fighting for their land.

NICOLAIDES:

So they were in the Californio group.

HERNANDEZ:

That was kind of that era. That was kind of that era. And so you don't marry a Texan. That was part of that issue with my grandfather.

NICOLAIDES:

Even into like--because this is into the mid-twentieth century by this point, right?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, but my grandfather basically owned orchards and he had farm workers and they basically were developing the land, and he had his own feelings. He was the patriarch of the family. I was born and I got to meet them, but I don't remember them. But I just know that something happened and my mom felt that she had to leave the family, and it took years for them to put that back together.

NICOLAIDES:

Did she ever talk to you about that, that decision? I'm sure that must have been difficult for her.

HERNANDEZ:

No. Well, Tijuana was difficult for the family. I mean, we were poor. I slept on a dirt floor, and it's not just a story; it was real. I had issues with a foot that would wake up crooked every morning and it was very painful, and they used to kind of bring it down. My mom got it in her head that if she got to orthopedic hospital, they'd be able to take care of my leg, which is why she made the journey up here. The journey took so long because we had stops in Chula Vista and San Diego and Garden Grove, I mean, Oceanside, Garden Grove, Santa Ana. I mean, these were little steps we took getting here because we were staying at people's homes from the churches that were welcoming us and letting us get here. So I'm about ten years old when we end up on this block, nine and a half. The lady who basically my mom met through, I guess, Divine Savior Church, was a lady named Carmelita Rodriguez, and this lady welcomed my mom into her property. But they had a little house. It's on this block. It's three doors down, I mean down the street. She had a little house in the back that wasn't really--it was basically a living room and a bathroom. We had one of those little hot irons to cook, and my brother and I slept on the porch and my mom and my sister slept inside. And that's where we were with Carmelita. Now, Carmelita's important to me.

NICOLAIDES:

And this was here. So I'm going to pause that story because I want to, if it's okay with you, just kind of dig back a little, because I definitely want to hear about this process of coming here. So you said your father was born in the U.S., right, and your mother, as well, was born in California.

HERNANDEZ:

Yes, mm-hmm. And her father.

NICOLAIDES:

So they went back quite a few generations in California.

HERNANDEZ:

Some people think I'm seventh generation.

NICOLAIDES:

So I guess just going back to your mom's kind of move away from her family, I guess I'm curious if she ever talked to you about that. Do you know if she felt like she was having to kind of give up her family on some level?

HERNANDEZ:

I think she was resentful of her family. She was upset at my grandfather. She was upset at my aunts. At the end of the day, she thought she did well, because she succeeded beyond what they expected, and they were all coming to visit her. My mom became kind of like the person for them, so she took pride in that and that was important to her.

NICOLAIDES:

Did they-- because it sounds like your grandfather had land and some resources. I don't know if this is prying too much, but did they cut her off?

HERNANDEZ:

They cut her off.

NICOLAIDES:

They did? Financially?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, they all got a home except her. They all got a home except her.

NICOLAIDES:

So she really was kind of on her own.

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah. And I might be wrong here. I don't know, because they owned a house in Sunnyvale. That's what my dad told me. They owned a house in Sunnyvale, but I don't think my grandfather would have bought them a house. But he was in the Army and he was an electrician. He learned electrical work. My dad ended up doing electrical work for the Boeing 707s, the first flights, planes that were coming out of Burbank. He was an electrician on those planes. That's when he came back to spend some time with us. When I was like ten and a half, he was working in Burbank.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you know what he was doing during the war?

HERNANDEZ:

No. No, haven't had that conversation with him. It was funny, because my Uncle Eddie, who we all thought was in the service, see, when he passed, I was trying to get him his veteran's benefits, and my Uncle Charlie said, "Well, what are you doing?" I said, "Well, he was in the Army. He told me he was in the Army and he has all these benefits." Eddie was never in the Army. He was never accepted into the Army because he had polio, and I knew he had polio, I just didn't put them together at the time. So he didn't have any benefits, so we had to--well, we buried him, but I was trying to get him his veteran's benefits.

NICOLAIDES:

And is your dad still alive?

HERNANDEZ:

My dad's still alive and we still talk.

NICOLAIDES:

That's great. So can I ask you about when you were in Tijuana? I mean, do you remember much about that?

HERNANDEZ:

I remember we were poor. I came out on TV. I actually won a prize and I won a TV set. But we lived up in Colonia Libertad. It's up going towards the airport, and we lived, again, with a great-aunt. There was a soap company, and I ran into the house and I got the coupon out of the box and I ran back into the street because this car was coming with a microphone on top yelling to bring these certificates. And I took the certificate, and, all of a sudden, we're coming out on TV and we're winning a TV set, and my aunts and uncles. So that was kind of like a good thing I remember as a kid.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you describe like what it was like where you were living, and what are your memories of that?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, I used to take the bus every day--and you've got to remember I'm like five, six years old--from Colonia Libertad to the border and back, because I used to sell Chiclets. I used to sell little gums on the bus. I'd be walking back and forth on the aisle, selling gum to the people on the bus. That was kind of my first job as a kid. But I used to bring home maybe a dollar by the end of the day.

NICOLAIDES:

Just on your own?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, my entire life, I've worked. I was the oldest, and there was an expectation on my mom's side that I would work and take care of the kids, my brother and my sister.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you go to school down there?

HERNANDEZ:

I went to school down there. I went to Cuauhtémoc Elementary School. I've always been exceptional in math skills, but in Mexico, they teach the fundamentals of math, and I learned them. So I had no problems with math, never had problems with math. However, English was a different story. It was like the opposite story. You've got to remember, I'm this little kid who, I guess, is learning English, and then, all of a sudden, I'm immersed in Mexico and now I'm learning Spanish to the point where I forget English. And then I come back at the age of ten, nine and a half, and now I'm supposed to learn English again.

NICOLAIDES:

What was that like for you?

HERNANDEZ:

I got F's in English. I have a report card where I have five A's and one F, and the F was given to me by Mrs. Figer.

NICOLAIDES:

This is here?

HERNANDEZ:

At (Florence) Nightingale Junior High School. She was my English teacher.

NICOLAIDES:

Okay. So before you went to Tijuana, I don't know if you remember this, I mean, were you already speaking Spanish like here or in those early--

HERNANDEZ:

I don't remember. I just know that coming here, I was speaking Spanish. I didn't speak English. I spoke very little English.

NICOLAIDES:

But your sense was maybe that you had to learn Spanish when you were in Tijuana? Do you remember that, five, six?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, yeah, because everybody spoke Spanish.

NICOLAIDES:

So just that was it.

HERNANDEZ:

That was it. All my aunts, my uncles, everybody spoke Spanish. And my mom was working on this side of the border, San Diego, and so--

NICOLAIDES:

In San Diego?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, in San Diego. See, I try to explain to people I don't understand the border. See, part of my politics are we didn't put the border there, and the reality is my relatives are both sides of the border. I mean, I've had issues with the border politically because I didn't put it there and it has nothing to do with me and my family.

NICOLAIDES:

So when you say you don't understand it, what do you mean by that?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, today when I talk to people--and, again, the politics of today are very different from when I was a public officeholder, but I was defending immigrants' rights and I was fighting people who felt strongly the need for a border. I have a good friend, Bob (Robert) Hertzberg, a state senator now, past speaker, who's Jewish. Again, I grew up in a very isolated environment, so I didn't really understand anybody else except Latinos, Mexicanos, and Bob would explain to me the politics of the Jewish community and the importance of borders. I kind of understood from his perspective the importance of those borders being respected, and I was trying to get him to understand the issue from my perspective that we didn't understand the border because we go back and forth and everything else. The whole issue of immigration, arresting people, my mother-in-law, for years, had this fear that INS was going to pick her up, even though she was a legal resident. And she never became a citizen. My father-in-law became a citizen, but my mother-in-law never became a citizen. But she just had this fear of Immigration, and for people to be in this country with that kind of fear makes no sense to me.

NICOLAIDES:

I definitely want to hear more about that.

HERNANDEZ:

That's part of my politics. So me growing up and having that experience shaped a lot of my politics.

NICOLAIDES:

So you were saying your mom was going back and forth?

HERNANDEZ:

No. She worked in San Diego.

NICOLAIDES:

So you guys were living with your aunt, your great-aunt, in Tijuana, and your mom, what was she doing in San Diego?

HERNANDEZ:

She was a saleslady. She worked at clothing stores out selling women's dresses and stuff like that, different department stores.

NICOLAIDES:

And she spoke English, right?

HERNANDEZ:

She spoke English, mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

And then was she coming back and forth to see you?

HERNANDEZ:

No, she lived with us. She just worked in San Diego.

NICOLAIDES:

Oh, so she was commuting from Tijuana to San--

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, yeah, back and forth.

NICOLAIDES:

Every day?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, every day. No, no, it wasn't that much of a commute. It was a half-hour drive. But she did it every day. I mean, here in L.A., we drive miles and miles.

NICOLAIDES:

So it was pretty easy for her to do that?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, when she was a U.S. citizen.

NICOLAIDES:

And you were too.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, can you describe like what the border was like when you were on that bus selling the gum?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, no, it was just a border, crowded. I was a little kid. I think I was a hustler. I was a survivor. You know, my aunts let me go do what I was doing because I was bringing home some money, bringing home a little money, and everybody kind of tapped me on the back for working. I worked my entire life, and I think it started back then when I was doing that.

NICOLAIDES:

So were you doing that while you were at school too?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, I was going to Cuauhtémoc Elementary School, and, in fact, the school was part of the trip. So it was part of the trip.

NICOLAIDES:

So would you do this like after school?

HERNANDEZ:

After school and before school, going in the morning.

NICOLAIDES:

That's interesting. So just putting your head back in Tijuana at that time, do you have any memories of--like, did you feel like you fit in there in the school, having come from California?

HERNANDEZ:

I don't really have feelings there, except I had a sense of family there with my relatives, and we had someone always taking care of us, which is why my mom took us there.

NICOLAIDES:

Was it a close family?

HERNANDEZ:

I think so, but, again--and that's early sixties, late fifties. I mean, something like having a TV was something new. I mean, today, that's unheard of, but in those days, none of that existed. And sleeping on a floor, it was a clean floor because it was swept and wetted every night, but the reality, we were very poor. But I remember being at peace there.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you have any other memories that kind of stand out for you at that time with your family?

HERNANDEZ:

No.

NICOLAIDES:

Or, like, would you guys eat together?

HERNANDEZ:

No, we didn't have that kind of experience. No. I remember we had a lady--something happened in the summers. Every summer, I ended up someplace, because school was got out and all this other kind of stuff. There was this lady lived up, up in the mountains, and I remember I'd spent a summer there with them. I used to feed the goats and walk around the mountains by myself as a kid. But everything was dirt all around us. But I remember her taking care of us, because they separated me from my great-aunts and my uncles. But that was basically that experience. Then I remember coming back to L.A. because it took so long. And basically the churches used to feed us. We used to get boxes of food from churches.

NICOLAIDES:

This is here?

HERNANDEZ:

No, coming to L.A. When I say took a while to get here, took two years.

NICOLAIDES:

Oh, I see.

HERNANDEZ:

You would go into Santa Ana, a church would take you in, they'd bring in some food, boxed foods. My mom also used to tell a story that we got these Christmas gifts from this one church and my brother and I, we took them all, we gave them away, and she was crying. She didn't understand why. And we'd never got gifts, so the fact that they'd given us these gifts told us, well, maybe we should give them away, and that's what we did. But, no, we were definitely poor in those days.

NICOLAIDES:

And in Tijuana, it was a poor existence there, it sounds like, so you were sleeping on the floor. I mean, do you remember sort of like the everyday routine there at all?

HERNANDEZ:

No, I was too young, too young to really remember.

NICOLAIDES:

Like up through when you were eight, nine?

HERNANDEZ:

No. I always remember coming back, and I think we were in Santa Ana. And you've got to remember, changing schools all the time. So we got to this one school and I got a project, we're building missions out of cardboard, the California missions, and all I had was some black shoelace--black for the shoe, and I painted my mission black, thinking that that would be acceptable. When I showed up at school, all the kids were laughing at it and everything else because you could tell we were poor, and I remember that experience.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you remember why you would have painted it black?

HERNANDEZ:

Because that's all I had.

NICOLAIDES:

Oh, in terms of to paint.

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah. That's all we had.

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah, wow. When you were in Mexico, part of what I'm interested in is kind of getting a sense of your own feelings of the culture down there. Did you feel like you were kind of immersed in that Mexican culture with food or religion?

HERNANDEZ:

No.

NICOLAIDES:

Or was the family like--

HERNANDEZ:

I just feel we were part of the family. I don't remember parties. I don't remember gatherings. None of that happened there.

NICOLAIDES:

Were your relatives out working? Or at least from what you do recall.

HERNANDEZ:

I couldn't tell you. I couldn't tell you.

NICOLAIDES:

Was your mom, in those early years, were you guys involved with the church at all or religion?

HERNANDEZ:

Not really, but she made sure we did our communions and our baptism and our first communion and our confirmation. And again, the churches provided for us in many ways, the Catholic Church provided for us in many ways.

NICOLAIDES:

And your mom at this point, sounds like she was working hard and traveling and stuff. Was she political at all when you were young?

HERNANDEZ:

No, she wasn't. And she didn't drive at the time. At the time, she didn't drive.

NICOLAIDES:

So she was taking the bus to work?

HERNANDEZ:

I'm sure she was, yeah.

NICOLAIDES:

In San Diego.

HERNANDEZ:

She didn't drive till she came to L.A.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you remember the store it was where she worked?

HERNANDEZ:

Not in San Diego, not in San Diego, and not in Chula Vista.

NICOLAIDES:

Okay. Now I'm going to ask you about the migration to the U.S. You can maybe flesh that story out a little. So you talked about how it was sort of moving from one--

HERNANDEZ:

Place to another. But we knew we were coming here.

NICOLAIDES:

To L.A.?

HERNANDEZ:

To L.A.

NICOLAIDES:

To where? Like specifically this area?

HERNANDEZ:

Orthopedic hospital.

NICOLAIDES:

And then you mentioned the person who welcomed you into their home.

HERNANDEZ:

Carmelita Rodriguez.

NICOLAIDES:

Carmelita. Did you know her through the church then?

HERNANDEZ:

I don't know how my mom met her. I don't know how my mom met her, except that we ended up in their little house.

NICOLAIDES:

So do you know, I mean, did your mom--so tell me what was happening with your foot at that point.

HERNANDEZ:

You know, I would wake up and my foot would be locked in like this position, and so in order to get it out, they'd have to snap it, they'd have to readjust it. So it took like seven breaks to put the foot back in its proper shape. So this foot's been broken several times, and that all happened at orthopedic hospital, resetting it, resetting it, until it got to the level where it's at now.

NICOLAIDES:

When you were a kid, was it painful?

HERNANDEZ:

Very painful.

NICOLAIDES:

Could you walk on it?

HERNANDEZ:

I could walk with a cane, and it was very painful to walk, put any pressure on it. Then they would adjust it, and (unclear). So we come here, and I tell the story, because Vera Gallant was my fifth-grade teacher and became a friend. But Vera Gallant looked at me and said, "Well, you look like you'd be a good soccer coach." I'm this little fifth-grader from Mexico, right, speaking Spanish, and so she thought I could be in charge of the soccer team. That was like one of my first leadership assignments, and I remember Vera doing that, and she did it because I couldn't play with the kids. But she did that, and Vera became very important in my life.

NICOLAIDES:

She sounds like a compassionate person.

HERNANDEZ:

Oh, she was. I don't know how far to go, because all these people come back. They're all part of my story.

NICOLAIDES:

Sure. Actually, I wonder if you remember any more details about that actual trip from Tijuana here.

HERNANDEZ:

You know, just several stops.

NICOLAIDES:

So you were saying you stopped--what were some of the places you stopped?

HERNANDEZ:

We stayed in Oceanside with my Uncle Charlie, in Vista, California, for a while. I remember them, because they had two kids, and, I mean, that was heaven. I mean, they had kids and they had toys.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you stay there for a while then?

HERNANDEZ:

I'd say about two, three months. You know, every one was a little stop heading here, wherever they would take us in, I guess.

NICOLAIDES:

And then, like, was your mom working along the way?

HERNANDEZ:

My mom would look for work, day work, and then she'd basically (unclear).

NICOLAIDES:

And then were you going to school through that trek?

HERNANDEZ:

Whenever they could involve us, they'd involve us in school. But I don't remember school in Oceanside. I remember Santa Ana school, I remember the Garden Grove school, and I remember arriving here.

NICOLAIDES:

So you were staying long enough in those places to have--

HERNANDEZ:

Where I got enrolled into school.

NICOLAIDES:

--gone to school, maybe for a few months.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

And the whole trip took how long?

HERNANDEZ:

I'd say about two years. I didn't like school.

NICOLAIDES:

Why?

HERNANDEZ:

Because kids made fun of me. Kids made fun of me. And I was kind of caught between these two worlds, because I'm this American citizen speaking Spanish, you see. I always tell people, I mean, I'm bilingual and I understood the bilingual--but because I understood some English--I remember a day at Loreto Elementary School, and it was around the time John Kennedy was shot and something happened. Some people were dropping off some kids, and the administrator said some stuff to them, but basically called them wetbacks, an immigrant. And I understood everything he said, and in my mind, I told myself, "I'm going to change that." I believe I developed a social conscience at that moment, and it was because I knew something they didn't think I knew, I saw something they didn't think I saw, and I understood something that I didn't think they understood, and I felt I could play a role getting people to understand that. And I'm like this fifth-grader thinking that way.

NICOLAIDES:

That was at Loreto?

HERNANDEZ:

That was at Loreto.

NICOLAIDES:

I'm curious about that school. Were most of the teachers there--well, let me ask you, because I want to understand more about what it was like around this area, too, when you arrived here. This is, like, Cypress Park, right?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

So this is, like, the Cypress Park area of Highland Park, or is it technically part of Highland Park?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, it's changed. I used to know this as Lincoln Heights, and the boundaries kind of change. Cypress Park I used to know as the area going beyond Figueroa, and this was Lincoln Heights. Then when you pass Marmion Way, Pasadena Avenue, that becomes Highland Park, and if you go up Marmion Way, that becomes Mount Washington. So we're kind of like in the middle of that area.

Now, Loreto was special, because what I remember is Mrs. Wright, she, for whatever reason, decided she liked my brother and was going to help him, so I remember Mrs. Wright as someone who was trying to help. Then I remember Mrs. Avery, and Mrs. Avery was my little sister's teacher. So for some reason, I remember all three of those teachers very well as caring teachers, as people who were taking care of us. You should know that I got beat up a lot at Loreto by the older kids, and, again, because I spoke Spanish and there was this thing between white kids and brown kids.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you tell me like what was the demographics at the school?

HERNANDEZ:

It was like largely, I would say, Latino, with some Anglo kids, poor Anglo kids.

NICOLAIDES:

Like roughly what percentage? Just ballpark.

HERNANDEZ:

I couldn't tell you those things back in the day. I know that when I graduated from Loreto, went to Nightingale--that's the junior high school a block from here, Nightingale Junior High School--first day of school, I walk in, I have no idea what's going on and there's all these big kids, and I get beat up in the bathroom. And supposedly I got jumped into a gang, the Avenues. I didn't want to be in a gang, but I got jumped into a gang by walking into a bathroom, and that meant that if I wanted not to be in the gang, I had to get jumped out that afternoon. I had to walk into that bathroom and get beat up again. But at Nightingale, I mean, here's a seventh-grader--and that was the freshman class in those days--and I'm watching these kids fighting these teachers. I mean, they're throwing blows, and these were like the ninth-graders actually fighting with the teachers. So Nightingale was a gang-infested school.

NICOLAIDES:

Is it white, Latino?

HERNANDEZ:

It was the Avenues. It was the gangs. And, again, Lincoln Heights had the Jokers. The CP Boys were just evolving in Cypress Park. The Avenues kind of controlled this turf. And you had the Undertakers in Highland. So all the gangs were part of my growing up, and so part of Nightingale's experience was doing well in math, doing terrible in English, and dealing with all this other stuff. So I grew up on this block called Arroyo Seco, and Arroyo Seco's five blocks, and the kids here, the older kids that used to jump me and make fun of me, ended up becoming my protectors. But the Arroyo Seco boys were athletes. They played baseball, they played football, and we had the older kids, high school kids, and younger kids and guys who were in the service. So we all hung out together to protect ourselves from the gangs, and so that was part of growing up here.

NICOLAIDES:

And it was all Latino?

HERNANDEZ:

Those were all Latino gangs.

NICOLAIDES:

Why were they making fun of you? Was it your foot again?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, it was a combination of things. The foot was part of it. Now, in the seventh grade, my foot's fixed, and I learned to run. For whatever reason, I ended up being one of the fastest kids at school, and I like to tell that story, because I think I was fast only because, all of a sudden, I could run and I'd been dying all my life to run. So the reality is I became a pretty good athlete at Nightingale Junior High School, and that athleticism led me to more opportunities. When I was at Franklin High School, I was playing baseball and football, and the coaches are making me run track. I didn't want to run track, but they're making me because they thought that'd be good for football. I got all those opportunities because the coaches knew me as one of the kids from Arroyo Seco, and that's all they needed to know.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, so it had a reputation of being the athletes' group?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, we were all athletes at Lincoln and at Franklin.

NICOLAIDES:

Was it hard for you to run or it felt good?

HERNANDEZ:

My foot was totally healed. I could run.

NICOLAIDES:

You could put all that pressure on it?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm. So in high school, I ran track. I was a sprinter. And I played baseball and I played football. But I was kind of protesting all the time. I created the first UMAS chapter at Franklin High School, United Mexican American Students, and our sponsor was a teacher named Ricardo Romo. He was recruited by the principal named Mort Tenner. Now, Ricardo Romo might be someone you want to interview. But Ricardo Romo ended up becoming the provost and the president of basically San Antonio, Texas, Austin, Texas Aamp;M or Texas--he's the president of the college. But I was known as a "Romo boy" at Franklin High School.

NICOLAIDES:

So he was a teacher there then?

HERNANDEZ:

He was a teacher there. He set the pace for Jim Ryan to break the four-minute mile. He was also an athlete, which is why Mort Tenner recruited him. Now, I'm sharing you the story of Mort Tenner. He was the principal at Franklin who I first met at Lincoln High School, but he was the acting principal at Lincoln High School the summer between my ninth and tenth grade, and he basically was kicking me out Lincoln, telling me he never wanted to see me again, and it's because I got in a fight over the lady upstairs. I got in a fight over my wife in high school, tenth grade, and so the principal basically kicked me out of Lincoln and I ended up going to Franklin. I think he wanted me to go to Franklin because he was going to be the principal at Franklin. So to make a long story short, Mort Tenner and I became friends, very good friends, after the fact.

NICOLAIDES:

So can you talk a little about your experiences more in school? Like if we even go back a little bit, when you first got here and you were going to Loreto, do you remember having troubles? I mean, it sounds like your English was coming back.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

Okay. I'm going to back up even more to when you were hopscotching, making your way from Tijuana here. Was it hard for you going into an English-speaking school, or what was that like? Like in Oceanside or some of those other--

HERNANDEZ:

It was. Like I said, Mrs. Figer made fun of me because I didn't speak English.

NICOLAIDES:

Where was this?

HERNANDEZ:

That was at Nightingale Junior High School in the seventh grade.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you remember even further back, like before you came up here?

HERNANDEZ:

No.

NICOLAIDES:

You don't remember too much? How about at Loreto when you were younger and just kind of adjusting here?

HERNANDEZ:

I think I was a quiet kid, and that's why the teachers kind of were trying to draw it out of me, get me to loosen up. But I think I was pretty reserved and quiet, and, you know, I was getting beat up and things were happening to me. I was the oldest in the house, and my mom had certain expectations for me to take care of my brother and my sister. It wasn't easy.

NICOLAIDES:

Tell me about that family routine, like what was happening. Your mom was--

HERNANDEZ:

She was working.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you remember where she was working?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, she worked at Nelson's Department Store on 4th and Broadway, she worked at an answering service in the evenings and on weekends, and she did the books for a bail bondsman.

NICOLAIDES:

This was all at the same time?

HERNANDEZ:

All at the same time.

NICOLAIDES:

Was this starting right when you guys got here?

HERNANDEZ:

From the very beginning. My mom was a hard worker, and I always tell people now what that meant. And, again, there's a reason why I became an addict and an alcoholic and there's a reason why I got sober. But as part of my sobriety, I share with people that I had a lot of issues of abandonment that I had to deal with, and for whatever reason, the alcohol and the drugs got me out of my skin and made me comfortable. But it all started because of the issues I dealt with from the very beginning as a kid. I just didn't realize that. So being sober, I used to take a lot of pride in telling people my mom worked three jobs raising three kids. I get sober and I tell people, but what that meant is I grew up without a mother and without a father, and that was my reality. But at the time, I took a lot of pride in telling people my mom was a hardworking woman.

NICOLAIDES:

So tell me about what were your responsibilities, like at home.

HERNANDEZ:

Well, I had to take care of my brother and my sister.

NICOLAIDES:

What does that mean?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, I remember one night walking to--I'm, like, this nine-year-old having to walk from here like five blocks down Figueroa to Gateway Market to buy some eggs, and I cried all the over there and all the way back, because this nine-year-old's walking in the middle of the night. My mom made me do it because I forgot to buy the eggs that day, and she came home--and eggs was pretty much a staple. Eggs and potatoes were something we ate every day, and there was no eggs, so she got all mad and she made me go do that, and it was the scariest thing in the world for me to have to do. But I did that, and those were the kinds of responsibilities. If my brother and sister got in trouble, I was responsible for that. So I was the oldest, and I had to take care of them.

NICOLAIDES:

So you were doing grocery shopping and making sure they got to school?

HERNANDEZ:

I made sure they got to school, and I protected them at school as much as I could. That's why I talk about Mrs. Avery and Mrs. Wright taking care of them at school.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you talk a little bit about what the neighborhood was like here back then, like right when you guys came?

HERNANDEZ:

Mixed. It was white and brown.

NICOLAIDES:

Half and half, roughly, or so?

HERNANDEZ:

Probably more white than brown. I remember, 1965, I vividly remember Eddie Ferris, sitting in front of his house with a shotgun, and I remember talking to him and saying, "Why do you have a gun? Why do you have a gun?" "As soon as one of them n--'s comes into this neighborhood, I'm going to shoot him." But we were in the middle of the Watts riots, and he thought he'd sit in front of his house with a gun waiting (laughs), you know. I vividly remember that conversation with Eddie Farris. Now, Eddie was a truck driver, okay. The Carters across the street--he changed the bulbs at Dodger Stadium. He worked at Dodger Stadium. But, basically, most of the neighborhood was white back in the days.

NICOLAIDES:

Most of it was white?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm. I was the guy who mowed everybody's lawns. I had three newspaper routes. I did the Sunday L.A. Times where I delivered them and picked up the quarters from underneath the mats. But I delivered the local newspaper, too, the Bulletin News. I sold papers on the corner after school, and I was painting fences and mowing lawns for everybody in the neighborhood.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you remember what it looked like physically? I mean, was it mostly single-family houses?

HERNANDEZ:

It was pretty much the way you see it now, pretty much the way you see it now.

NICOLAIDES:

Were there apartments too?

HERNANDEZ:

No.

NICOLAIDES:

It was all single-family homes?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm. We've always had that apartment building, was always there. There's one building on this block.

NICOLAIDES:

Was it kind of working class, middle class?

HERNANDEZ:

I'd say working class. I'd say working-class neighborhood.

NICOLAIDES:

So you said truck driver. Like, do you remember what some of the other neighbors did for a living?

HERNANDEZ:

Again, Carters worked up at Dodger Stadium. I don't really remember what they did, except they all owned their homes. A lot of retirees. That's who I did the work for.

NICOLAIDES:

Was it well kept?

HERNANDEZ:

I think so.

NICOLAIDES:

You were keeping up some of them, it sounds like.

HERNANDEZ:

I think so. I remember one night, I tell people, I came one night, had to be like 6:30, 7:00 o'clock at night. When I was out there, I was painting this lady's fence on Marmion Way. I kept on seeing these cop cars driving around and everything else. I had no idea what was going on. I come home, my mom's like freaked out. She'd taken the taxi and she came here, and they thought that I was abducted or something and they were out looking for me, and all I was doing was working. But for some reason, something happened, and they thought that someone had taken me. But I remember that day.

NICOLAIDES:

So it sounds like a pretty nice community, I mean working class.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm. When I like to look at my history, Nightingale's where I became an athlete, and I excelled at math, I failed in English, I got jumped in and out of gangs, but I started growing up. And part of that experience was my summers, and it's because my mom couldn't take--so summers, I always got shipped off to someplace else.

NICOLAIDES:

Did this start when you were pretty young?

HERNANDEZ:

In junior high school, because I got in trouble. I got in trouble for breaking into school and vandalizing my algebra teacher's classroom.

NICOLAIDES:

Your algebra teacher's?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, and it's because I was going to go to Lincoln High School to learn algebra because he could not teach it to me at Nightingale, and he felt that I was too advanced for the class and I didn't think that was a reason for him to put me down. But to make a long story short, me and a friend broke into his classroom. We vandalized it.

NICOLAIDES:

So you said you did it because you were angry about that?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm, about the teacher.

NICOLAIDES:

You wanted more math?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm, wanted more attention, I think. So some detectives came to my house, because I wrote my name on the wall, and they came to my house. My mom called, and she was working at an answering service. "What are you up to?" I hung up, thinking I could get away with it. She shows up in a taxicab, grabs some clothes, takes me to Greyhound bus depot and puts me on a bus to Lodi, California.

Now I'm about twelve, going to be thirteen, and I'm headed to Lodi, California, to my wicked aunt of the north, my Aunt Stella, who's the one (unclear), but my Aunt Stella took me in. That night, I must have got to Lodi about 10:00 o'clock at night, 10:30. I'm being woken up at 3:30 in the morning to go pick tomatoes, and I was picking tomatoes with my cousins. So I basically was working the fields, but it was a great summer because I learned to play baseball with my cousins, and I played baseball with them and learned how to swim and do all these other things. Another summer I spent with my Uncle Ruben, who was in the military. But that's where I got introduced to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, because my aunt, she's Korean, and she loved peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, so she would make them for the kids.

NICOLAIDES:

Was this in Lodi, too, or this was another--

HERNANDEZ:

I want to say they were in someplace by Fort Ord, because my uncle was still in the service at the time.

NICOLAIDES:

So was that the first time she put you on the bus, when you were about twelve, you said?

HERNANDEZ:

That time, yeah, mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

After the vandalism incident.

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, after the vandalism.

NICOLAIDES:

So how old were you then?

HERNANDEZ:

Had to be eleven, going to be twelve, either twelve or thirteen. Those were the summers I was moving.

NICOLAIDES:

And tell me more about the Lodi experience. Were you out there like every morning picking tomatoes?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, we picked tomatoes, we did apricots, we did oranges. No, we worked every day, and I remember like the first day, I made like $11.65 and it was like a lot of money back in the day. So I was making money. I was working every day. Other male cousins were around, so that's why I got into baseball, and I really evolved in sports during those summers.

NICOLAIDES:

What else do you feel like you got out of that, being up there during those summers?

HERNANDEZ:

No, no, no, I think I was growing up. I think I was growing up. And I wanted to come home afterwards. It was good for me. I mean, it was good for me that my mom did that. I needed that kind of discipline.

NICOLAIDES:

Wow. So let me ask you again about the community here, because it's interesting to me, because it sounds like you were describing, back in the sixties, let's say, maybe even before you started in high school, it sounded like a pretty decently kept neighborhood. I guess I'm trying to square that with the whole gang scene here. Like were the gangs already starting by the sixties, do you think?

HERNANDEZ:

Oh, yeah. No, they were here.

NICOLAIDES:

So that was kind of happening in this neighborhood of, you know, single-family homes and families.

HERNANDEZ:

And a lot of the gangs, I mean, I was growing up with some of the kids. There was a guy named Joe Luna, was basically the main guy in the Avenues, and he died. They used to call him Camel because he smoked Camel cigarettes, and he died of lung cancer. I mean, I knew the gang members and I knew the athletes.

NICOLAIDES:

What did the adults around here think about the gangs, your neighbors? Or was there a real awareness of that?

HERNANDEZ:

Oh, there was. Oh, there was. I just don't know what you could do about it. Some of the guys, Arroyo Seco guys I grew up with, ended up being LAPD officers, anti-gang guys.

NICOLAIDES:

That's another question I was going to ask, is about what was the sort of--how would you characterize like the relationship between the police and the community here at that time, sixties into the seventies?

HERNANDEZ:

I didn't really have a relationship with them.

NICOLAIDES:

Was there a feeling of--I know in some of the communities, sometimes those relations were on the tense side. Was there a feeling of that at all here?

HERNANDEZ:

Not for me. I didn't get that feel. I mean, the gangs dominated the neighborhood. I had that feeling. And there was many of them. It was very different.

NICOLAIDES:

Was there any like kind of abuse by the police here?

HERNANDEZ:

Not that I remember. I mean, no, it was gangs on gangs. I mean, I had to be about thirteen when I saw the first guy got shot, and it was in Cypress Park at a tire shop. I was running around with this guy, Tommy Maldonado, and, to make a long story short, we just saw him shoot this guy. And we knew we shouldn't have been there.

NICOLAIDES:

So you actually saw the shooting?

HERNANDEZ:

We saw the shooting.

NICOLAIDES:

And what happened?

HERNANDEZ:

Nothing. I disappeared. We disappeared.

NICOLAIDES:

Well, how did that feel for you?

HERNANDEZ:

Again, I think I was growing up. I was smart enough to stay away from the bad guys, but dumb enough to hang out with them to survive, and so they kept an eye on me and then the other guys kept an eye on me. I mean, to me, it was all survival in the neighborhood, trying to figure out how to make it through the next day.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, were you feeling other pressure as you were getting older to get into some of these gangs, besides like what you--

HERNANDEZ:

Well, I'll give you an example. My mom wasn't a seamstress, but she tried to make our clothes, and so I used to wear homemade shirts that everybody knew were homemade shirts. I used to have a crew cut because, you know, that was the easiest way to cut my hair and everything else. So that was part of the kids making fun of me all the time and me getting beat up. I had to learn how to survive on the streets, and that's what I was doing at the time. I don't think my son ever got in a fight, but I was in fights every other week as a kid.

Now, once I hit high school, things changed for me quite differently, because now in high school, I'm an athlete, I have good math scores, and I met a lady named Marguerite Archie-Hudson. She ended up being on the Community College Board of Trustees and worked for Speaker Willie Brown. But she was basically the executive director of the Upward Bound program at Occidental College, and Upward Bound was a brand-new program of the War on Poverty that was introduced. Basically, it was one of these affirmative action programs that was just starting, trying to figure out how to help, I guess, minority kids get into college. And so Marguerite looked at my grades and said, "There's something wrong here. Why does he do so good in math and then does lousy in English? Why is he getting along so well with all these other kids? He has some skills." So I remember walking in the room and her telling me to walk back out and come back in with my head up, so I must have been walking in with my head crotched, and she said, "Walk back in here with your head up." I'm in the tenth grade. She talks to me about this program, and basically what the program required is for me to spend ten weeks out of my summer at Occidental College. So they separated me from the neighborhood, and going to Occidental College was like an experience. I mean, it was like, whoa. These Ivy League schools, I mean, I never knew what Oxy (Occidental College) was about, didn't know where it was or anything, and it was right here in the neighborhood eight miles away. So I ended up going there for the summers. They worked on my grades where I did wrong, got me a pair of glasses. They figured out I needed glasses. Had a stipend to get me some clothes. So that's when I was introduced to the African American community, because Oxy, the Upward Bound program was three-quarters African American, one-quarter Latino. That was the breakdown. I excelled in Upward Bound, and so at the end of the three-year stint, I worked as an Upward Bound counselor. I was one of two students from Upward Bound who basically got accepted to Occidental College, primarily because of my math scores. And Occidental was the only college I applied to, and I got accepted, but if I hadn't been accepted, I wasn't going to go to college.

NICOLAIDES:

So, wow. That sounds like it was transformative for you.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm. Upward Bound was very transformative. And I got involved with more political--the teachers at the time were organizing. There was the beginnings of UTLA (United Teachers of Los Angeles).

NICOLAIDES:

So this was when you were still in high school?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, in high school, tenth grade, tenth grade. Eleventh grade, I'm supporting the teachers, and we had the "Blowouts" going on, the walkouts, and I'm organizing students to save our teachers. And Vera Gallant comes back in my life, and Vera Gallant was one of the organizers, original organizers for the formation of UTLA. She's marching with me and we're marching down York Boulevard and Figueroa and we're leading this march of students, and Vera's talking to me about Oxy and she goes, "You should look into political science." So Vera was going to UCLA at the time, studying political science, and she gave me all her political science books, and so I started looking at them. And when I went to Oxy, political science was my major. But I was organizing students there. I ran into conflicts with my coaches. But they basically said, "You can't be doing that stuff, so it's either going to be sports or you're going to do that." And I said, "Well, I'm going to do that." So my senior year, my probably most productive year, could have been my most productive year in sports, I chose not to play football, and my coaches made me very much aware of that decision.

NICOLAIDES:

How?

HERNANDEZ:

They took my letterman's patch off my jacket, basically told all the students I had nothing to do with them anymore. And I was an athlete, but I was a good athlete, so it was their loss, not mine.

NICOLAIDES:

So this was at Franklin then, right?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

Were most of the teachers white at that point?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah.

NICOLAIDES:

Were there any Latino teachers?

HERNANDEZ:

Very few. Ricardo Romo was recruited.

NICOLAIDES:

Okay. Right. Yes. (laughter)

HERNANDEZ:

Ricardo Romo was recruited. There was very few. And the Latino teachers that were there, I was closed to most of them, but what happened was at Franklin--Nightingale Junior High School, you've got to make a decision. Most of the Latinos went to Lincoln, and the blacks and Asians went to Belmont (High School), and the whites from Nightingale went to Franklin. So I was going to go to Lincoln, and I get kicked out of Lincoln, I end up at Franklin. That's how I ended up at Franklin. When I was in Upward Bound, some of my best friends from Upward Bound were from Lincoln, so I might have ended up in Upward Bound either way, because Lincoln High School was one of the places Marguerite recruited from.

So when I went to Oxy, they made it very clear that they were taking me because of an academic scholarship. I didn't have to play any sports. But when I get to Oxy, they want me to play sports. They wanted me on the baseball team. They wanted me to play football. And I'm like, "I'm not going to play." I could not have played and gone to school at the same time, because I had to time everything. It was hard being at Oxy because I did not have all the skills to be at Oxy.

NICOLAIDES:

So it was worry about time or energy?

HERNANDEZ:

Time management. Basically, reading all the books I had to read. I mean, it was an experience trying to survive Oxy my first two years.

NICOLAIDES:

Can we go back a little to high school? Because I was really interested when you were talking about how you had to choose between sports and politics. Can you talk a little more about what was happening with politics at that point? And you mentioned the Blowouts, so were there walkouts at--

HERNANDEZ:

Franklin?

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah, at Franklin.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm. Yeah, Franklin and Wilson.

NICOLAIDES:

Wilson, you said?

HERNANDEZ:

Wilson High School also. All the East L.A. schools had walkouts. What made us a little bit more different is not only we were walking out because of the student stuff, but we were also supporting the teachers. So we were organizing around the formation of UTLA and the teachers' union. And UMAS was part of my--I was like the chairman of the UMAS chapter, and we had an underground newspaper and we were doing all this, trying to make students aware of the Latino politics that were going on.

NICOLAIDES:

How did you, like, first get into that?

HERNANDEZ:

I think it was teachers who encouraged me.

NICOLAIDES:

Which? Like Ricardo Romo?

HERNANDEZ:

Ricardo Romo was one. There was another teacher, Lou (phonetic). I don't remember his last name, but he worked with me on the underground newspaper, helped me develop it. There were teachers who basically took an interest in us as students and got us involved.

NICOLAIDES:

Was there much of a Latino, like, identity kind of--

HERNANDEZ:

It was just evolving, just developing.

NICOLAIDES:

Chicano identity?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm, Chicano identity was developing. Those of us who were standing with pride, we were the minority at the time, but it was growing, and went at Oxy, it really grew up. So Ricardo Romo, for example, as a high school student, took me to Delano one summer to basically work on union contracts, farm worker contracts. Every farm worker, because they were all (unclear), had their own contract, and so we worked on helping farm workers sign those contracts with the union. I got to attend Cesar Chavez's daughter's wedding as part of when we were there working at Delano. But Ricardo Romo exposed me to that. I'm a senior matriculating to college, to Occidental. I'm already accepted. I know I'm going to go to Oxy. I'm working that summer as an Upward Bound student counselor and working with Oxy students and Latino Oxy students, and they took over the president's office. So I haven't even matriculated to college and I'm already demonstrating at the president's college. So the president doesn't even know who I am, and I was part of that takeover.

NICOLAIDES:

What were they calling for?

HERNANDEZ:

We had a set of demands. And, again, this was Kent State era and everybody was protesting, and our demands included we wanted one Latino faculty member, one Latino administrator. We wanted our numbers to increase. I was part of a freshman class of twenty-nine Latino students, and this is 1970. And Oxy's constantly reminding us that we're this experiment. They're letting us in. Okay?

NICOLAIDES:

How were they reminding you?

HERNANDEZ:

Every chance they got, they told us we were the minorities and we're not going to make it unless we apply ourselves and we do all this other stuff. But there was twenty-nine of us. Of that group, like twelve of them or thirteen of them were older transfer students that they brought in to help the younger ones, and I'm part of the younger ones. So by the time I graduated, I think, from Oxy, there was forty-eight Latinos. I remember being an Upward Bound student at Oxy and us having a meeting, and everybody was all concerned because there was the people lined up on the hillside, on Fiji Hill (at Occidental), and they said they were minutemen and that they wanted us to stay inside because we were all Latino and African Americans. So you've got to remember, it's '65. I mean, there was definitely an ethnic thing going on, and it was the whites against the blacks, pretty much, and I was in between that. The other thing that happened in Upward Bound, I was introduced to barbiturates, to drugs. I used to (unclear), the barbiturates. But that was the beginning of that introduction.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you talk about that at all? Was that just like part of what everybody was doing or--

HERNANDEZ:

No, no, no. I mean, the kids, we were all doing them.

NICOLAIDES:

This was in high school?

HERNANDEZ:

In high school. So I got introduced to them, barbiturates, in the African American community, but at the same time, in high school, I had a friend whose parents were in convalescent homes and they had all these barbiturates, all these buckets and buckets of pills. So I was taking barbiturates then.

NICOLAIDES:

So was this during those summers when you were at Oxy that that was happening?

HERNANDEZ:

Exactly. During the summers when I was at Oxy, that's when it started.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you live on the campus?

HERNANDEZ:

We lived on campus. We lived on campus. And, you know, it was all new to us.

NICOLAIDES:

And it was mixed. It was African Americans, Latinos.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm. And we'll go back and forth in the story, because I always tell people I wasn't supposed to be a councilmember. I was supposed to be a college dropout, high school dropout growing up on the streets. For whatever reasons, faith led me to be this councilmember. I wasn't supposed to go to an Oxy, but I ended up at an Oxy.

So I'm sitting there in rehab attending a lecture on barbiturates, and I'm on barbiturates at the time. I'm in rehab. They're trying to clean me up. Basically, because of my pains, I'm sitting there on Ibuprofen and I'm noticing this feeling, right, and, god, I remember this feeling from a long time ago. That feeling went back to Orthopaedic Hospital. That's when they started giving me barbiturates.

NICOLAIDES:

For your foot?

HERNANDEZ:

For my foot. But I remembered the feeling internally when I'm at rehab, so I said, okay, now I know where that started. And so the barbiturates were part of that feeling, dealing with the stress and trying to figure out all this other stuff, but it started there. It started there. And my activism also started then.

NICOLAIDES:

So you're talking about at Upward Bound?

HERNANDEZ:

Upward Bound, my activism--

NICOLAIDES:

During those Oxy summers.

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, and it's because I'm busy finding out about myself, who I am, reading about, you know, Ernesto Galarza-- (Telephone interruption)

HERNANDEZ:

So my activism started and my organizing started. So (unclear), like, Ernesto Galarza went to Oxy. He went to Oxy like in 1934. But he was an organizer of miners, one of the foremost organizers at the time. We asked him how he went to Oxy and he said he was there as a Mexican student, and we didn't understand that. No, he was there as a Mexican national student. Even though he grew up in Sacramento, Oxy let him in as a Mexican student, and that's how he got into Oxy.

NICOLAIDES:

Is he an American citizen?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, yeah.

NICOLAIDES:

Okay. But they considered him like a Mexican national?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, because of that thing with Galarza, and that's how he got to Oxy. Then I met a guy named Johnny Carmona who'd also graduated from Oxy in the thirties, and he was the center of the football team, All-American center, and that's why he went to Oxy. But prior to that, there was very few Latinos who went to Oxy. So we were all discovering ourselves, what we were about. I'm organizing with them. We had the Moratorium. I was one of the organizers of the Moratorium.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you tell me about that, how that was--so this was, at this point now, when you were a college student?

HERNANDEZ:

College, mm-hmm. Mr. Garcia, Lou Garcia, lives two doors down. He passed already. But Mr. Garcia basically used to take me to these community organizing meetings at Epiphany Church in Lincoln Heights, and that's when I met some of the first organizers of the Chicano Moratorium. But I met Rosalio Muñoz, I met Richard Cruz, I met all these different people who were activists in the Latino Movement, and I became part of that organizing team organizing for the Chicano Moratorium as an Oxy student also.

NICOLAIDES:

So were you involved in this at all when you were in high school?

HERNANDEZ:

It started in high school.

NICOLAIDES:

And so like '69?

HERNANDEZ:

Sixty-nine.

NICOLAIDES:

Sixty-eight, '69.

HERNANDEZ:

Sixty-nine, '70, '71.

NICOLAIDES:

And then can you just tell me more about like what you guys were doing?

HERNANDEZ:

So the Moratorium happened in 1970, and I had a group of farm workers, a busload of farm workers, who basically we were in charge of. Might have been two buses. But they stayed at one of the dorms at Oxy. We got Oxy to allow us to use one of the dorms so they could stay overnight and we had a meal prepared for them at a church in El Sereno, and then we went to the Moratorium the next day and we participated in the march. When that broke out and we had this big old riot going on, sheriffs' riot, I'm rushing people back into the bus, trying to get them into the bus, and then I watched the sheriffs go in the bus and start beating everybody up. I mean, I'm watching this violence.

NICOLAIDES:

Were you in the bus?

HERNANDEZ:

We got out of the bus. We got out, we ran. And then these people took us in their home and they let us stay there until it was over and we could get out. But I remember that experience. That was--

NICOLAIDES:

Did you get beaten?

HERNANDEZ:

No, I did not. I did not.

NICOLAIDES:

So these farm workers that you were--

HERNANDEZ:

They did get beaten.

NICOLAIDES:

Wow.

HERNANDEZ:

They did get beaten. I got to see that. And I should share something else happened to me while I was at Oxy. Three things happened. Because of my activities with the Moratorium, I'm convinced, one day, the FBI shows up and knocks on my door, says, "Are you Mike Hernandez?" I said, "Yes." They said, "We need to talk to you." They drove me to Westwood, to their shop over there, took my picture, my fingerprints. The reason they wanted to talk to me, someone was writing checks at Occidental College and signing them "Mike Hernandez." I don't know what that had to do with the feds, but that was that. So once they took my picture, they interviewed me, I said, "It wasn't me. Why would I be writing checks, signing them with name?" They sent me home.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you see evidence of this?

HERNANDEZ:

No.

NICOLAIDES:

They just said this to you?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm. I think that was the beginning of a file on me. Now, that's my own personal thought, but that had happened.

NICOLAIDES:

Was your sense that they were kind of making that up?

HERNANDEZ:

Yes, mm-hmm. And I say it very clearly, because a week later, I'm riding my bike from Oxy to my house--and my mom was staying here.

NICOLAIDES:

Here? From Oxy to here?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm, and I get pulled over by LAPD. I get pulled over by LAPD a block away from here. And I used to carry a switchblade. Eleventh-grader, twelfth-grader, right, carrying a switchblade, or Frenchman, I should say. The cops asked me, "What are you doing with that switchblade?" I said, "I carry it to protect myself." "Why?" "Well, look where we're at. We're in the middle of the Avenues." Said, "Do you belong to a gang?" "No." "What do you do?" "I go to Occidental College." Well, they gave me my knife back and they said, "Take care of yourself." They left me. About two weeks later, I go to the Will Rogers Park (Ted Watkins Park), Watts Festival. I'm at the Watts Festival, and out of nowhere--and used to work split shifts. So I was working for the phone company. So I'd work in the day, then I'd get a break, and then I'd go back, work at night. So I got out like at 10:00 o'clock and I'm going to the Watts Festival to meet a friend from Lincoln, this guy John Murillo, and he's at the park waiting for me. I get there. Soon as I walk on the park, all the sheriffs swarm me and I'm being beaten up with billy clubs and everything. I have no idea what's happening. There's a temporary booking station there. They book me, they take me to county jail, and they put me in a room with no windows, just cement.

By then, my mom is in the bail bond business and she's trying to get me out, and she has this attorney in the Superior Court. They're trying to find me and the system doesn't show me there, so it took a couple days. They found me and they let me out. Supposedly, a big Mexican stabbed someone with a switchblade, and that's why I was arrested.

NICOLAIDES:

Did they tell you this when they were arresting you?

HERNANDEZ:

No, no.

NICOLAIDES:

So they didn't explain what was going on?

HERNANDEZ:

No. I had no idea what was happening.

NICOLAIDES:

Did they just handcuff you or something?

HERNANDEZ:

They beat me, handcuffed me, put me in county jail, and they booked me in the trailer, so I was never booked at the county jail, but I was moved into this room with no windows. And then hours later, I don't know how long, they'd come and move me to another room with no windows, until they finally let me out. When I went to court, my attorney's telling me, "All you've got to do is say," when the judge asks me what's your occupation, "that you're a prelaw student at Occidental College. They're not going to ask you if you're guilty or not guilty because they're going to drop the charges, because the DA's not filing. But in the Southeast Division, the judges need to talk to you, and if you tell them you're a prelaw student at Occidental College, it's all going to go away."

So that's what I did. "I'm a prelaw student at Occidental College." And they dropped the charges. Years later, I'm sitting on the City Council and I'm trying to deal with some settlements on some people that were falsely arrested back in the early seventies, and the council's sitting there telling us that LAPD and the L.A. County Sheriffs have a 100 percent homicide conviction rate. I said, "A hundred percent? How is that possible?" Everybody who committed a homicide was convicted. And the two guys we were voting on the settlement were innocent, and that's why I was voting for them. I started questioning all the settlements of the cops, and everybody was asking why is he questioning the settlements, and that's because I basically did not trust the cops because of what happened to me.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you express that at that time?

HERNANDEZ:

I saved the city a lot of money, because we were sued in federal court because we supposedly were--the council was a rubberstamp. The city argued we weren't a rubberstamp, and the reason they were able to argue we weren't a rubberstamp is they used Mike Hernandez, because I was the one who was always voting no.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, did you talk about like what had happened to you?

HERNANDEZ:

Not public.

NICOLAIDES:

Why not?

HERNANDEZ:

You know, when you're an elected official, you don't--right now, you've learned more about my past than everybody else has, and it's because you don't talk about those things. The media's kind of fickle. You don't know what they're going to run on, you know.

NICOLAIDES:

Well, going back to--it's pretty amazing. You said those three things that had happened to you at Oxy. I mean, had you ever had, like, run-ins with the cops before that like in the neighborhood here?

HERNANDEZ:

I mean, I told you when I got arrested, I mean, for the vandalism at the junior high school, that was my only real run-in.

NICOLAIDES:

I guess I know I'd asked you earlier about your feelings about the police in the neighborhood before this happened.

HERNANDEZ:

I don't remember negative feelings with the police. I remember riding my bike to the Northeast Police Station so I could get my license, and the officers were very nice and gave me my license. I don't remember issues with the police.

NICOLAIDES:

So when this happened--well, I guess that was with the sheriffs, especially the thing at Will Rogers Park. Tell me your feelings or thoughts like when that was going on, if you remember. Do you remember, like, what was--

HERNANDEZ:

You've got to remember, it was a combination of things that happened, and I think they were all happening for a reason, and I think that reason was I was part of an organizing committee for the Chicano Moratorium. They had people there, and they were spying and trying to find them.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you have a sense of that at the time, that that's what was going on?

HERNANDEZ:

No, no.

NICOLAIDES:

What was going through your--

HERNANDEZ:

I put all three things together, because there was no reason for the FBI to go take my pictures and do that. And at the time, I didn't know they couldn't do that. And there was no reason for LAPD to give me my knife back, but they were aware of the knife. Then as soon as I showed up at the Will Rogers Park, I got swarmed on.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, were you, like, putting those together at the time?

HERNANDEZ:

I put them together at the time, and it's because the moratoriums hadn't happened yet.

NICOLAIDES:

Like, what did you do after that? I mean, did you kind of have support from other people, other activists that were--like, how did you kind of respond to all that?

HERNANDEZ:

It was more of a private thing. I mean, it wasn't a public thing. I mean, I thought I was lucky I got out of jail. I mean, I thought it was lucky I was still alive. To me, it was just another one of these experiences I had growing up.

NICOLAIDES:

So you didn't really tell other people about it at the time?

HERNANDEZ:

My wife knew, my mom knew, my attorneys know.

NICOLAIDES:

But none of the other, like, activists in the Moratorium?

HERNANDEZ:

No, no, no. I did not make it an issue.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you think that was happening to other people?

HERNANDEZ:

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you hear about that?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm. I did a big fundraiser here for a young man named Gordon Hall Castillo. Gordon Hall was falsely arrested for killing someone and was sentenced at the age of sixteen to San Quentin for the rest of his life, and we were a Free Gordon Hall Castillo Committee. To make a long story short, five, six years later, he was freed. But I was very much a part of that movement.

NICOLAIDES:

When was this?

HERNANDEZ:

I'd say early seventies. The Latino activist attorneys I had a relationship with. To this day, I have relationships with them. That was all part of me getting elected to City Council. I always had support of activist attorneys. I had support of the immigrant community, the immigrant attorneys. No, but those things happened.

NICOLAIDES:

When the arrest happened, you were at Oxy at that point, right?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

Did the school know about it?

HERNANDEZ:

No.

NICOLAIDES:

Were you worried about them finding out or anything?

HERNANDEZ:

No. Like I said, the charges were dropped. They never filed, so it wasn't something--

NICOLAIDES:

Did that change your opinion about the police?

HERNANDEZ:

It made me question them. I did question them. And, again, I didn't assume all cops were bad or all cops are good. Just now I had a reason to question them.

NICOLAIDES:

They actually beat you up, you said.

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, I got beat up.

NICOLAIDES:

Like on your head?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, no, all around.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you have any like permanent injuries from that?

HERNANDEZ:

No, nothing like that.

NICOLAIDES:

With a billy club?

HERNANDEZ:

With billy clubs. But, you know, you're just getting beat up. You're just getting beat up. Let me show you something

NICOLAIDES:

Okay. Should I pause it?

HERNANDEZ:

1986, '87, I was Occidental College Alumni of the Year. When I graduated from Oxy, I sat on the Board of Governors for three years.

NICOLAIDES:

For years?

HERNANDEZ:

For three, four years. I chaired the Annual Fund for Occidental College for two years, which is why I was selected as Alumni of the Year. I kind of share that because that's kind of the image the politician shows. It's not the image of the activist.

NICOLAIDES:

But it sounds like that was pretty intense for you at that time, the activism.

HERNANDEZ:

Well, and all of Oxy was, and it's because, you've got to remember, during the moratoriums, one of the people we had a lot of respect for was a journalist named Ruben Salazar, and Ruben used to write these articles every other Thursday, I think, that we used to look forward to reading because it described us. It talked about what it was to be a Chicano, what it was to be a student in these environments. So Ruben Salazar was killed during the Moratorium by basically a sheriff's projectile. The response to that murder was a coroner's inquiry. When was the last time we've had a coroner's inquiry? There was no DA, no investigation. It was a coroner's inquiry. We meant nothing. And he was so important in our community. A lot of people have a hard time understanding that. But those are part of the politics that kind of brought me to where I'm at.

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah. Wow. You know what? Here we go. So this is going to be kind of going back again to junior high, high school years. When you were living here--okay. Actually, here's a question. Did your mom buy this house?

HERNANDEZ:

My mom bought this house.

NICOLAIDES:

What year?

HERNANDEZ:

I bought it from her in '78. She had to buy this house, I'd say, 1970. I moved out of the house in 1969. I didn't live here when she owned this house.

NICOLAIDES:

So you were already at Oxy by that point?

HERNANDEZ:

I was already at Oxy at that point.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you remember much about her buying it? I mean, was that, like, pretty difficult for her?

HERNANDEZ:

My mom owned these houses next door.

NICOLAIDES:

Your mom?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm, these three.

NICOLAIDES:

Three?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah. She owned two houses on French Avenue and she owned this house.

NICOLAIDES:

Wow. How was she able to do that?

HERNANDEZ:

She bought that house by asking thirty-two people to give her $100, lend her $100, and she paid them all back one at a time. And then she made the monthly payments. She understood that real estate would provide her wealth. My mom was a very successful businesswoman. But she bought those houses on her own, because she was working three jobs.

NICOLAIDES:

So was she able to save or--

HERNANDEZ:

No, no. At the end of the day, she lost them through foreclosure. I wasn't in a position to help her.

NICOLAIDES:

With all of the houses?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

But not this one?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, I bailed her out on this one. My wife and I bought our first house when we were twenty, going to be twenty-one. We wanted to get married when we were in tenth grade, and our parents wouldn't let us. Her parents basically said, "The only way you guys are going to get married is if you get your B.A.'s, you have a job, and you're buying a house." So those were the rules.

NICOLAIDES:

So tell me a little about Sylvia. You met when you were--

HERNANDEZ:

In the seventh grade at Nightingale.

NICOLAIDES:

--in seventh grade. And what was her maiden name?

HERNANDEZ:

Castro, Sylvia Castro.

NICOLAIDES:

And what was her background, like, her parents?

HERNANDEZ:

Her father's a first-generation citizen. Her mother never became a citizen. Her father worked in the railroad, for San Fernando Road here at Taylor Yard for like thirty-five years. One of his original jobs was to pack asbestos for the railroad, pack it and put it away. But he was a laborer for the railroad. That consistency allowed him to buy a house up in the Montecito Heights. The city then basically used eminent domain to buy that house from them because they wanted to expand the roadway, and they ended up buying a big house on Griffin Avenue, which is down the street from here. But I met Sylvia and I used to walk her home. I first met her father because he took a shot at me with a gun, missed.

NICOLAIDES:

What happened?

HERNANDEZ:

I was up there riding up with my bike and I was throwing rocks at the--trying to get Sylvia's attention, and he came out with a gun and took a shot at me. I always joke with him, because I said, "You got me so mad, I decided to marry her." But, no, she's been my wife for forty-four years, the mother of my children, my best friend. She's gone through a lot through me.

NICOLAIDES:

And then you said her mom was a--

HERNANDEZ:

A seamstress.

NICOLAIDES:

And you said she was an immigrant from Mexico?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm, Mexico. But all three of their kids--her son's sixty-six. He was born here. So she's been here all her life. Her mother lived to be ninety-six and her father was eight-nine. And her father was my first father figure. Those people like him and Romo and Mr. Garcia, they were the father figures in my life.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you tell me a little about him and your relationship with him, with your father-in-law?

HERNANDEZ:

He was a hardworking neighbor. I used to meet Sylvia at Franklin High School at 6:30 in the morning because that's the time he took them to school. He drove them to school every day and picked them up every day, and so I used to meet her there at the school, Franklin. I took her to (unclear) dance. He drove her there. But he was very strict, a tough man. But I became his tax guy. I did his taxes. I read everything. I became their advisor, and we became very close.

NICOLAIDES:

At what age was that? I mean, that was later?

HERNANDEZ:

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. When Sylvia and I first got married, we were buying our house in Highland Park. Some friends of mine accidentally blew up my little Volkswagen that I had, so we didn't have a car. So I asked my father-in-law for a loan, and he loaned me like $2,000, but he said I was going to have to pay it back. I didn't have a problem. And we bought another Volkswagen, and that's what she used to work and I used to use my ten-speed. I used to ride a bike all over. Then what happens is, years later, maybe two, three years later, I'm doing well. I'm working for the phone company, making some money and stuff, and my father-in-law says, "It's time to pay up." So I'm thinking I'm going to pay him like $2,700. Well, he has me drive him to Montebello. I drive him to Montebello and there's this little mechanic shop. They have a Porsche in there. He wanted the Porsche. So I had to pay close to $7,000 for him to get that Porsche, but that's how I paid him back. But he taught me those kinds of lessons.

NICOLAIDES:

This is after you were married?

HERNANDEZ:

After we were married. But he taught me those kinds of lessons. They never really helped Sylvia.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you feel close to him?

HERNANDEZ:

I did. I felt close to both of them. I think they both loved me.

NICOLAIDES:

Could you talk to them and kind of share stuff, or what was that relationship like?

HERNANDEZ:

I used to talk to him a lot. Well, again, we used to talk in Spanish all the time. We had a good relationship. I never really had a problem with my in-laws. And they loved our kids and they took care of our kids when they were small.

NICOLAIDES:

Okay. So your mom was able to buy this house in about 1970.

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, but she was losing. I came in. I ended up carrying it, carrying the foreclosure, basically bought the house. And then there was another 7,000-dollar lien I had to clear up that she never told us about. It became a very expensive property.

NICOLAIDES:

When was this?

HERNANDEZ:

1980, '78, '80.

NICOLAIDES:

Okay. Late seventies.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

But for a time there, she owned the house and some other properties, it sounds like, so she was--

HERNANDEZ:

But she was leveraging everything real high. So she kept on leveraging to get this and she'd never lose one, and then when it all came down, it all came down at the same time. So she lost this house, lost the house on French, and she was losing this one when I came in to bail her--

NICOLAIDES:

When did she start the business?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, that's a different story.

NICOLAIDES:

Okay. I mean, we could put that off if you want.

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah. I think we should, because that's a whole--

NICOLAIDES:

Okay. That's fine.

HERNANDEZ:

And that would be the next chapter.

NICOLAIDES:

Yes, we will do that. But the other thing is when you were living here, junior high, high school, did you feel like in your kind of everyday existence, I mean, did you feel a kind of connection to Mexican culture, you know, in your everyday life? Like, were you still speaking Spanish at all?

HERNANDEZ:

I've always spoken Spanish.

NICOLAIDES:

Like, how strong was it in your home, let's say?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, my mom didn't speak a lot of Spanish, but her friends did, and my mom had a lot of friends. In the immigrant community, they take care of each other, and, like I said, when my mom asked thirty-two people to lend her $100 each, all those people worked at the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. They were all the waiters and the maids.

NICOLAIDES:

How was she connected to them?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, I don't know how she met them, but they would come over weekends when they had their time off and they would party at our house. But they were welcomed in our house, and we'd have a big bowl of beans and eggs. I mean, but every weekend, there was people at our house, (unclear).

NICOLAIDES:

Were they neighbors?

HERNANDEZ:

They were friends.

NICOLAIDES:

Just friends? Friends of your mom?

HERNANDEZ:

They were friends of my mom.

NICOLAIDES:

Were they immigrants?

HERNANDEZ:

They were all immigrants.

NICOLAIDES:

But your mom wasn't an immigrant.

HERNANDEZ:

But my mom wasn't an immigrant.

NICOLAIDES:

But she felt a connection?

HERNANDEZ:

She felt a connection with the immigrant community. She worked a lot with them and she introduced a lot of them, and people used to respect my mom, because the neighborhood really respected my mom because they saw her when she first arrived and then when she became, and everybody thought that she became something big because of these properties. This would be a good time to break for the next chapter, and next chapter I want to basically discuss my work with the phone company, my work with my mom's company, and how that all evolved into this--

NICOLAIDES:

Definitely. We'll definitely do that, but is there anything else, like--I'm kind of curious as to your connection to kind of Mexican culture when you were growing up here. Did you feel like that was still pretty strong in your house? Like, were you guys ever making return trips to Mexico?

HERNANDEZ:

No, no. And it's funny, because when people talk to me about Mexico, I talk about Tijuana.

NICOLAIDES:

Okay. Tijuana.

HERNANDEZ:

Right?

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah.

HERNANDEZ:

I went down further south, to Mulegé, with my daughter and son's school. But I took them to Mulegé, and that's in Baja California on the Gulf side, a small town. But I spent a week with them there, and I would go to San Felipe and everything else. My wife and I as a married couple basically went to Acapulco. We've been to Mérida. I've been to Mexico City. But never Mexico, and part of it was my grandfather, it was all my mom's family, they were never in Mexico. They were Californios. Again, I know it's hard to explain. (laughs)

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah, I know. That does make--well, I guess I was thinking more to like the relatives that you stayed with when you were in Tijuana.

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, and they were in Tijuana.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you stay connected with them?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, their connection, they were connected to Lodi, my aunt in Lodi. They were very close with my Aunt Stella and with Carmelita and Refugio and all of them.

NICOLAIDES:

So you didn't really make return trips to Tijuana.

HERNANDEZ:

No, never did any of that stuff. To this day, I don't like to go to Mexico.

NICOLAIDES:

You don't?

HERNANDEZ:

No.

NICOLAIDES:

Why?

HERNANDEZ:

Because it's a foreign country. Now I play everything very safe, and I just don't want to be in a situation where something could happen. So my wife doesn't feel comfortable going to Mexico, so I don't go to Mexico.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you feel a connection to it?

HERNANDEZ:

Not really. Mexico, the culture, I love the food. You know, I love our history. But I'm not from Morelos, I'm not from Yucatán, I'm not from Zacatecas. My in-laws are from Zacatecas, and they have a hall where they all have their parties. They never really traveled back. So my wife has recollections of going back to Mexico from when she was a little girl, but that's about it.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you guys like go to church when you were here as a kid?

HERNANDEZ:

You know, my mom, again, she insisted we do the ceremonies, but we didn't have to go. I went to church a lot with my in-laws.

NICOLAIDES:

Which church?

HERNANDEZ:

Sacred Heart in Lincoln Heights. Then with our kids, we took them to Holy Family in South Pasadena.

NICOLAIDES:

Oh, okay. Here's a question. What values do you think, like when you were a kid, your mom and your family kind of passed on to you?

HERNANDEZ:

Probably work ethic. I've always been a hard worker. I've never been scared of work. Whenever I had an opponent, no matter, I always knew I was going to outwork them. I've never worried about that part. So I've always been a hard worker. And for whatever reason, faith has put me in positions where it made a big difference. But Oxy's buildings, the names of the buildings, are the same names past presidents of the phone company have, Pacific Bell in particular. They always said that ATamp;T recruited their higher management from Harvard, but Pacific Bell recruited from Oxy. So one of my first jobs at Oxy, I was recruited to be an operator, so as a student, I'm working as an operator, "zero." Now, that's not unusual today, but back then, I was the first male operator the system had. Okay. And we had these toll boards--

NICOLAIDES:

With the--

HERNANDEZ:

The cards, and I'd put the cards in. You have to understand, my mom's water broke when she was working a toll board in Austin as an operator. She worked as an operator, her and my Aunt Jenny, so I was always a phone company baby, they said. But the company took me and made me a male operator. So I would say, "Operator," and people would hang up because they weren't used to having a male voice.

NICOLAIDES:

That's funny.

HERNANDEZ:

Then I became the guy who went around to different offices to explain what it was like working in an all-female environment, trying to recruit more males into the field. Then we had the Nicaraguan earthquake, was a big earthquake at the time. My line got in, and when you got a line in, I was hooked up to the earthquake, and I held that line like for an hour and a half, which was the longest period anybody had done it at the time. But I was dealing with all these emergencies. And so the phone company kind of looked me as a rising star. So from that assignment, they gave me an assignment to work as a public office manager in the Adams district, and, again, that's another story. But I worked as a public office manager and I started learning my management skills. And I worked as a business office supervisor. But I left all that to go work for my mom, to help her with her business, and then her business became very successful. That's why I'm saying that should be the next discussion, so we talk about all that--

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah, we'll get into that. That's great. Okay. Well, I'm going to stop.

SESSION TWO (August 31,2018)

NICOLAIDES:

This is Becky Nicolaides, and I'm here interviewing Mike Hernandez on August 31, 2018, at his home in Los Angeles. So I just wanted to follow up on a couple of things that we talked about in the last session. One thing I was really struck by that you told me about, when you were at Loreto (Elementary School) in fifth grade and you mentioned how you overheard some of the teachers using the word "wetback," and that that had a real impact on you. I had heard you say that it sort of--you said you developed a social conscience kind of in that moment. I just wanted to maybe return to that for a moment and have you--can you sort of talk to me a little more about how you felt when that happened? Or if you had anything more to say about it.

HERNANDEZ:

Again, that experience happened at Loreto, and I remember it because I told myself then that I was going to do something to change that. And I had to be like a fifth-, sixth-grader, but I remember the incident. It happened around the time that John Kennedy died. People were dropping off their kids in front of the school and one of the administrators referred to that family as wetbacks, and I was having a hard time understanding why they were bullying them. People looked at me a little bit different because they knew I was born here as a U.S. citizen, but I didn't speak English, and my realities were I was bullied because of that. I got a nickname because of that. I got jumped into a gang one day and jumped out of a gang the same day because of that. My English teacher, Mrs. Figer, didn't help, because she would call me "Milk" Hernandez. She would joke with my name. But she's the one that gave me an F in English, and I think I have that report card someplace, because it was five A's and an F. So that became kind of something that stayed with me. So I had the benefit of being born here, but spending the formidable years in Tijuana and coming back, and I always tell people the only time I was illegal was when I was in Mexico. So it was something I was very conscious about, something I was aware about. I was very much aware that I was--they used to call us TJs in those days, Tijuaneros, and I didn't understand why they would refer to me as a TJ when I was no different than anybody else. So that became the beginning of my realization that I was different in the eyes of other people, and I didn't understand it.

I also had the problem with my foot, so my foot didn't allow me to play with the other kids the way they played, and it took a while to straighten that out. And then that became a blessing because it allowed me to run, and I was one of the faster runners for the kids my age and that put me in a position where I got a little respect from the other kids. This neighborhood, particularly Arroyo Seco Avenue, had a group of kids who kind of survived the gang experience by uniting together and playing sports together, and we hung out together so that we weren't intimidated by the other kids. And some of those older kids basically gave me a nickname of "Goofy." It's funny, because were playing football and I didn't have rules or anything, and they kicked off the ball and it came to me, I caught it, all these people running at me, and so I threw the football. This older kid, Joey Solis, he basically called me Goofy, and that nickname stuck to me through high school. But that made me different. I was determined to take the term "Goofy" and make it positive, and I did that through sports. (Florence) Nightingale (Junior High) was a transition period for me, because I saw a lot of gang members, a lot of gang activity, and the direction I could have gone was leaning towards the negative as opposed to a positive experience. What saved me was the fact that I would look at old people as role models and ask them--I don't know why Mr. Garcia--he lived two doors from me, three doors down--he started taking me to community meetings when they were organizing the student walkouts at Lincoln High School, but he wasn't taking his son and his son was my age. He was taking me.

NICOLAIDES:

Why do you think that was?

HERNANDEZ:

I have no idea why Mr. Garcia took a liking in me, but he found that I liked that stuff. And by then, I'm going to Franklin (High School) and we formed a student organization called UMAS, United Mexican American Students, and our advisor was Ricardo Romo. He always tells the story that when he first met me, I told him I didn't understand why they called us Tijuaneros when I thought we were always the same, so he thought that made me different from kids because I was thinking that way at--

NICOLAIDES:

When did you first meet him?

HERNANDEZ:

In the tenth grade. Tenth grade. He was like the first teacher, besides Mrs. (Vera) Gallant, who I could relate to. He was an athlete, and he basically took an interest in several of us, that we were like the Latino athletes. But we were on the borderline, so having a role model like him made a difference. He became the provost of Texas Aamp;M in San Antonio.

NICOLAIDES:

He was one of few Latino teachers at that time.

HERNANDEZ:

Back in those days. Back in those days.

NICOLAIDES:

So do you think that played into why you felt like you were connecting with him?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, he was the one I connected with, him and Charles Espaline (phonetic), who was a counselor, again, was a Latino counselor. But the one who changed my life the most then was Marguerite Archie-Hudson, basically trying to recruit students for this Upward Bound program, and she was looking for students who had potential but weren't showing it, weren't exhibiting it. I don't know what criteria she used or whatever, but I remember when I walked into the counselor's office and she was there waiting for me, and I always remember that I walked in and she told me, "Young man, walk back out and come back in with your head up." I didn't understand what that was about, but she was talking about my self-esteem and she was talking about how I was a leader and that there was all this potential that they wanted to work on if I got into this program called Upward Bound. Upward Bound back in those days was one of the War on Poverty programs of the (Lyndon B.) Johnson administration. They were allowing minorities into colleges. It was Upward Bound at Oxy (Occidental College) that I went to, and we spent the weekends there, and the summers. Just taking me from this environment and putting me in that environment made a huge difference, although in that environment, I was exposed to something I didn't understand, and that was more racism. We were high school students from South L.A. and East L.A., and they used to tell us at night they didn't want us leaving the campus or being out there by ourselves because on the hill these guys would gather. They were called the Minutemen, and they would burn crosses on top. So that was going on in Eagle Rock.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you see that ever?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, we saw that.

NICOLAIDES:

The crosses burning?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, we saw activity on the hill. We didn't understand it, but we understand that we were supposed to stay away from that.

NICOLAIDES:

So did you feel like Oxy, the folks there were trying to protect you from that?

HERNANDEZ:

The counselors in Upward Bound. See, Upward Bound was made up of primarily minority counselors, and they understood. I don't think Occidental College understood the impact that environment has on a young person coming from the barrio or the ghetto. When I went to Oxy, even though I had three years of Upward Bound, three summers there, it was a shock for me being in that environment. I wasn't used to that kind of affluence.

NICOLAIDES:

So can you talk a little more about how you said that they didn't really understand the impact of--

HERNANDEZ:

To this day, I don't think Occidental College understands the impact it has on Latino students in terms of the environment we come from. There's an adjustment period you have to go through, and it's because your roommates--my roommate, David Smith, we used to call him WASPMAC, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant with a little Chicano in him, something like that. They even came in, and his mom's an English teacher and his father runs the bookstore at the local college, so he had skills I did not possess. And David helped me with my papers and he would correct my papers, help me get through that period. But he was prepared for an Oxy. I didn't come with any of those skills.

NICOLAIDES:

Could you talk a little more about what you felt like you were lacking?

HERNANDEZ:

Just reading. I'll give you an example. Upward Bound, one of the first things they did was went and got us reading glasses because they found out I had vision problems, and that was one reason I had trouble reading. They took us to deal with our health issues. And basically we had classroom settings, teaching environments. They taught us speed reading. I took a lot of quantitative logic courses, which is why I prefer numbers to the qualitative stuff. They kind of gave us some exposure, yet when I went to Oxy, it was like an eye-opener when all the students arrived.

NICOLAIDES:

What do you think was lacking at Franklin? I mean if you compared what you were getting in Upward Bound versus--

HERNANDEZ:

Well, there was no such thing as college prep courses in those days, so I didn't have those advantages. I mean, to me, the issue of reading was huge at Oxy, and it's because I had to read like three books a week, more reading than I've ever done in my life, and I had to discipline myself to do it. And it was like I was always in the library and I was always reading.

NICOLAIDES:

What kind of stuff were you learning in that?

HERNANDEZ:

Political science. I was taking political science. I liked constitutional law. I had an excellent advisor. Raymond McKelvey was my advisor at Oxy. I was a McKelvey Scholar. He paid part of my scholarship. But when I first met McKelvey, he asked me what I had heard about him, and me being a naïve freshman, I shared with him that I'd heard that he was into quantity and not quality in terms of the work. It's because McKelvey was known--he had Poly Sci 50, and it was an 8:00 a.m. class, 8:00 in the morning, one hour. You had to read one book a week and write a ten-page paper a week, and you had to do that every week. When I met with McKelvey, he paid for and made sure I had subscriptions to Time magazine and Newsweek, and he told me I had to read those every week because I had to get involved with current affairs. My first paper I turned in, he took it in front of the class and he counted the pages, and he said seven and a half. And he said, "Mr. Hernandez, the assignment was ten pages," and he tore it in half. And he let me make it up. But that was the best class I took at Oxy.

NICOLAIDES:

Why?

HERNANDEZ:

Because it showed me the discipline to read and write my papers, and surviving McKelvey's class wasn't easy for anybody at Oxy and he took me under his wing. I remember having dinner at his house. He was a famous radio--I guess today they would be called podcasts, but Raymond McKelvey was like a--I don't know, thirty, forty radio stations at the time, and he used to do a commentary every week. He worked for several presidents as an advisor, and so I was fortunate to have him.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you feel like you got any, like, ideas? I mean, were there particular concepts, ideas you were learning from him that were important to you, looking back?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, no, no. Again, understanding the news and current affairs was important, and the discipline of the doing the work was important. He taught me all that kind of stuff. I had another professor, (James H.) Robert Lare, or Professor Lare, who basically was an urban studies professor. In doing my comps, I knew what would excite him and I actually told him I was going to be the first Latino elected to the Los Angeles City Council, and he thought that was a worthy goal at the time.

NICOLAIDES:

So did you already envision that at that time in college?

HERNANDEZ:

You know, I don't know where that came from, but I told him that. And I was studying redistricting. I did a paper on the incorporation efforts of East Los Angeles as a bedroom community. I did a paper--I think it's still at the Oxy Library--on parent involvement in terms of education and the activities that were going on back in those days. I was a community relations commissioner on the Board of Governors of the college. So I was participating. I met some key people. That's where I met Congressman (Edward R.) Roybal, who became one of my mentors.

NICOLAIDES:

At Oxy?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, he came to speak to Oxy students.

NICOLAIDES:

And then how did you maintain a connection with him?

HERNANDEZ:

I met him there and then later on, I went to see him in his office. Congressman Roybal is definitely one of my mentors. But I met him at Oxy. Oxy, I met Octavio Paz, and reading his book Labyrinth of Solitude, particularly the chapter of where he talked about the cultures and us being caught as Mexican Americans. We didn't necessarily have an American culture and we didn't have a Mexican culture anymore, and we kind of formed our own. Octavio Paz actually first described to me the pachuco and why it was that Latinos have their own way of dressing and why we hung out in gangs and we kind of stood out on our own, because we developed our own culture.

NICOLAIDES:

Did that sort of resonate with you just given what you saw growing up?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah. And I was trying to find out who I was, and having that experience was important. Meeting Ernesto Galarza, one of the renown mighty organizers and him sharing with us that when he went to Oxy in the twenties and thirties, he had to attend to the school as a Mexican foreign student because Oxy didn't have Mexicans as part of its admissions standards. Oxy has 1,600 students and it's not going to grow beyond that. I mean, it might have 1,700, you know, one given year, whatever. The reality is each class is about 400 students. I always tell people you can't fail at Oxy. Oxy can fail you, but you can't fail, and it's because you have this small environment where you have really quality teaching. What I learned at Oxy was how to think, how to reason. I took logic courses. The quality of education is--to me, from my perspective, there's no better. And I've met some long-term friends there, to this day. I got involved with the Alumni Association at Oxy. I was in charge of the Annual Fund, I think for three years.

NICOLAIDES:

When did you start that activity?

HERNANDEZ:

As soon as I graduated, '74, '75, '76. I was selected as the Alumni of the Year, 1987. So I have a history with Oxy. My biggest disappointment at Oxy was I was talking to one of the presidents when I was a city councilperson and we discussed me teaching at Oxy and I discussed trying to get a master's through that process, and that never happened. And I had some negative experiences at Oxy. I applied to be Assistant Dean of Admissions, and this is as I'm graduating from Occidental College. They actually had a meeting with me on Friday and made me the job offer and I got the job. On Monday, they took it away, and it's because they ended up giving it to someone from Stanford, Jim Montoya. They cut somebody else. So to make a long story short, I got the short end of the stick.

NICOLAIDES:

When was that?

HERNANDEZ:

That had to be around '74, '75, when I was graduating.

NICOLAIDES:

Oh, so that was soon after you graduated, then.

HERNANDEZ:

That's when I was applying. Again, those kinds of things, you know, my life has fallen in different directions for different reasons. At Oxy, I met the phone company, Pacific Bell, and some of the buildings at Occidental College have the names of some of the past presidents of the phone company and there was a strong culture of the phone company to recruit Occidental College grads. So I was recruited, and Ron Halan (phonetic) was my first manager who--I mean, he was assigned to me, a good man, corporate man, took an interest in me beyond just the work and kind of guided me. So his manager was a guy named Gene Connelly (phonetic), was the district manager, and Gene Connelly took a liking to me. I think everybody was looking at me for upper management development because I was a MAPper, what's called Management Acceleration Program, and so I started as an operator--

NICOLAIDES:

This was while you were still a student then?

HERNANDEZ:

While I was a student at Oxy. I started as an operator and I worked the summer as an operator, did the split shifts. It was different because I was working in an all-female environment, and I was the first male operator in the system, but that then allowed me in the future to go around talking to other operators and what it was like for males to work in an all-women environment, kind of the reverse of (unclear). But I did that for a year, almost a year, because I could go to school and work late shifts and whatever, which gave me some good financial settings. They promoted me to public office manager, and my first assignment was the Adams public office in South L.A. It was like Adams and Central. I had some challenges there because my tellers were being pistol-whipped. They were being robbed once a month. The manager there wasn't happy about a young kid coming in to take his job. So he was supposed to train me, and he basically threw a calculator at me and he said, "Figure out the load, kid." So I'd take the management books and figure out what a load was, and basically that was the amount of staffing you needed to deal with the workload for that week. I figured out how to do it, but I spent like a week trying to figure out how to do this load, working late at night and reading everything. Then he comes in with a slide rule and he just does the load in like thirty seconds, right? But his way of teaching me was to throw me into it. But we were being pistol-whipped, and Gene Connelly said, "Look. You're the manager. You make the decisions. What do you want to do about it? It's your problem." So I put bulletproof glass in front of my tellers.

NICOLAIDES:

So you literally were being pistol-whipped?

HERNANDEZ:

The tellers was.

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah, the tellers were.

HERNANDEZ:

I saw that my first day in the office.

NICOLAIDES:

Wow.

HERNANDEZ:

So I put the bulletproof glass in front of all my tellers. We were always being robbed during the 1st and 15th, and that's when people had their welfare checks. And we had a collection problem. Most people weren't paying their bills. So I had armored trucks bringing in cash on the 1st and the 15th, so we would cash everybody's welfare checks and everybody's checks, Social Security checks, whatever be the case, and in South L.A., nobody would cash checks, so I had lines of people at the phone company trying to pay their bills.

NICOLAIDES:

Wow.

HERNANDEZ:

My collections went down. We stopped getting robbed because I did something to protect those employees. So that resulted in another promotion. I was given Lincoln Heights. I worked in the Lincoln Heights public office.

NICOLAIDES:

Still with the phone company?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm, same district manager. Meanwhile, I'm being introduced to other people in the company who are taking an interest in training me. I met Ray Garcia. He ran a shop for the phone company called Servicio Amigos where if you would call for a service, but you spoke Spanish, we would transfer you over to Servicio Amigos and then you'd have a Spanish-speaking rep. So Ray ran Servicio Amigos, and he was part of a leadership training institution called Los Padrinos in the phone company. So they got me involved in that stuff, training people, and I met some of the other managers in the phone company and I became part of that Latino management group who was trying to train other Latinos to get promoted.

NICOLAIDES:

How big was that group?

HERNANDEZ:

Los Padrinos had to have about thirty, forty people at the time, but we claimed to represent all the Latino employees.

NICOLAIDES:

And this was like sort of middle management, kind of?

HERNANDEZ:

Middle management, middle management.

NICOLAIDES:

All Latinos?

HERNANDEZ:

They were trying to teach people how to move up in the ranks. I used to teach a class called "The Establishment."

NICOLAIDES:

Teach it at Pac Bell?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, yeah. We used to have a building and a classroom, and employees would voluntarily show up and we'd teach them. But my course was designed to teach them what it was like to work in a non-minority environment and how to survive. But I became part of that. And I remember Lincoln Heights, the challenge there, we had a problem selling phones, we had a problem, collections. So I went out and recruited the few Spanish-speaking service reps the phone company had and put them in the Lincoln Heights office because I didn't want to be sending stuff over to Servicio Amigos, and we trained those service reps to sell telephones. I mean, there was an assumption that people didn't want to pay seventy-five cents a month to have a streamlined telephone that had a little light that turned on at night by your night lamp, and I basically thought that people would if we offered it. So the minute we started offering Princesses and these other phone services in Spanish, my sales skyrocketed. I solved that problem.

NICOLAIDES:

So there was an untapped market there that was--

HERNANDEZ:

That they weren't even looking at.

NICOLAIDES:

Was this all kind of starting around this time? This would have been like the seventies?

HERNANDEZ:

It was middle seventies. You figured I graduated from '74 and I (unclear) company.

NICOLAIDES:

So were you kind of getting in there right when this was beginning to develop momentum?

HERNANDEZ:

Affirmative action was very strong in those days and everybody was trying to catch up, particularly in the Latino community. And like I said, I kept on taking these negatives and making them positives. They told me in the Lincoln Heights office--this was the capital equipment district--they said, "We have a collection problem. Our long-distance collections are skyrocketing, but they owe us all this money we're not collecting." That was my assignment, to figure out how to collect more of that money. I'm looking at all the charts, I'm looking at all the info, and I decided to find out if we really had a collection problem. I couldn't figure out why we would have a collection problem. What I figured out was they would show the amount of money that was owed. They weren't showing the amount of money that was spent.

NICOLAIDES:

By?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, once the phone company saw the amount of long-distance service revenue they were collecting on calls to Mexico, Central America, their collections were almost nil. What they thought was like a 20 percent problem became a 1 percent problem. They just weren't comparing apples with apples and oranges with oranges. So I took the time to get the data to show them, and I remember going to this district meeting and saying, "We don't have a collection problem," and everybody looking at me with their mouth open. "We've got all this money owed to us, and you're saying we don't have a collection problem." And I said, "That's because we made this much money, and when you look at the comparison compared to other callers, this is nothing." And that impressed the heck out of my district manager and I got another promotion. So then I was working at the Pasadena business offices as a business office supervisor and, again, honing in on my management skills and meeting people who were managers and training me to be a better manager.

NICOLAIDES:

How many people were you managing along the way?

HERNANDEZ:

Business office had about eighty people. Public office had about--well, you had maybe four service reps and eight tellers, plus a cashier. So it kept on growing from that perspective.

Then they were talking about me becoming a district manager and they wanted me to move to Sausalito, because in that process, Gene Connelly was kind of in charge of all the political stuff, too, the network and the district, and he saw that I had a liking to that. So they introduced me to a vice president named Ed Harding up in San Francisco. Now, to meet him, I had to go to San Francisco to have lunch, and I'll never forget that meeting, because you had the vice president walking with another vice president. Then you had the division managers walking with a division manager. Then you had a district manager walking with a district manager. Then you had the local guys, me walking with another kid. They walked in in that order, and they would order their food in that order, order their drinks in that order, because you didn't want to do anything to upset the vice president. I was reading books about, like, the organization man and corporate America, and I'm like, I'm not sure I want to get there. But they're getting ready to offer to buy me a house in Sausalito for me and my wife to move to Northern California, and it's because Pacific Bell was headquartered in Northern California. At that time, my wife was pregnant with my daughter. We were already buying our house. I guess I should back up a little and share with you that I wanted to marry my wife in the tenth grade. Our parents wisely said we can't, and they basically said we both had to graduate from college, we had to be buying a house, and be employed. When we met those three tests, they would let us get married. So at the age of twenty, going to be twenty-one, I'm graduating from Oxy. My wife had already graduated from Trade-Tech. She's working, I'm working for the phone company. And we bought our house. We bought our first house on Elgin Street in Highland Park. Cost us $18,000.

NICOLAIDES:

And when was this?

HERNANDEZ:

This is 1973, '74. Closed escrow in '74.

NICOLAIDES:

So you didn't rent at the beginning.

HERNANDEZ:

No.

NICOLAIDES:

You just purchase that house right out.

HERNANDEZ:

We just purchased the house.

NICOLAIDES:

What did that mean to you to be able to buy a home, like to become a homeowner?

HERNANDEZ:

We were the owner ones buying homes at that age. It was a small house, nice house.

NICOLAIDES:

Was it easy to be able to buy it?

HERNANDEZ:

No, no, no.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you tell me about that a little bit?

HERNANDEZ:

I think we needed to put down about $2,000, and, again, the house was $18,000. Then our payments were about 160 a month. I was making 700, minimum, working for the phone company, and my wife was making another 400 or 500 dollars. So we started that way.

NICOLAIDES:

Was this in a predominantly, like, Latino area?

HERNANDEZ:

It was mixed. It was Highland Park, a mix, you know.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you sense that there was any, like, difficulty with getting loans or discrimination or anything like that?

HERNANDEZ:

No, not during that process, not during that process. It was funny, because two doors down from here, Mr. Garcia, his son is named Louie Garcia, and Louie and I went to high school together. We played football together, and he lived two doors down from our house on Elgin Street in Highland Park. So he was our neighbor. Then when we moved here to buy this house, he moved back home with his parents. So we've known Louie forever. My wife and I were talking about it last night. But I remember a real estate lady who was very friendly and worked very hard for us, and she was determined to help us because we were this young couple. About a year later, after we bought the house, my wife got pregnant, and that's about the time the phone company started talking to me about relocating. All of a sudden, I get a call from my nina, my godmother, Aunt Jenny, and my other aunt, my Aunt Ramona, and what I called my wicked aunt, my Aunt Stella from Lodi. They all want to meet with me. And you've got to understand, they're coming from Hayward, from Lodi, and from San Francisco to sit down and talk to me, and I had no idea what they wanted to do. Basically, they wanted to talk to me about helping my mom. My mom's business was a shambles. She was a hustler. She did whatever she could to survive. She bought this hamburger stand in East L.A. called Bea's Bean Bandit, and she used to be a bail bondsman. I shared with you she worked three jobs, though. She claims to be the first woman bail bondsman in the state of California, and when they used to have this program on TV, they basically used to ask her for--they had a woman bail bondsman, but they used my mom as the model. That was a tough industry for a woman back in those days. But she's running this hamburger stand and she has these boxes full of papers, and that was the only place you could go get a burrito and a bail bond at the same time. (laughs) So me and my college roommates used to kind of appreciate it because we all had a job making burritos. When we needed to make some extra money, we'd go help my mom out.

So my aunts met with me and said, "Your mom's in trouble. You owe her, and we'd like to see you help her." Now, I'm trying to make the decision do I relocate or not relocate, with a clear understanding that if I turn the phone company down, my career's going to be over. And I mentioned before that two of the people I promoted working at the phone company became presidents of the company. So I was on that track, and it was a difficult decision, but I decided to try to come and help my mom with her business. Then she thought I was crazy, because the first thing I did was go talk to the government, to find out how to deal with her tax problem.

NICOLAIDES:

So when you made that choice, you basically--did you quit at PacBell?

HERNANDEZ:

I asked for a leave. They gave me a six-month leave. Then they would evaluate. But taking that leave meant I lost that position that they were offering in Northern California. Then I never went back. But to help my mom trying to straighten out her business, one of the first things I did was sell the hamburger stand. We had no business in that business, and we started working on the paperwork.

NICOLAIDES:

How did she get into the bail bond business?

HERNANDEZ:

She used to do the paperwork for another bail bondsman. She was like secretary for a bondsman and she learned the industry from that perspective. People always respected my mom as a hard worker. You've got to remember, she worked as an answering service operator at night and many of the clients there were bail bondsmen, and then she worked as a saleslady during the day, and on weekends, she did the bail activity. So she was always working.

I came to start working with my mom. We had almost $11,000 of savings, and in those days, again, you bought a house for 18,000. All the savings went because my mom couldn't pay me and I'm busy trying to straighten out the business, and my wife got pregnant with my son. She wasn't supposed to be able to conceive a second child, and through the grace of God, my son came. My reality was he came when I didn't have any medical insurance. I call him my 9,000-dollar son because he cost me $9,000 at Huntington Memorial to claim him as mine. So I'm working for my mom, trying to hustle. In the bail bond business, they have what they call posting fees. So I'd work at night, and all the other bail bondsmen who were at home, they would get clients and they didn't want to go to the jail to post the bond, and so I would have their paper and they would let me post bond on their behalf and they would pay me $25 for each one I posted. So it was possible for me to post thirty, forty bonds a night, and I'm making this twenty-five-dollar commission on those postings. And then if you wrote a drunk driving bond--at the time, that was like $375--you made $42. So the volume is how I made it. And I would have a van that was parked right in front of Parker Center, and so in that van I had all my paperwork and everything else and I would just write my bonds there. But I worked seven days a week, and to this day, I don't sleep at night because I set up a pattern where I was up every night.

NICOLAIDES:

So it was a whole night, I mean the full night shift there?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

How did that affect you, like doing that work?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, it gave me a lot of freedom to do what I wanted in the day, because most of my work was at night. As a manager, I learned to delegate the work. You know, first thing I did was hire a CPA to start working on the books. I started looking at our revenue and our promotions and how to increase our revenue. The insurance companies were very happy with me. My mom worked basically for a general agent, and they work for the insurance companies. I became the general agent, so I was selling (unclear) to my mom. We became very successful in the bail bond business. That gave me the freedom to do other stuff. That other stuff included political activity, community work. But I ran my own business, and that was the Bea Hernandez Bail Bonds.

NICOLAIDES:

Can I just ask you, I mean, did you ever see the bail bond work as political at all? Or, like, given what you were seeing--

HERNANDEZ:

Well, in the bail bond business, the industry was under threat of being eliminated. Governor Brown just signed a bill two days ago that he was trying to sign back in the seventies when he was first governor, and he was trying to eliminate bail back then. I was in the middle of that battle to stop that from happening, and I learned from other bail bondsmen who were already in that battle. They had a lobbyist, and I flew to Sacramento on several occasions lobbying against it. That's what got me politically involved. Then I found out that people like David Roberti, who was my state senator--and, again, at the time, he was the Speaker, the president of the Senate, I think the Senate Assembly, but he was my assemblyman and I had meetings with him. Same thing with (Richard) Alatorre. Gene Connelly was impressed that I already knew him, but that was all part of the phone company exposing me to the political network. Basically, one of the things they were training me to do was be in charge of the phone company's political network, and they had a network where every one of their public office managers was the contact for the elected official and you would be feeding that elected official information. And they had a network throughout the whole state.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, was there a kind of lobbying element to that, then?

HERNANDEZ:

That was their lobbying element.

NICOLAIDES:

But so you were part of that?

HERNANDEZ:

They were trying to make me part of that group.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you ever kind of reach that level?

HERNANDEZ:

No, that was the assignment I didn't take in Northern California working for the Vice President of External Affairs. But I understood the network. Again, in the bail bond business, trying to save the industry, I got involved politically, and then I started meeting people. All this was happening at the same time. I'm doing more community work. I'm getting more politically involved. I had a good friend named Victor Griego, and Victor Griego worked for Richard Alatorre as a field deputy. Victor kind of took me and started talking to me about politics, and what Victor really wanted to do was groom me to become a fundraiser, teach me how to raise money for his boss. And he did such a good job, I ended up becoming Alatorre's co-finance chair in some of his later campaigns.

NICOLAIDES:

When was this?

HERNANDEZ:

I'd say that was about '78, '79, '80.

NICOLAIDES:

So was that sort of some of your first forays into--

HERNANDEZ:

It was meeting with Alatorre, and I became close to him, which meant I got close to Art (Arthur) Torres. I got close to Roberti. I raised money for almost every Latino elected official. But I became a fundraiser.

NICOLAIDES:

So were you getting paid to do that?

HERNANDEZ:

No, no.

NICOLAIDES:

It was just volunteer work.

HERNANDEZ:

And it was me learning, me learning. I met a Chicano activist named Willie Velasquez, and Willie Velasquez had started a voter registration group in Texas where they changed the whole movement of Texas. Willie decided to bring Southwest to California, and some of the first young ones he talked to was Victor Griego and myself. Victor became the chair of Southwest Voter Registration Education Project in 1984, and I was the chair in '88. So we were like a team, the two of us. But Victor did a great job. We registered 44,000 people. We introduced the world to the army of ironing boards. But we would get high school and college student volunteers, and they would all get an ironing board. Then their job was to go to a site, set up their ironing board, and that's where they would register people to vote. To get 44,000 people registered to vote, we registered throughout East L.A.

NICOLAIDES:

East L.A.?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah.

NICOLAIDES:

Was it mostly focused in that area?

HERNANDEZ:

Primarily it started East L.A., but, I mean, southeast cities, we did a lot of registration. When you talk about South Gate and Bell and Maywood, all those cities we registered. And we did a lot of registration in--

NICOLAIDES:

How many volunteers are we talking about?

HERNANDEZ:

We had hundreds.

NICOLAIDES:

Hundreds?

HERNANDEZ:

Hundreds of volunteers.

NICOLAIDES:

And these were mostly students?

HERNANDEZ:

Mostly students, primarily college students we recruited. They were all volunteers. We went through organizations to recruit, we went to healthcare centers to recruit, wherever we could recruit a volunteer. We had voter registration down to a science. We knew that if you went to the Kmart on San Fernando Road and you had a volunteer with an ironing board there, on the average, they could get six registrations an hour, and if we had two volunteers, they would get twelve registrations an hour. That meant if we had them there five hours, they would come back with sixty registrations. That's how we had it down. If you went to the Alpha Beta in Highland Park, you were going to get three registrations an hour, and if you went to the Superior Market in East L.A., you were going to get two registrations an hour. So we had it down, and we had our locations and we were doing registration throughout the city.

When I did the '88 registration, I had to get the executive director, I had to raise the money, I had to put the organizations together. Did the whole thing from scratch. There, it was a youth project. We were focused on registering young people, primarily high schools. Then I got a grant to get out the vote, and being that most of our registrations were all young people, we decided to do things a little bit different. But we had these meetings with young people to ask them questions and basically came up with the concept that we were going to have phone banks, but we were going to have the boys calling the girls and the girls calling the boys. It was amazing that that worked getting people to the phone. And then part of their pitch was how important it was to vote, but you weren't voting for yourself, you're voting for your parents who can't vote and your little brother who can't vote, so you have a heavier responsibility to vote. We then tested the turnout, and because we got this grant to get them to vote, we found out they voted same numbers as other people. So stimulating them and talking to them, they actually voted. So that was the '88 drive.

NICOLAIDES:

Can I just ask you--this is really interesting. When you registered that 40,000, like how long did it take you?

HERNANDEZ:

It was like a summer.

NICOLAIDES:

In one summer, 40,000?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, one year, one year.

NICOLAIDES:

Wow.

HERNANDEZ:

One year.

NICOLAIDES:

And was that the voter registration--but that was carrying on in subsequent years?

HERNANDEZ:

In '88, we did the twenty-five. So you figure in a five, six-year period, we registered 65,000 people to vote.

NICOLAIDES:

Sixty-five thousand.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm. And that was like the change started, because now we had people registered to vote and the campaigns had to talk to them. But that became the beginning of that movement. And the political activity started where opportunities arose. Alatorre, by then, had cut the deal with Willie Brown for the Speakership. He was put in a leadership role and redistricting and did a tremendous job in creating these opportunities for Latinos to get elected throughout Los Angeles.

NICOLAIDES:

So you were working with Alatorre, like, pretty--

HERNANDEZ:

As a volunteer. But I was very close to his office back in those days. I remember having a discussion with Alatorre, because I was involved with a leadership training organization called the Jaycees, the California Jaycees. I had rose in their ranks, too, from a chapter president to district manager to regional director, and in doing Jaycees, I'm teaching leadership training and I was forming these Chicano chapters throughout California to teach leadership training. I take a lot of pride in that, because you're teaching a course in Pico Rivera about leadership training, trying to get them to form an organization called Jaycees so they could do community projects. One of those young women you're talking to at the time is named Hilda Solis, and now she's a supervisor. But Hilda remembers me as a Jaycee, and going into Pico Rivera, forming a chapter for them to learn leadership skills. So I did a lot of that back in the day. But that was happening between the phone company and me establishing my own business.

NICOLAIDES:

Were you involved in other, like, civic organizations here in the Highland Park area, Cypress Park?

HERNANDEZ:

Highland Park, I was known as the honorary mayor.

NICOLAIDES:

When was this?

HERNANDEZ:

Eighty-four, '85, '86. In the eighties.

NICOLAIDES:

So even before that, like back into the seventies when you--so you and Sylvia had bought the house in Highland Park, and then--

HERNANDEZ:

And we moved to this house in '78.

NICOLAIDES:

And then at that time, can you talk to me a little bit about--I'm kind of curious about your involvement in the community here and how you were navigating making connections and networking and that sort of thing.

HERNANDEZ:

In '78, I got involved--again, my business gave me more personal freedom. Now my business is in the black and I've got employees. We've got a personnel manual. We've got a management manual. I have good, strong contracts and everything's flowing. So now I have the freedom to get involved, and my wife and I decide to take these guitar lessons at this park in Lincoln Heights. They were taught by a guy used to own a tortilleria down the street here in Cypress Park called Pepe Peña. Well, Pepe Peña was a classical guitarist, played for several Presidents of the United States, and he was teaching these courses as Plaza de la Raza. So my wife and I go to take classical guitar classes and we meet underneath the tree and we're learning, and there I met a lady named Margo Albert. Margo Albert was Eddie Albert's wife, and she was a famous actress who fell in love with the park, fell in the love with the kids, and wanted to create a cultural center called Plaza de la Raza. So Margo Albert, I don't know how, recruited me to be on the board. I ended up becoming the treasurer of Plaza de la Raza, the cultural center, and we were trying to raise this money to build this cultural center. I'm involved with Plaza de la Raza. I'm on the board.

I'm meeting people like Lod (Lodwrick) Cook, who used to be in charge of ARCO, but he was the chairman of the board of ARCO. Lod Cook basically brought all of us together from Plaza de la Raza, the board members and stuff, and had a training session. I don't know if it was two days or three days, but he brought in these pros to train us how to raise money, how to make phone calls, how to set the goals, how to nurture and develop the contact. So I got to do that and I got to meet people like Lod Cook, and I'm the treasurer and we're building this cultural center. It's actually happening. We built it. I dealt with some of the politics. Art (Arthur K.) Snyder was the councilmember, and he basically wasn't necessarily supportive of the project. He ended up loving it and wanting to claim it, and we kept on fighting him because he wanted to put his field office there and we didn't want it. So we had to deal with people like Lod Cook, who had much more power, to kind of kill those kinds of issues. That's when I started understanding corporate power, besides the phone companies. So by now, one day, I showed up at a board meeting and there was all these parents there, and they were basically fighting the board because the board was making a decision to no longer do Head Start, early childhood development, and it's because they thought they had lost their direction. They were supposed to be a cultural center. They were into the arts. They wanted to teach that, and we were busy dealing with early childhood education and we weren't doing this part. So the board thought it was getting away from its mission and they felt that the Head Start was taking up too much of their activity.

So at the time, the chairman there was a young man named Carlos Garcia, and I was always impressed as to how he went through the policymaking, decision-making process, because he always went over the problem with everybody, made sure everybody agreed on the problem, and then talked about potential solutions and found out what solutions most people agreed on, and then moved in that direction. That was Carlos Garcia's style, and he taught me that and I've used it to this day in trying to deal with people who need to mitigate issues, but I learned that the first step is to listen and try and identify the problem. But Carlitos taught me that. How he solved the Head Start problem was by giving it to me. He basically told the parents, "We're going to form this special ad hoc committee. Mr. Hernandez will be in charge of it. We'll have Mrs. Santian (phonetic), Minnie Santillan, who's the secretary, be on it, and I'll be on it. They're going to come up with a solution." So we meet with Carlitos and we're having a meeting and trying to figure out how to separate it, so we figured out if we create Plaza de la Raza Head Start, Inc., it'll sound like Plaza de la Raza Head Start and we'll be able to hopefully still continue with our federal grants, but we'll form a separate corporation, a whole separate board to just deal--that will be their focus. And I was the chairman. So I became the chairman of that board and I put together a board. Our seven Head Starts became seventeen Head Starts, became a very successful program, and I'm chairing it and I have a board. I dealt with a lot of issues.

NICOLAIDES:

Was this seventeen Head Starts like in this area here?

HERNANDEZ:

Primarily Northeast, East L.A., mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

Highland Park?

HERNANDEZ:

Highland Park, Lincoln Heights, El Sereno, Boyle Heights. So I got into early childhood education, and I understood the importance of that early childhood education. I think that takes me back to those formative years when I was traveling from house to house. So for some reason, early childhood education became important, and so Head Start became important. I found out more and more about that importance and learned how to deal with certain issues. So we used to get reimbursed for medical exams of each child. But examining the child was not enough, because they had brothers and sisters, and then they had parents. So the child in the Head Start program was benefiting, but the other folks weren't. So we figured out that if we hired a nurse practitioner, they could do the same job of a doctor when it came to the exams of the children, but she could examine the family, and we were able to expand the service that way. Everybody thought that was innovative on our part because we made that decision.

NICOLAIDES:

Where were they doing those exams?

HERNANDEZ:

Basically, the children would go to the medical offices.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, the family, too, same thing?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm. So when we were creating our Head Starts, we had a nurse's office, and then we kind of set up the nurse's office to be able to do those exams. If it was something more serious, then you send it out, but the nurse practitioners basically dealt with 90 percent of the problem.

NICOLAIDES:

So this was obviously meeting a huge need in the community.

HERNANDEZ:

Huge need. The other thing that was going on with Head Starts back in those days is they organized and they basically had their union. A lot of people don't understand the concepts, but what happens is the union's job is to fight for more benefits for its members, and so every year, every contract, they're going to try and get a little bit more. The unions would separate the agencies. So I got a contract with Plaza de la Raza and I got a contract with Good Beginnings. But Good Beginnings is giving me this, now Plaza de la Raza gives me this, but because I got this from Plaza de la Raza, I negotiate this from Good Beginnings additional. So that was going on with the Head Starts, and we figured out we were going to die because we were funded on a year-to-year basis and we didn't get to carry over money to pay for those benefits. You had to have them within your budget. So when the union came to negotiate with us, I basically took the position, "No, we can't negotiate with you." We hired a third-party negotiator. "You've got to talk to them." The way I hired that third-party negotiator was by putting a coalition of Head Start executive directors together and getting them all to contribute to hire this negotiator, and we forced the union to negotiate all their contracts, so we had a boilerplate contract for all the Head Starts. Then we were able to deal with the issue of the benefits, because unless we could figure out a way to set aside some funding to pay for those future benefits, it wasn't going to happen because the agency would die, and we worked that out. So I created the boilerplate agency that county Head Start used, and they were all impressed at how we got there. But, again, it was us using innovative ideas, looking at ways to solve the problems we were having.

But I got involved with Head Start. I got involved with early childhood education. I was involved with the Jaycees. I'm doing Los Padrinos. And I found that most of my life was leadership training, trying to deal with how to manage my skills more. Back in those days, I was listening to Rocky music every day just to stimulate me to go. I was listening to all these motivational tapes, time management tapes. I was really into developing my management skills.

NICOLAIDES:

So you were still running the bail bond business at this point?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

And was the Head Start work, was that paid work for you?

HERNANDEZ:

No, that was all volunteer work.

NICOLAIDES:

Wow. So how much time was that taking up for you?

HERNANDEZ:

I have no idea. I don't remember.

NICOLAIDES:

Sounds like it was a big responsibility. And I didn't know that. Today, I understand it as a deficiency, but back in those days, it was definitely an asset that I only slept four hours a night.

NICOLAIDES:

Four hours?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah. To this day, I sleep four hours a night. But I didn't know that I had a problem. I found out afterwards I had a problem, but I thought four hours a night was how everybody slept. And you should know my mom, by the way, loved the fact that her son came to work with her and the fact that he took charge, because then she disappeared. My mom decided to travel around the world, and she took these month-long vacations and would go to China, would go to Europe, cruises. She was catching up on all the stuff she missed out in life, because her business was operating fine.

NICOLAIDES:

By that point.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, one of the things, just kind of getting back to the bail bond business, I was curious as to if you ever had to kind of grapple with this criticism of that whole industry that it's been called like a tax on poor people.

HERNANDEZ:

When I ran for office, for the Assembly, the first time, I was the reason child molesters, rapists, and basically felons were on the streets. That was the campaign against me.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you personally--I mean, did you ever sort of grapple with that way of thinking about it?

HERNANDEZ:

No.

NICOLAIDES:

Or what was your thinking or your feelings about it?

HERNANDEZ:

My mom had an attitude--and you have to understand, my mom actually had a gun in her drawer, right, and if people came and talked to her, she'd actually put it on the table. I was there trying to protect my mom. I didn't think that was the way to handle stuff, but that's the way she handled stuff. But my mom taught me--and I believed her--that we didn't bail out a single guilty person. See, bail was part of the Constitution. You're innocent until proven guilty, and so we were out there to bail out the innocent. If we knew someone was guilty, I don't think we'd even entertain the bond, but from our perspective, everybody we were bonding out was prior to their arraignment and we didn't take that position.

NICOLAIDES:

How did you try to sort of figure that out, like if someone was innocent, guilty?

HERNANDEZ:

No, just the system says you're innocent until proven guilty, so if you believe in the system, you believe that, and so I didn't have issues with bailing people out. In fact, I think this new system they're introducing is going to be a total failure.

NICOLAIDES:

Why?

HERNANDEZ:

Because if you understand bail today, the way it works today, there's a bail schedule. That schedule is set by the judges. Judges feel if you're a domestic violence--and part of it's political because it's no part of the public arena--that bail jumped to $7,500, right? Well, on the new scale, it might be $15,000, because there's all this activity. So if you get busted for domestic violence, you're in jail on a $15,000 bond. In order to get out, you've got to put up $15,000. If you go through a bail bondsman, you put up 1,500 and they get you out. Bail bonds is going to take an application, look at your credit, make an assessment as to what is the likelihood of you appearing in court, and they know that if you appear in court, they don't lose their money. If you don't appear in court, they're going to lose their money. If you don't appear in court, they're going to hire someone to go find you to bring you back in to go to court. So we usually have the signature of the mother or the grandmother of the house. We're collateralized. But that's our job. You've got to remember who set the bail in the first place: the courts. If the courts wanted that person out easier, they would lower the bond. So now you've eliminated cash bail as a way out. What you've introduced is a system where you're going to have these people evaluate the crime and determine your flight risk, and then they'll decide whether to let you go or not. What's going to happen to minorities under that system?

NICOLAIDES:

You tell me.

HERNANDEZ:

They're going to be in jail longer. You know?

NICOLAIDES:

Yes.

HERNANDEZ:

So we were like middle people, brokers. I didn't have a problem posting bond.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, did you and your mom see this as sort of helping--

HERNANDEZ:

A service.

NICOLAIDES:

--poor people or people that might have been mistreated by the--

HERNANDEZ:

And in the community, we were looked at as a service. Now, I created a bond that basically gave me an exclusive right. What's happening is in the bail bond business, we're writing bail bonds and we're writing immigration bonds, and everybody's questioning why we're writing immigration bonds. They're not the same. So at the time, I asked then-Assemblyman Alatorre if he would ask for an opinion from the Attorney General. That Attorney General was George Deukmejian. We asked, is the bail bond a criminal bond or a civil bond. The Attorney General does their research and they come back and they say that the immigration bond is a performance bond. It's a civil bond, no different than a contractor's performance bond. So, all of a sudden, the bail bondsmen are not licensed to write it.

Being that I asked the opinion, I went and got myself a fire and casualty broker's license. Now I'm licensed to sell insurance. I convinced an insurance company to give me paper to write immigration bonds not as criminal bail bonds but as civil performance bonds. I'm the only one in the nation who can do it. And INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service), under George Bush, Sr., had started their raids again, the same kind of activity you've got now, except now people could bond out while they were waiting for their documentation, so you wouldn't have the situation, you have all these kids. You could actually post the bond for them. So my classic example was Fernando Valenzuela. He comes to pitch for the Dodgers. He's undocumented. They give him a work permit, but how do you guarantee he's going to perform according to the work permit, that he's going to leave the country when INS tells him to? You make him put up a bond. I put up the bond. So I found myself writing immigration bonds not for poor people, but for people who were trying to take out their maids, their nannies, all these people who basically had the whereabouts to try and do that.

One day, INS does this huge raid called Sbicca Shoe case, and they arrested all these people and basically deported them without giving them their rights. Peter Shay was the attorney on the Sbicca Shoe case, and Peter Shay today is the City of Los Angeles' immigration attorney. So Peter basically--they contacted me because they knew me as an activist, bail bondsman. I remember Bert Corona, who, again, is an activist, he comes to my office and he asks me to bond out all these people, and I don't know how many bonds they were, but there was, let's say, eighty bonds at about $2,500 apiece. Bert signed the Deed of Trust. I put up all the bonds, because the judge ordered them to bring them back from Mexico to basically let them go through their deportation hearings, and they bonded out, and so I became the bondsman. I bonded all the people out of the Sbicca Shoe case. I'd say 90 percent of those people got their green card. It was an important case. It showed basically anybody detained by INS could continue their detention, but be out to do that, living their lives until they--and that's because INS takes years to basically process paperwork for someone who has a right to immigrate. You have the right to immigrate. They'll try and deport you in that process, and so you put up a bond to fight for that right and then you complete the process and now you're a citizen. But I was writing those bonds. After the Sbicca Shoe case, I became the immigration bondsman and I was writing immigration bonds in the hundreds. But Bea Hernandez Bonds and Insurance became a separate corporation, and they specialized on the immigration bond and Bea Hernandez Bonds just did the criminal bonds, so now we had two separate businesses and I'm operating both of them.

NICOLAIDES:

So did the immigration bonds, did that really grow during--can you talk a little bit about what happened with that?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, it was huge. I mean, financially, we were grossing about $5 million worth of paper. You figure that's at least $500,000 worth of premium a year.

NICOLAIDES:

And was it moving more towards the families themselves that were coming to get the bonds?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

NICOLAIDES:

It wasn't just the employers, as you mentioned?

HERNANDEZ:

Those were the bonds. In other words, I talked about Sbicca because it kind of exposed us to the rest of the world, and we created programs to be able to write those bonds. INS could take ten years, easily, to deal with your case, and every year you're supposed to pay 10 percent. So we put a program together where people would pay the premium to get out. They would basically guarantee it. But they would make monthly payments into an account. When they had the full amount cash, we would substitute their cash for the bond, and now they were self-bonded out. But that was one of the programs we introduced. And we were writing a lot of bail. But I was now dealing in the activist world. So I met Father Luis Olivares, who, some people, should be a saint, because he comes to about--and he was representing a church in East L.A. But he showed up at my office with Lydia López, and they wanted me to bond out these people who were picked up from his parish by INS. I'm taking his application and I'm telling Father Olivares, "How much money do you make?" and he's answering questions. And you had to understand Father Olivares. You had to know him. But he would say, "Sustenance."

And I'd said, "Well, what's sustenance?" He goes, "I make what I need." I said, "But what do I put down on a figure? I can't put down ‘sustenance.'" And he said, "No, you can. That's what I make." So he was hard to deal with, but I posted all those bonds, and Father Olivares and I became friends. Years later, we had the pleasure of working together on a project. I forget who brought it to my attention, but they actually decided to try and bond out all the children being detained by Immigration for Christmas. I'm dealing, at the time, with Cardinal (Roger) Mahony, who basically agreed that the Catholic charities, the Catholic churches, would be in charge of all these children, provide them education, a home to be in, feed them, take care of their health needs, if we could bond them out. And we were dealing with Ezell, who was the INS commissioner, trying to negotiate the release of all these children, and they're giving us a hard time, and I'm suggesting we do bail hearings and we do smaller bonds. I remember I'm at this meeting and I'm saying, "We can get bail hearings on all of them, get their bonds reduced as much as possible so that we're putting up the least amount possible," and the regional commissioner's mad at me because I'm making all these suggestions. He got so mad, he didn't want me to make any money, so he decided they would let them all out (unclear). But I'm dealing with Father Olivares, Cardinal Mahony, Father Estrada, and I just got a smile on my face because we got all these kids released with no bail, and there were hundreds of kids at the time. But it was in spite that it happened. A commissioner decided that he didn't want me making any profit. I said, "Fine." But that's how things were being done then. What it meant to me is I'm dealing with people who, in my future, were going to make a huge difference, and they're getting a chance to work with me. So that was an experience that was important to me.

When I ran for office, all these immigration attorneys supported me. I remember I was at a meeting of UNO, United Neighborhood Organizations, and they were asking why, and I said, "Because I think they believe that I'm going to be bailing out people who are innocent and they believe in my services and they've worked with me in the past and they trust me. I think that's why they're giving me money." I mean, I was very open with people. People wanted to know why this developer, Louie Valenzuela, who happened to be someone who I went to college with, was giving me money, and I said, "To be honest with you, Louie wants my Dodger tickets, and so he wants me to get elected so I can give him my Dodger tickets." But I was able to give answers like that right away that traditionally people would look at, you know, "Why are you taking money from developers?" that type of thing, and I didn't want to lie to anybody. I just told everybody why. But I met people like that in the business. So with Father Olivares and UNO, that was my first interaction with UNO. Father Olivares was one of their leaders, him and Lydia López. To this day, Lydia López is a good friend.

NICOLAIDES:

So it sounds like your work was really pulling you into these activist channels, although--

HERNANDEZ:

And I'd say part of it is I was choosing to do that because I wanted to be an activist and my work gave me the ability, the freedom to do that kind of work. So I was involved with registration. I'm involved in community projects like parades. You know, when the Jaycees would do projects, part of the leadership training was to do what we called CPGs, a Community Programming Guide. It was basically a plan as to how you were going to accomplish a task. So if we were doing a project, we had a CPG on the project, and that CPG basically was a game plan as to how it was going to happen, and that's how you were training people. Well, I would do projects, and I just assumed some people were going to fail. So I would have co-chairs, and I would have two projects trying to raise the same amount of money so that I could take into account the one that was going to fail and make sure that we were successful. But I was doing that with Rotary; I was doing that with the Optimists; I was doing it with the Chamber of Commerce; I did that with voter registration.

NICOLAIDES:

So you were helping these groups kind of develop these community programs. And were you like a member of all these different organizations here?

HERNANDEZ:

Yes, I was.

NICOLAIDES:

When did you first start joining those types of groups?

HERNANDEZ:

Years before. I was doing this as a businessman and I was enjoying the work. It wasn't because I had political aspirations.

NICOLAIDES:

So you kind of had roots within these organizations--

HERNANDEZ:

Definitely.

NICOLAIDES:

--before it started becoming a little more political.

HERNANDEZ:

Exactly. So when I'm running for office, I'm talking about my work at Plaza de la Raza. I was one of the founding board members. I was there for the brick and mortar of raising the money, and then I was the offshoot of Plaza de la Raza Head Start. But I actually did the work. In Highland Park, I was Mr. Honorary Mayor, but I did these events, I did these festivals, I did the Christmas parade, and I worked through the service organizations to do that.

NICOLAIDES:

When did you first start joining those groups, those service groups?

HERNANDEZ:

I had a formula. We opened an office in Highland Park, and then I wanted to become part of the Chamber and I wanted to become part of the service organizations. Groups that worked with youth, I tended to be more involved in trying to--

NICOLAIDES:

Why was that?

HERNANDEZ:

I think part of it is because of my experiences growing up. It was important to me to provide alternatives for young people.

NICOLAIDES:

And were your own kids maybe factoring in with that?

HERNANDEZ:

We were trying. I didn't have enough time to be a full-time coach. I wish I had, because I didn't do that. My kids joined teams. When I started running for office--I always tell people this. We have two walls upstairs of all my kids' pictures. Something happened. I stopped taking pictures. But now as a public official, now people are taking my pictures. I'm not taking them out to take pictures. And for them, it wasn't fun being the kids of an elected official, so they didn't want to be with me. My wife didn't want to do the activities. A lot of it happened because I ran in '87 for the Assembly and they were gung-ho and they were supporting me 150 percent and I lost, and they weren't accustomed to their dad losing. It was harder on them, I think, than it was on me. So when I decided to run in '87, they made it known to me upfront they weren't going to be there and I made the decision to run anyway, and I kind of regret that decision.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you tell me a little bit about that?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, because I don't feel today that I got enough time with my son, got enough time with my daughter. It's one of the sacrifices I really made. But it was my ego that chose to run, and I chose to do that over being with them. Today, I talk to candidates all the time. They want to run for office, and I ask them why. I was talking to a young lady that wants to run for City Council. She's a mother. Her eldest is going to vote the first election she's running for council, but her youngest will be fourteen. I'm asking why, and she wants to serve, she wants to make a difference. So she's willing to make the sacrifices. But that's a regret I have, that I didn't spend enough time with my family.

NICOLAIDES:

How old were your kids at that point?

HERNANDEZ:

You know, my daughter, I was almost ten and she wrote a paper called "The Candidate." It was like a book. And my son was there with me. But they were like ten--I mean, it was like from their age eight to twenty. But you figure I ran in '91--'91, my son would have been thirteen--to City Council.

NICOLAIDES:

So they were still pretty young.

HERNANDEZ:

But I first ran in '87, five years before that or four years before that. But that's one of my regrets, and nobody understands the sacrifice electeds make.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you think if you had to do it over again, you would have not run?

HERNANDEZ:

No, I think I would have ran. I think I would have ran.

NICOLAIDES:

Or would maybe done it differently?

HERNANDEZ:

I would have tried to do it differently. I believe I provided for my kids and my family. My problem is my standard was too low.

NICOLAIDES:

What do you mean by that?

HERNANDEZ:

I used my standard. See, I always tell people I didn't have a father. The fact that my mom worked three jobs, I didn't have a mother. I had to figure out how to go to college. I had to figure out how to finance my life. I mean, when my son was born, $9,000 was a daily goal. I counted every penny to raise that money, because I had to pay for him, and it was our stupid decision not to pay for insurance with my mom's business. My mom didn't have insurance. But I had to pay for him, and I worked very hard to get that done. And he was born a preemie. He was a preemie. He was two and a half months early. We weren't ready, and I almost lost him. But that was important to me to pay for him. To this day, he doesn't understand when I talk about it, but it's like "You had to be mine, and in order for me to claim you, I had to pay for you."

NICOLAIDES:

Was Sylvia, was she working at that time?

HERNANDEZ:

She was home most of the time. She tried working, but it was difficult being home and working and me being out doing all of that stuff. We found it easier to hire her, and so she worked for the business.

NICOLAIDES:

Oh, she did?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah. And in working for the business, it allowed her the freedom to do all the stuff she needed to do with the kids. But she worked for us, pretty much.

NICOLAIDES:

So that probably gave her some flexibility with her hours and how much she would be doing that.

HERNANDEZ:

But I wasn't here, and that's why when I talk about the standard, it's like I compare my standards growing up to their standards growing up, you know, they've had it great. They went to private schools. I was involved in their schools. They went to a great school called Sequoyah in Pasadena, and Sequoyah's philosophy is a child's curiosity will carry them through their education, and so they want to stimulate the child's curiosity. So we would take trips to, like, San Felipe. I remember going to Mulegé to go watch the whales play with the dolphins, and Mulegé is about 900 miles south, Baja on the Gulf side. But the school would go on these trips and then a van would break down and they would call me, and because we had our own business, I'd have a truck and we'd go pick up the van. That type of stuff. So I went on most of the trips with the kids. My wife didn't get to do that. I'm the guy who did that. But I was mostly bailing the school out when they had a problem.

NICOLAIDES:

What led you to choose Sequoyah, like to send your kids to that school as opposed to maybe the public schools around here?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, part of what happened is my experience in public schools wasn't a positive one. Two, we could afford it, so I wanted my kids to get the best education I could give them. We first did send our kids to a school called--we sent Michelle to Stancliff.

NICOLAIDES:

What was it again?

HERNANDEZ:

Stancliff. It's in Highland Park. Stancliff had some problems afterwards, but the reality is we noticed Michelle was chewing her nails. She was very nervous about school. Now she tells us that they used to beat her. She tells us all these stories. We don't know what's true or not true.

NICOLAIDES:

And this was a private school?

HERNANDEZ:

A private school called Stancliff. So she's like three and a half years old when we put her in there, and she's doing math at four, so we're impressed at what's going on. But the bottom line is it was too much for her, and when we figured that part out, we decided to find a different kind of school, and that's when we heard about Sequoyah. So we took her to Sequoyah and there was an admission process. They accepted us, and we were one of the few Latino families there at the time. Then Lano (phonetic) was automatic to go to Sequoyah. And now we sponsor families at Sequoyah. But Sequoyah was a very good experience for them. I was very happy with the school. My wife was happy with the school. But it meant they were going to school in Pasadena, so they did their confirmations at Holy Family in South Pasadena, and then we lived here. I used to work at the phone company building in Pasadena and my wife worked at the phone company building in Pasadena, so it all made sense to us back in the day. One of her first jobs--and I should (unclear)--she worked for Directory Assistance. She was information with the phone company. I think she started as a seamstress--not seamstress, but a pattern cutter for Phase II Dresses. That's what she studied at Trade-Tech, doing fashion design, and that only lasted so long. And then she decided to take care of the kids, and when she went back to work, she went back to work with us.

NICOLAIDES:

What were the schools like here at the time that your kids were of school age? Were they still having some of the same--like, had they--

HERNANDEZ:

I don't know. I had a lot of different experiences with--I tried to start a Boy Scout troop.

NICOLAIDES:

Here?

HERNANDEZ:

At Loreto Elementary School. And I found out they had a Boy Scout troop for like seventeen years, right, but I'd never seen one. So I got involved with the Boy Scouts, and what happened is the Boy Scouts would use the numbers of kids, minority kids in low-income communities, to claim they had troops for their fundraising reasons, but never started the troop. So I want to start a real troop, a bonafide troop, so we started one with the local kids and I became--it was a Cub Scout troop. We had little Tiger Cubs. And then it became a Boy Scout troop. So a lot of the kids know me as their scoutmaster here in the neighborhood, and I bought them all this camping equipment, did all this work. I became the district manager of the Boy Scouts Sierra Trails, and I'm fighting the scouting organization because of these false chapters, making them real chapters. So again, that was an experience, taking on the leadership of the Boy Scouts of America.

NICOLAIDES:

What motivated you to do that, I mean to want to go and do that?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, the fact that I was just trying to start a chapter?

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah. I mean to start that.

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah. And then I found out that we supposedly had a chapter that didn't exist, so then I started creating a real chapter and finding out that, becoming a district manager of a paper district, because all these chapters didn't exist, and me determined to make them real.

NICOLAIDES:

So was your son part of that, too, at the time?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, they were in the Cub Scouts. That's why we got involved with the Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts.

NICOLAIDES:

I guess I'm trying to understand why you would have, like, done that to begin with.

HERNANDEZ:

Again, I didn't grow up with a Boy Scout troop in my neighborhood, so I thought that was important.

NICOLAIDES:

So for your own son, then, to have that?

HERNANDEZ:

Because of our son. And we liked working with neighborhood kids.

NICOLAIDES:

Was that a way for you to connect in with the neighborhood here or have your--

HERNANDEZ:

It was one of the ways. I think everything's a combination. You know, I was registering people in the neighborhood because it was part of my voter registration. People knew I was doing the parades and doing these festivals. We did Scouts. That was an experience. But I actually took kids camping that had never been camping, and I hadn't been camping, so it was me learning with them. I think Sequoyah helped, because the trips that we were taking with all the kids. But I just thought we should have something like that in the neighborhood. We didn't.

NICOLAIDES:

Were you connecting with different circles of people through Sequoyah, too, or not so much?

HERNANDEZ:

No. No, not so much through Sequoyah.

NICOLAIDES:

Not with the other parents?

HERNANDEZ:

No, not so much. And Sequoyah was very supportive. We were involved, but we just didn't expand our circles there.

NICOLAIDES:

But the sort of base of your life, your orbit, was more in this area in--

HERNANDEZ:

Here in East L.A.

NICOLAIDES:

In East L.A., Highland Park.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

Can I ask you, those service groups that were in the area here, were they pretty active? Was there a lot of participation in the community here? Or what were they like?

HERNANDEZ:

I always found myself the young guy in the group. So there was the Optimists, the Chamber. They were all the elder people, the institutions of the community, but they couldn't get young people to join, so I think they all knew they were dying.

NICOLAIDES:

This was back in the eighties?

HERNANDEZ:

Eighties, the eighties, the Chambers and so forth. I came in the picture and I represent this young group of people. And then Jaycees, you would get kicked out at thirty-five. So when I started the Northeast Jaycees, which is with the Highland Park Jaycee chapter, we started with twenty, and we had, at one time, about 160 members. I mean, we were a service organization that we would go out and we did a breakfast. We had 160 volunteers to do a breakfast. I mean, so we were pretty profound in the neighborhoods of Highland Park and everybody knew who we were. So the Jaycees, that exposed me to all those, the Chambers. So they needed someone to take over the Highland Park Christmas Parade, and I'm talking about the institutions, the older folks, and they called on me and then I said, "I think the Jaycees will do it." We'd meet as a board and we agreed to do it, and we became the people in charge of the parade. The Chamber appreciated the fact that we were doing that. One of the people I met because of my Jaycee work was an old Jaycee, a guy named Oren Asa, and Oren Asa actually owned Northeast Newspapers. When I was a kid, I used to deliver Northeast Newspaper. I had three routes, and on Wednesdays and Sundays, there was a twice-a-week daily that you would deliver to every house in the neighborhood. They'd drop off a stack, we'd fold them, and then we'd deliver them, my brother and I. And I had two, three routes. Then they would give us a little book of receipts, and you'd collect forty cents per each receipt. So you would deliver them to every house, and then at the end of the month, you'd go knocking on the house trying to see who wants to pay you for the newspaper. Then you'd go turn in your money and they gave you a percentage of it.

So I worked for Northeast Newspapers as a paperboy, and Oren Asa was the publisher/owner and he went to Oxy. So Oren, when I became a candidate for Assembly, Congressman Roybal gave like a list of seven people I had to talk to, had to meet, and Oren Asa was one of those people. So when I met with Oren, Oren says, "I've been tracking you for years, kid, ever since I found out you were involved with Jaycees and you were doing Oxy." And Oren probably became my strongest supporter for City Council, so I had the support upfront of the local newspapers. But, again, with Oren, I had the Oxy connection, the Roybal connection, the neighborhood work. I was kind of automatic. And I believe that's the way candidates should earn the right to run for office, by doing the work in the community. Today, I meet candidates left and right who get the bug, and you ask them why and there's no history there except they want to run for office. I think there's no substance there.

NICOLAIDES:

So do you feel it was different back then? I mean, there was a real engagement that--

HERNANDEZ:

For me, there was.

NICOLAIDES:

For you within these groups that was plugging you into the area here?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm. After I ran for Assembly--and my race in '87, I know this is a City Council oral history, but that race is part of it.

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah, that's okay. Yeah, sure.

HERNANDEZ:

1987, when I ran, we took on everybody and nobody gave us a shot, but we lost by 160 votes, which kind of shocked the world how well I did, and that made me a player, put me on the map, the '87 race. By the time I'm running in '91 for City Council, nobody wants to run against me. I was the one to beat. But in the '87 race, I think I established myself as a community person. Now, what happens after that race, David Roberti calls me and says, "We've got a seat in the San Gabriel Valley for Assembly. I think you should run." I told him, "I don't think so."

NICOLAIDES:

Why?

HERNANDEZ:

Because that would have required me to move. I wasn't going to move from this neighborhood to run for office. Well, that was the second ask. The first ask was for Assembly, for Lucille Roybal-Allard's seat. Gloria Molina's vacating the seat. She had support of me against (Richard) Polanco. I lost the Assembly race. They thought I would automatically run for Lucille's seat, right? I said, no, because it would have required a move, and everybody said, "Yeah, but it's the same community. It's just next door." And I said, "Nah, I don't want to move from my block. I'm not going to move." So I turned that down. Then I was offered the '87--when Roberti asking me to run San Gabriel Valley, I'm the one who suggested Xavier Becerra. When we were talking about the Lucille seat, I suggested Lucille Roybal. So then I supported Lucille in her election. And when I suggested Xavier, he became the candidate, but I was kind of set up, because I thought Congressman Roybal was supporting Xavier for the seat, and it was Congressman Roybal's chief of staff, Henry Lozano, who basically called me to meet with Xavier. So we have a meeting at a house and I decide to manage his campaign. Xavier wanted me to do his campaign because he was impressed with the grassroots operation we had going and my history as an organizer. So I agreed to do his campaign, but he was from the outside coming in, so that was contrary to what I was about.

So we put a strategy together for Xavier Becerra's campaign, and he ran against Diane Martinez, who was "Marty" (Matthew G.) Martinez, the congressman's, daughter on that seat. He ran against Marta Maestas, who I encouraged to run, who was the chief of staff for then Chuck (Charles M.) Calderon, the assemblyman. Then there was a guy, Eugene Hernandez, who was Congressman Esteban Torres' candidate, who was a school board member in Pico Rivera running. And I got Xavier, right? In putting a strategy for Xavier, I knew we could win with five candidates. I needed to have like 23 to 27 percent of the vote and he would win, which is why I encouraged another woman to run, because of the Diane Martinez issue. I find out after I commit to Xavier that Roybal had committed to Marty Martinez that he would support his daughter. So Roybal calls me up and he says, "What's going on?" I said, "Congressman, I thought you were supporting him. That's why I committed." Congressman Roybal kind of scolded me, and then he said, "You better win. You can't afford to lose." Now, I didn't know what he meant at the time.

But I did Xavier's campaign. In order for Xavier to win, I did small--it's five city elections. You've got to remember, I learned all this from my campaign. I ran Elizabeth Diaz for the Garvey School Board, Fred Balderrama for Monterey Park City Council. We had Hilda Solis running for Community College Board of Trustees. We had, like, all these candidates we were supporting, but the idea was for them to win and then endorse Xavier so he would have some endorsements. The biggest endorsement I was able to get for Xavier was John Van de Kamp, and at the time, John Van de Kamp, Xavier was one of his deputy attorney generals, and Van de Kamp was running for governor. I knew Andrea Van de Kamp because she got the job I was applying for at Oxy. So, again, the Van de Kamps, that's when I started having a relationship with them, and John Van de Kamp independently chose to support Xavier. To make a long story short, he got 27 percent of the vote in the primary, what made him the Democratic candidate for the general in a Democratic district, and he became the assemblyman. Now he's the Attorney General.

NICOLAIDES:

Were you working with the Democratic Party at this point? Like, what was the kind of structure of all this political work, or the organization?

HERNANDEZ:

You know, I was like this independent guy. I was out there doing campaigns. When I did my campaign, we went through a process to try and find a campaign consultant. You've got to understand, I'm running against Willie Brown's candidate, Rich Alatorre's candidate.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you kind of back up a little and tell me about how you even decided to run in that first election for the State Assembly position?

HERNANDEZ:

Okay. All right. All this time, I'm supporting my friend Victor Griego to replace Richard Alatorre in the Assembly. I'm raising money for Alatorre. Victor's my southwest voter registration partner. Victor and I are just close. Alatorre announces that he's going to run for City Council, because Art Snyder's resigning. We work hard on Alatorre's election to City Council, and we know that Alatorre wants Polanco to take his place. We didn't not feel comfortable with Richard Polanco running. I knew Richard Polanco as a guy who lived in Duarte, and the reason I knew his work with Alatorre is he was the bagman. He was the one who would pick up monies, checks. So he was primarily Alatorre's money guy, and he's the one that's going to run to represent me in the Assembly. Meanwhile, I'm the treasurer for another school board candidate named Larry Gonzalez, and Larry Gonzalez was a Latino school board member, replaced Julian Nava, and I'm his campaign treasurer. So I'm driving him home one night from an event, and we all had decided that we were going to support Larry Gonzalez for City Council against Alatorre's wishes, who was going to become the city councilman. And we were supporting another candidate to replace Alatorre. So, politically, that was a big decision on our part. Now, our part being--we've got to go back a little bit more, if you don't mind. I belonged to a young group of people, we used to call ourselves the Breakfast Club. Eduardo (phonetic) Molina called us the "Macho Dogs." But we were all guys, and we would actually get together at this friend's lawyer's office and talk about how to acquire power. Now, that group of guys consisted of Bob Hertzberg; a friend of ours named Louie Valenzuela, who's that real estate developer friend from Oxy; Henry Lozano; Congressman Roybal's guy; Victor Griego; a land use attorney used to be the president of Pasadena Planning Commission named Bill Ross, Bill Ross, a Republican; and myself. We would get together to discuss power and how to acquire it, and that's why we got involved in campaigns.

NICOLAIDES:

When did this group start?

HERNANDEZ:

The group started, you know, I'd say, 1980, maybe '78, '79, '80.

NICOLAIDES:

And how did it come about?

HERNANDEZ:

Several of them met up in Sacramento as part of the Youth Council. They were part of the Youth Council, Victor Griego and Bob Hertzberg. Bob Hertzberg's father, at the time, was known as representing the right for Indians to control their own destiny. I call it "AKA Bingo," because that's what resulted out of it. So that was Bob, and Bob was this young, well-organized young man that--and so we used to meet all the time and talk about politics and candidates and who we would help. The way we became fundraisers is we would all chip in to give money at a fundraiser, so we'd always buy the table and be the group. So the breakfast group was known in circles as this group of young, dynamic people, and nobody knew how big we were or how small we were, but I just gave you the name of the core group. So we started doing campaigns. We started empowering people, doing all the little things. So one day I'm driving Larry Gonzalez home. We've all decided we're going to support him for City Council, against Alatorre's wishes. Larry'd had a few too many to drink. As I'm driving him home, he decides to share with me that he cut a deal, and I said, "What was that deal?" Basically, that he would become the next city councilperson if he agreed to be the "stalking horse." In other words, he took out papers, run for the Assembly, all these people would endorse him, and then he would drop out, and that was the stalking horse.

I dropped him off about a mile from his house. I said, "Larry, please leave the car now." I was upset. I drove home. I was fuming. I called some of the members of the group. We all agreed to get together the next morning, because they all knew I was upset, and I told them Larry was a stalking horse and he was out there to expose us to Alatorre as non-supporters. And that was part of the machine politics. They were trying to clear the field for (unclear). So when that decision was made, we thought Victor would run, and Victor was in the process of getting married and he decided he was not going to be the candidate. At that breakfast meeting, everybody looked at--I became the candidate. Prior to that, I had no intentions of running for office, even though I had mentioned it to that professor there. I liked making money. I liked the freedom I had to do--I liked my life at the time. But I was so mad, we used to say, "We'll put together $25,000 each." Each one of us would (unclear) 5,000. Well, that became $160,000, and two races, became 300,000 we spent. And it was a heck of a campaign. But they had everything. I had to put together a team. So at the time, Willie Brown's biggest, I guess, enemy in terms of campaigns was Clint Riley. So Clint Riley was this consultant in San Francisco that we went to meet, and Clint Riley agreed to do the general campaign. He didn't agree to do the primary. I met a young, dynamic woman named Pat Bond, used to do Gloria Molina's campaigns. Pat Bond decided to help us, not full-fledged, but she reluctantly came in. But she became the full-fledged person. My friend Victor Griego, who was a premier organizer, had learned his organizing skills from people who used to work for the farm workers.

So at Harvard, there's a school for organizers. Marshall Ganz is one of the premier organizers. He was Cesar Chavez's number-one guy, and he had a group of people. Jessica Govea was one of his organizers for Chavez. Larry Tramutola worked on Cesar Chavez's campaigns, Larry Frank. These are all names of people who got involved in my campaign for Assembly, and it's because they had no alliance to Cesar Chavez anymore, or Willie Brown, and they just saw us as a bunch of upstarts. So Jessica Govea, who I believed to be one of the premier organizers in the country, is the muffin lady. She would show up at our campaign at 10:30 at night when we were all debriefing all the organizers and she would come in with muffins, and she would ask them, "What's going on? How'd it go? What'd you do?" and she'd make suggestions. But she was there like every other night. Larry Tramutola would do the same thing. He'd come in and do a weekend training for the organizers. And Marshall Ganz was kind of looking at the whole picture. So I had probably the premier ground organizers in the country working on my Assembly race. So people were shocked when we did as well as we did, because they threw everything at me. It was ugly. It was one of the ugliest campaigns in the history.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you talk about that a little bit?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, again, there was a negative piece sent out every day with a positive piece. So they had Cesar Chavez hitting me. Mayor (Tom) Bradley, Mayor Bradley did not like the fact that they hit me, and I think they hit me with a child molester--it was a piece that said "Under the age of thirteen, this child was abused. Why? Because of Mike Hernandez." And the positive piece in that was Tom Bradley endorsing Polanco, the negative with the statement. So Tom Bradley took offense to that piece and he withdrew his endorsement, and so we were able to use that. The L.A. Times, through Frank del Olmo, who was a kind of a renowned Latino editor, he supported me and he called me truly from the community, because he took that I was a candidate truly from the community taking on the machine. So in terms of Latino politics, this was the campaign that challenged the machine. And I had the support of Gloria Molina, and we built off of that. We lost. A variety of reasons why we lost. I learned from that.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you talk about that a little bit? I mean, what was your strategy for running that campaign? Like, how were you all going about that?

HERNANDEZ:

It evolved. We did things a little bit different. You know, one of the things I did is, in putting my team together, we would get together at 6:30 in the morning and we would walk a border of the district so that I would get to know it. So I didn't know Echo Park as well, so I wanted to walk over there, so we'd walk Echo Park. We'd walk Mount Washington. And we'd be discussing what we were going to do that day as we walked. One day, we were walking down this hill, and I think it was Mount Washington, and we looked around and there was like thirty of us. But this was based on a 6:30-in-the-morning meeting every day, but we would bring more and more each day, and that was kind of like the philosophy of the campaign, to build. So we knew that in making contacts with voters, it was very important.

NICOLAIDES:

So were you actually going door to door?

HERNANDEZ:

I did door to door.

NICOLAIDES:

Or going to businesses?

HERNANDEZ:

We did business. We would do these conferences. I would have three meetings a night, house meetings a night, and if we could get three people in a room, I wanted to talk to them. Again, because of our voter registration efforts, we recruited high school and college students. One of the high school students we recruited was a guy named John Pérez, was a tenth-grader at Franklin High School, came to work on my campaign. Now, if you know John Pérez, the Speaker of the Assembly, that's the same John Pérez, but mine was like the first campaign he got exposed to. But John became a lifelong friend. But, again, we took on the system and we built, and that building paid off, I think.

NICOLAIDES:

Was the Democratic Party--was there any, like, connection with them?

HERNANDEZ:

I was part of the Democratic Party, and part of my relationship with developing with Alatorre in company, I became the chair of the 55th Assembly District Committee and I got elected to County Central Committee, so I was part of the Democratic Party structure. I remember the presidential race when John Glenn was running for president. I had a busted eardrum, and we were at the Democratic Convention and I'm counting votes. Ed Roybal had made me a super delegate for the--I basically was his vote on the Electoral College. So I was involved with Democratic Party politics, not to the extent that you see today. I was looked at as the outsider. When I ran against Willie Brown's choice, I was the outsider.

NICOLAIDES:

So were there Democratic clubs that were involved?

HERNANDEZ:

The Northeast Democratic Club.

NICOLAIDES:

I guess I'm trying to get a sense of the sort of organizational landscape and kind of like who you were tapping into.

HERNANDEZ:

I was tapping into the activist world of the local Democratic Party. To this day, I have friends, Ann Waldem (phonetic), who were part of the Northeast Democrats who really got involved in my campaign. But they were involved in my campaign because they knew my work with the 55th AD and my work with the County Central Committee. In other words, I got elected, but then I got involved and attended the meetings and did the work, and people knew me that way and they saw me working. At that convention, I drew a lot of attention because we undid one of the rules the Democratic Party was trying to establish for that endorsement convention, and we fought it and we won.

NICOLAIDES:

What was that?

HERNANDEZ:

I forget the rule. I forget the rule, except I know that I organized against it and nobody thought we could win and we won, and then everybody was super impressed, the fact that we did it, and they were talking about it down here. But that was at the convention. I don't remember what it was, except my wife was awestruck by John Glenn, and that was that. But I was involved in Democratic Party politics from the Electoral College all the way to the local assembly district central committee, so I understood the structure, but I was never a party player. I was never an elected member of the party; I was always appointed.

NICOLAIDES:

During this campaign for State Assembly, what were the issues that were especially important to you, like at that point that you were talking about that were kind of foremost in your mind?

HERNANDEZ:

I think youth was part of it. Representation was a lot of the discussion at the time. What I found interesting--and I tell this to candidates all the time. I said, you walk up to a house, you knock, the people come out and you tell them you're running for us, the first thing they ask you is they want to know where you stand. And I had this down pat. I didn't know. I would tell them, "I'm not here to share with you what's important to me. I'm here to hear what's important to you." And what I would pick up is the fact that constituents don't know government. So people would talk to me about education issues and I'd say, "Well, the Assembly, we deal with the state budget. That's part of the education. But we don't do policy for education. That's what happens at the local school board." They would talk to me about Social Security, and I explain to them that's what a congressman does.

So what I found is most of the voters weren't talking about meat-and-potatoes stuff. They didn't know what a city councilperson did per se, and it's because our councilperson for years was Art Snyder. And before I ran, we had a ten-year period where all this redistricting kept on happening, so our councilperson was Joel Wachs, Art Snyder, Joel Wachs, Mike (Michael) Woo, Peggy Stevenson, and my last one was Alatorre. So I had like five councilpeople in ten years, and what it meant is we were the boundaries of all the districts during redistricting, so we never had that center person. And I was able to talk about that when I ran for City Council, because I thought it was important that we have that kind of representation. So my intentions at all times, I kind of slipped into the role of running for City Council because I was mad at what I believe was machine politics. The group that was surrounding me also felt the same way, and they were willing to make a statement and I became the person who was trying to make that statement. I never had any intentions of moving. If I was going to serve, it had to be in this neighborhood, because this is where I grew up and this is where I wanted to make a difference. My wife and I would literally be watching TV and we'd hear a car driving by, we'd tell our kids to duck, and it's because we were scared of drive-bys. I remember one of the first council meetings I went to, I went to a Land Use Committee and I was fighting a liquor store license they were trying to issue down the block, and it's because we had liquor licenses all over the blocks, on all these blocks. Hal (Harold M.) Bernson was the councilperson, chair of the PLUM (phonetic) Committee. He agreed to fight with me, but he had this statement. He said, "You're not going to win them all, and the reality is people need to make money and that owner of a liquor store needs to make money." And I was arguing about there's too much liquor in our neighborhoods and he was giving me a whole different argument that I didn't understand at the time. I didn't understand business and all that. I'd ran a business.

So to make a long story short, I got involved with finding out--I didn't believe the council was listening to the community and I believed we needed someone to represent the community, and that basically was a representative of the community, and that became my role on the council. I never would have considered running for office anyplace else, and those offers were there. But this is where I ran.

NICOLAIDES:

Right. Okay. I think we'll wrap it up for today.

HERNANDEZ:

Okay.

SESSION THREE (September 7, 2019)

NICOLAIDES:

This is Becky Nicolaides, and I'm interviewing Mike Hernandez on September 7th, 2018, at his home in Los Angeles. So just to kind of pick up where we left off last time where we talked about your first run for the State Assembly, can you tell me a little bit about what was going on in between that run and then in 1991 when you would first run for council? Tell me a little about your work. Were you still in the bail bond business? And then what other activities, things you were involved with at that point.

HERNANDEZ:

Again, I was part of two businesses. One was the bail bond business and the other one was what we called the insurance company.

NICOLAIDES:

That was the immigration bonds?

HERNANDEZ:

Immigration bonds.

NICOLAIDES:

And they were both active, still, at that point?

HERNANDEZ:

They were both at the same time, mm-hmm. I was the president of Bea Hernandez Bonds & Insurance, Inc., and I managed Bea Hernandez Bail Bonds for my mom. My mom was the owner, built her business, but I came in and helped her through that process, and once her business was pretty much running on its own, she traveled a tremendous amount of the time. She was out of the country at least six months out of the year and let me handle the business. The business grew, was very successful, allowed me to manage my time in ways where I could be more involved in the community. So I was definitely involved in Highland Park, and part of our business plan included an understanding that we wanted to have offices in the community, so we had an office in Highland Park and that's why I got more involved in Highland Park with the Chamber of Commerce and I became the honorary mayor. The Jaycees had a tremendous--the leadership training organization had a tremendous impact on my life because I got to play a role and train young leaders, Latino leaders, throughout not only Los Angeles but throughout the state. I was opening chapters throughout the state as part of my Jaycee role and getting to meet people and networking.

Part of the Jaycee work included the president at the time, a good friend of mine, Greg Stavish, he was open to the concept of allowing women into the Jaycee movement, which was kind of radical at the time, and we became the Johnny Appleseeds of bringing women into the Jaycees and that became part of the change of the organization, because it used to run a lot like a fraternity. It was a good ol' boys network-type thing, and even though we were doing good community work, we were still male only. And so I think that change and made a tremendous difference.

NICOLAIDES:

So were you pushing that idea yourself?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, the president was pushing it and then it became my role to implement it. As a regional director, part of my role was to start new chapters and basically orient and train those chapters so they could take off on their own, and so some of the new chapters we were starting had female leadership. I use the example when I was trying to do a chapter out in Rosemead, Rio Hondo, Hilda Solis was one of the people who was attending those meetings, and at the time, she didn't hold any office or anything. After that, I met her as a candidate running for the Community College Board of Trustees. The East L.A. Jaycees were like--around East L.A., everybody knew them, and their players included Richard Alatorre, Alex Torres, pretty much the Eastside political establishment.

NICOLAIDES:

So was it a kind of mix of politicos and businesspeople?

HERNANDEZ:

Mostly businesspeople. It was a huge network organization, kind of like the Who's Who of in East L.A. politics, or the Who's Who of East L.A. all knew about the Jaycees.

NICOLAIDES:

So was their chapter more established then than like the chapters here in Highland Park?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah. East L.A., that's the chapter I joined, and then I formed the Northeast L.A. Jaycees and basically created a lot of Jaycee chapters, and that allowed me to network and meet a lot of other people. Strangely enough, I ran for the Assembly in 1987. 1986, '86, '87, I was selected as one of the five Outstanding Young Californians, and that award is given by the California Jaycees. The only other person of the five that I still know is--he's a Channel 7 weather reporter. I forget his name, but silver hair. He's a reporter on Channel 7. But he was one of the five Outstanding Young Men with me. So we're the same age. (Added by interviewee: Fritz Coleman)

NICOLAIDES:

And can you talk a little bit about what you were doing politically at that time? So this would have been like after your Assembly campaign but before--like in that interim period.

HERNANDEZ:

When I worked for the phone company, they started introducing me to electeds and the network of political people. I, for some reason--because my friend Victor Griego got involved in starting to raise money for Latino elected officials, and I was raising money pretty much for all of them. I learned how to raise money because of working on community projects like Plaza de la Raza, and so I spent a lot of time nurturing relationships. I didn't have intentions of running for office at the time, but I did want to have that power that people talk about to have influence to be able to talk to people, and the reality was in East L.A., the politics were forming in terms of the sides. The machine politics were evolving. The more successful they became, the stronger they became.

And then you started a group of challengers. Gloria Molina was part of that group who started challenging, and we chose to be part of Gloria Molina. The case of Gloria running against (Richard) Polanco, we were definitely involved with Molina's campaign and not Polanco's campaign. When Richard Alatorre won the City Council seat and vacated his seat, he basically decided, or the machine that he was part of decided that Polanco should take his place. We decided to challenge that, and we were supporting Larry Gonzalez. I already shared that Larry chose not to run because he cut a deal, and I thought that that was one of the worst things that could happen in our community at the time. I don't know where that came from, but it created a lot of anger in me. And I'd done too much in one direction trying to empower a community to have politics of machines kind of dictate to the community who would be their leadership. So that's when the decision was made that I would become a challenger, and we had a group that was sophisticated enough in politics that we were able to put together a team. Putting our team together, it was a learning experience. So it was the first time I actually got involved in the nitty-gritty of a campaign. And being able to put together an organization included a consultant, and we knew we were taking on the machine, so we talked to six or seven consultants. Most of them weren't willing to do that work. There was someone, Clint Riley in San Francisco, who I learned a lot from as to his style of politics. We studied him. And I ended up with a woman named Pat Bond who I had a tremendous amount of respect for, and she's the one who had done Gloria Molina's campaign. So I became a side, the anti-machine side.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you talk a little about what your critique of the machine was?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, they used to call them the Golden Palominos. But they would get together in a room and decide who was going to be the next assemblyperson, who would be the next state senator, who would be the first city councilperson, who would be the school board member. They were making that decision. Then they would provide the resources to their candidate and do whatever they can to make sure nobody ran against that candidate. So it was taking away the community's right to make that decision. So we felt it was worth giving the community a choice, and when we ran against Polanco, initially, nobody gave us a shot. As we built our team and got resources, I think we shocked everybody. They considered it the ugliest election in the history of our politics, and it's because of my work, they basically chose a campaign that accused me of being the reason why rapists were on the streets. You know, they sent out pieces, assault on a child under the age of thirteen, and they were saying it was because of Mike Hernandez, because I freed all these people. We basically stood on--we were running on behalf of the community. We wanted to represent the community.

NICOLAIDES:

Were you ever able to shift the conversation about that bail bond work toward more of a social justice kind of story?

HERNANDEZ:

No, and it's because it all happens in the mail. It wasn't happening in the forums. At the forums, I think I stood my own, and the media picked that up, that I was a valuable candidate, and reflected that. I think that the community definitely was picking up on it and I was gathering a lot of support. And it was shocking, because Alatorre had, like, walked into the City Council seat. It was like he was the most popular guy at the time, and here we are challenging his decision of who should take his place. But Polanco had Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta. He had Tom Bradley. He had all the endorsements, and we had community endorsements, so it was like a community-versus-machine campaign. We lost by about 168 votes, and it surprised everybody. We were running two campaigns at the time, because you were filling a vacancy, and then as soon as the vacancy was filled, the regular seat, the primary was coming along. So I had to run both campaigns. Losing the vacancy seat election was a difficult decision. It was difficult on my family because they had never witnessed me losing and we were very successful up to that point. I had to really reflect on it and decide what I was going to do, and I found out that I basically developed some anger and I wanted to make sure I got back at them. So that became my personal goal, was to win, and that meant that Polanco had a Community College Board of Trustee who endorsed him, Leticia Quezada. When she ran for reelection, I ran David Lopez-Lee. I managed his campaign and he won, and she was no longer there. Larry Gonzalez, who was that school board member, I ended up supporting a candidate name Vicky (Victoria) Castro, and she won and she became a school board member. To replace Gloria Molina's seat, they ran a candidate, Lucille Roybal-Allard. I made sure she got elected to the Assembly. So I spent the next three years working campaigns. I managed Xavier Becerra's campaign for Assembly. I did five smaller campaigns in the San Gabriel Valley so he could have some supporters, because nobody knew who he was. Meanwhile, I was being offered these other positions, but I wasn't going to move. My wife and I've lived in this house our entire life.

NICOLAIDES:

The PacBell positions or what positions are you--

HERNANDEZ:

Well, David Roberti wanted me to run for the Assembly. That ended up being Xavier Becerra's camp seat. Initially, Gloria Molina and company had talked to me about running for Gloria's seat, but that became Lucille Roybal's seat, and it was because I did not want to run for those seats. I would share with people one of the principles I developed is I was running to represent my neighborhood, and if I was going to hold office, it was going to be representing my neighborhood, not someplace else. So why this neighborhood became important to me I don't understand. And you've got to understand, when I'm talking to a guy like Xavier Becerra, who's running for Assembly in basically Monterey Park, and I know he's from Sacramento, so that was different from my personal principle, but I was willing to support him to get him elected. Lucille Roybal, I didn't feel that way at all. She's East L.A. all her life. Her father brought them up. I felt very comfortable, her getting elected. So I kind of became a grassroots community engagement guy. And, again, we were forming childcare centers. I was doing Jaycee chapters. I was doing a lot of talking to people.

NICOLAIDES:

Were you connected to Gloria Molina and some of her activist work that had being going on at--

HERNANDEZ:

Well, I was very close to her consultant. She trusted me and she understood my camp because she did my campaign. So, for example, there was crucial moments in selecting her team. We knew Pat Bond was going to come onboard. There was a guy named Ross Bates, and Ross Bates was a Westside numbers guy. He used to work for D'Agostino (phonetic) machine, and in politics, Westside politics, he understood the demographics of the voters and he was a numbers guy. And Pat Bond was really a quality mail person. So we put them together as part of the machine, part of the team. Then, in making certain determinations, for example, we didn't have the monies--all our campaigns had to be done under strict budgets and so forth because we didn't have all these resources in the world, but they did. So there was a time when we had to do a poll to determine how to position our candidate, and that was Gloria Molina. I brought in David Lopez-Lee, who basically is a numbers guy, but USC, and he's a pollster. So we developed the questions. He formatted the questions for us so that they'd be as objective as possible. We provided a universe. He looked at that universe and broke it down as to how we had to break it down so that we could call every tenth voter and so forth so that it would be a random sample that he could basically verify the results on, and we basically asked the question. And as a result of that poll, we made the decision to run Gloria Molina as the Latina candidate. Art (Arthur) Torres was running as everybody's candidate. I think Chuck (Charles M.) Calderon was running as the Democratic candidate. Someone else was running as the Republican candidate. But we chose to run Gloria as the Latina candidate. Now, what that means is, all of a sudden, something like a Mexican American Political Association endorsement becomes primary for us, and so when we go fighting for that endorsement, Gloria Molina actually got that endorsement by one vote. But it was important for our overall strategy that we posture her that way, and it's because the polling told us that if we did that, she could come in like at 33 percent of the vote. It would give her high enough percentage that she would be in the runoff against Art. And the strategy worked. To this day, I have some of the poll questions in a box someplace. But we did that, that polling, and I was involved in that process. So I was part of the strategies with Ross Bates and Pat Bond and Gloria Molina in running that campaign for Board of Supervisors.

I walked precincts with all the candidates. I enjoyed walking precincts and talking to voters, and I remember walking with Gloria when she was running for the City Council seat, because that was the first campaign. I'm supporting Gloria, trying to make sure Larry Gonzalez doesn't win, and we were walking up in Chavez Ravine, we walked into this home and this lady was in a wheelchair, an elderly lady. She was part of them moving people out of Chavez Ravine when they built Dodger Stadium, and she told Gloria her story and I watched Gloria there sitting with the lady, holding her hand and basically crying over this issue. That was important to me, because I'm the guy that took on the Dodgers when they wanted to put a football stadium. But it was that experience that brought that to my attention. So walking precincts was very important to me, and listening to the constituents and understanding what their concerns were, because that's who I was running to represent. It wasn't money. It wasn't that power. It was representing the neighborhood I grew up in, and I was real proud of Arroyo Seco as a neighborhood. So we were able to do that, and that was the political campaigns.

When I chose to run for office--Gloria, when she got elected, the night she got elected to the County Board of Supervisors, she looked at me and she said, "You're next." My assumption was she's supporting me to take her place for City Council. So now we're dialoguing and I'm getting ready to run for a City Council seat. I talk to new candidates all the time and I always tell them, "Chances are, you're going to lose the first time, but what you learn in that loss will carry to a victory the second time around." It's just a hard lesson to teach people. (Telephone rings. Recorder turned off.)

HERNANDEZ:

So then basically my assumption is Gloria's going to support me. I'm building my team. I'm getting ready to run for her seat and everything's coming together. All the pieces were coming together for me. I had $50,000 raised before I even announced, and I had like two hundred community endorsements already. And then I was going to the electeds asking for endorsements, and normally it's the other way around. People try and get elected officials' endorsements so they can get community endorsements and money. But I already had that in place, and I kept on saying, "The train is moving, and I just want to know if you want to get on." Then I find out Gloria Molina would rather have a woman take her place, which I could respect, but I wasn't going to drop out of the race.

NICOLAIDES:

When did that happen? Like kind of far into it?

HERNANDEZ:

I think she spoke to some of her supporters and her supporters felt strongly that a woman should be taking her place. I felt a little bit like, "I've earned it. Gloria, I've been working for you. You know that. This is the district I've been working for. I've given up other opportunities to run in this district." I didn't understand it, but I told her I was going to run anyway, and she actually told me not to run and I said, "I'm running." Her candidate was Vivian Bonzo, and Vivian was a friend of mine. Prior to that, Tom Bradley had appointed me to the commission of El Pueblo, and I sat on that commission. Vivian Bonzo owned Lo Golondrina, and as my work as a commissioner trying to straighten out the issues there, we became good friends. So we had a meeting. I did not want to discourage her from running because I had problems who do that. But I told her I was running, and she basically shared with me she would not run against me. She chose not to run against me. I asked her that she'd have to share that with Gloria. To make a long story short, Gloria endorsed me, but it wasn't because she wanted to endorse me.

NICOLAIDES:

Did she tell you why she wouldn't run against you?

HERNANDEZ:

Vivian?

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah.

HERNANDEZ:

I think she just respected my work and respected--she saw my work and she knew I wanted--and she'd been involved with Gloria's campaigns in the past. I think Vivian just thought I should be the candidate, and Gloria was kind of pushing her to become a candidate.

NICOLAIDES:

So you did eventually get Gloria Molina's endorsement?

HERNANDEZ:

I did get Gloria's endorsement, and I learned a lot from Gloria. I remember we were at a CRA (Community Redevelopment Agency) meeting, a meeting in Chinatown, and people were complaining about the CRA. They basically were telling Gloria, "This is a debate," and they're asking the candidates would they allow Chinatown residents to select who was going to be on the CRA board to represent the Chinatown area. I'm sitting there listening to that discussion, and Gloria Molina said, "No, I won't let you do that," and I was surprised and I wanted to hear what her answer is. And she says, "I'm running for office. You're going to vote for me and you're going to hold me accountable. That means I need to make that decision. If I make a bad decision, I expect you to vote me out. If I make a good decision, I expect you to support me. But I'm the one you're going to hold accountable, not them." And I kind of liked that response, because Gloria was saying, "I'm the one who's responsible," and it was something I started using as part of my philosophy in politics. But I felt I was accountable to the people.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you tell me, when you were running for the 1st District, what was your involvement in--because I know you were very, like, involved in this particular area, but how did you kind of start getting engaged in that whole district?

HERNANDEZ:

As I shared with you, we walked different parts of the district when I was building that team to kind of get to know geographically what it looked like and what it was like, and I walked precincts. Every day, we were walking precincts. And we held house meetings, and the house meetings, anytime we could organize a meeting of three or more people in a house, I would actually show up. The goal was to do three house meetings a night, four nights out of the seven.

NICOLAIDES:

This is for the 1st District?

HERNANDEZ:

When I was running for the 1st District and running for the Assembly.

NICOLAIDES:

So you did the same kind of strategy, that very grassroots kind of--

HERNANDEZ:

Same strategy for both, mm-hmm. And in doing that, you actually are talking to people about the issues that are impacting them at that time. I was shocked at what I saw at Pico-Union, literally shocked. I thought I had problems in my neighborhood where if a car drove by, my wife and I would tell the kids to go down on the floor because we were scared of a drive-by shooting. We had liquor stores all over the place. You'd never see a police officer. I mean, things, from our perspective, were bad. But when I went down there, it was terrible. I mean, I could not believe--you talk to people at night in a room not this size, but you'd have twelve, thirteen people sleeping, and at night they'd all be outside in front of the apartment building. Why? Because it was cooler than it was inside. Then at night, they would sleep inside. And people were living in those conditions with kids, and there was no playgrounds and no schools. So I saw like a different city and I started talking about two cities, and it's because in my own district I could see two cities and I did not understand why the neglect in Pico-Union. But walking precincts, talking to people at their homes, you know, up in Mount Washington, in talking to everybody, you find out this community, northeast community plan, was extremely important to the people up in the mountains. So I had to learn about the planning and what was going on there.

NICOLAIDES:

The people in Mount Washington?

HERNANDEZ:

In Mount Washington, Montecito Heights, because they had the same kinds of issues. So being out there as part of the campaign, I walked in with an agenda of work to do that I did not understand why conditions were that way.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you just talk a little about that agenda? I mean, what was on that agenda?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, I knew I was basically being elected to represent the district that didn't have a representative for decades, not only as a Latino, but we were boundaries of all these other districts, so they took these boundaries and now they create a district and that's my district. So every one of those communities had issues of neglect, but it was because the city's formulas worked against us. I'll give you an example. When fifteen members are present, fifteen members make a decision. If fourteen members are present, fourteen members make a decision. So here you have funding for a library in Lincoln Heights that someone worked on for decades trying to get. All of a sudden, Gloria Molina gets elected to the City Council and they're going to move on that library. It's going to get done. But she's running for supervisor, gets elected supervisor, and now there's a vacancy. Meanwhile, the San Pedro Library needs some funds. So in that vacancy, the money disappeared for Lincoln Heights' library to San Pedro.

So I had an experience where I get elected to office. Keith Comrie is the chief administrative officer of the city, and he comes to me and he says, "Councilman, here's your project book." It was this thick, and it was projects that were basically being worked on in the district. They gave it to me, let's say, on a Friday. On Monday, I'm calling them back and I'm saying, "None of those projects are in my district." They were in the old 1st Councilmanic District. "So I'd like to have a book of projects in my district," and they had to build the book, because it was a new district. So now he comes into my office with a book this thick, and I'm looking at the projects and I'm like, "Why does this district have all these projects, this one has no projects?" He explained to me that capital projects, it's a five-year process, and five years ago, there was a vacancy when they were doing all the redistricting and there was nobody to submit projects for the 1st. Well, all those redistricting issues basically left this district without a representative, and when a new representative would come in, they were just--like, Mike (Michael) Woo came in and he was here six months. Joel Wachs was here for six months. Peggy Stevenson was here for six months. Art Snyder was here longer, but he only had a portion of the district.

So basically I came in and I started looking for stuff. I wanted to know what happened to my Lincoln Heights. I found out it went to San Pedro. I wanted to know what happened to this, and that's when I found out the rule, that if fourteen members are present, they're going to make decisions, and they're going to make their decisions in their best interest. So that vacancy hurt us a lot. Those vacancies hurt the district a lot over a period of time. Didn't mean we didn't need the projects; it just meant we weren't getting attention. So I started fighting for my projects, and one of the things I decided to do was take on my colleagues one at a time. So I took on Zev (Yaroslavsky) on the budget. I took Hal (Harold M.) Bernson on same land use issues. But I wanted them to know I wasn't scared to mess with them. Joan Milke Flores, one day, he had an ordinance going through a process, and it could take a year and a half, two years, and this was to change the community plans in San Pedro. It comes before council and you need a unanimous vote for it to go through the next step. It's the last day to do that, and I voted no. (John) Ferraro calls me up to the president's, was the chair, a little meeting, and he says, "Why are you voting no?" I said, "She took my Lincoln Heights money." And he said, "So what do you need?" I said, "I want my money back. If she gives me my money back, I will give her her vote." So he called that a spite vote, and I told the council president, "You're going to see a lot of those now." Joan finally agreed to give me my money back, and she agreed to give my money back, I voted for her project.

NICOLAIDES:

Did that happen soon after you--

HERNANDEZ:

It was like within the first two weeks. (laughs)

NICOLAIDES:

Oh, very soon into it. Okay.

HERNANDEZ:

I introduced myself that way to my colleagues. They thought I was a little feisty, and none of them could figure out how to work--and as I started breaking down all the city formulas, I found out they were all working against us indirectly. People don't understand these concepts, but you have street-paving money. We use it by mileage, not usage of the street, and so when you look at council districts, each one has the same amount of people in it, about 250,000 people in every council district. That's by law. But different sizes of land. So all your inner-city council districts were 10 to 13 square miles of land, but you go out to the suburbs, and, you know, Hal Bernson's district was 47 square miles of land. Cindy Miscikowski's, or, back then, Marvin Braude's district, was 53 miles of land. Zev's district was 47 miles of land. Yet all your inner-city council districts are 10 to 13 square miles of land, and what told you is they were packing poor people into the inner city. So land became a way they manipulated formulas. So if you have 100 square miles of land, you get 100 miles of street-paving money. If you have 13 square miles of land, you get 13 percent of the street-paving money. I was arguing usage. Everybody comes through our side of town. We have all the buses beating up our roads and our streets needed to be paved more, and so it was me arguing, "Look. I don't want to take any of your money. I just want one-fifteenth." None of them wanted to deal with the one-fifteenth because they all knew they were all getting more than and they were taking it from the inner-city council districts. This city was doing that for decades.

NICOLAIDES:

So what was the response to that when you brought that issue up?

HERNANDEZ:

I was the guy who asked the "No, no" questions. That was kind of the response. "Why do you keep on asking these questions?" And nobody understood I was just trying to represent my district. I was trying to get my resources to do my district. And it didn't matter what I threw. I hit the target every time, and it was because it was so rampant. There was so much neglect in the district. So I had the highest crime rate in the city. I had all these issues, and a lot of it was centered in Pico-Union, so that became my area of focus, Pico-Union, and I brought in a different philosophy. Gloria Molina basically, in trying to deal with the issues, she would close off certain streets, the access. You couldn't get to them. Well, in doing that, the police couldn't get to them either, because they were going to leave their patrol cars. So where you closed off the streets, you had this crime that just festered in there, and the cops wouldn't go in there. First thing I did was take the barricades down, demand that Department of Sanitation come in and pick up all the bulky items. "Let's start cleaning the streets." I just basically started providing the services the city's supposed to provide. That reduced crime. But I did something else. I was a top news story on--I forget--Channel 11, I think, one night. But I asked them to put a camera on 11th and Alvarado and a camera in Westwood, and they had a camera in Westwood and they had a camera at 11th and Alvarado. I'm sitting there talking to this reporter and he goes, "Why do you have us do this, councilman?" I said, "We're looking for cop cars." And he said, "All I see is these cars doing U-turns."

I said, "Well, the reason they're doing a U-turn is because you've got your light on and we're on TV and they're trying to buy drugs and they don't want to be on TV. So as long as we're here, we're fighting the drugs." So that's my story on this side of the camera. Meanwhile, in Westwood, they have a standing camera and all these cop cars driving by, all these cop cars driving by, and over here you have none. So that became the top story. I was doing those kinds of things to expose the issues in my district, which didn't make me a fan of the rest of the council.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, to me, this is speaking to the issue of inequality across L.A. city, right?

HERNANDEZ:

That's what Mike Davis talked about in his book.

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah. I mean, what were other issues that you saw were illustrating that?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, the fire inspections were one, where they weren't doing fire inspections in the district. We had issues with trash pickup. And I'll give you another example: street cleaning. So I would have my field deputies out there waiting for street cleaners to show up in Pico-Union and the street cleaners wouldn't show up to clean up the streets, and we'd find out they didn't show up to this one, they didn't show up to that one. So I'd call in to the department head, said, "How come you guys aren't cleaning my streets?" And they'd say, "The equipment breaks down, councilman, and when the equipment breaks down, we can't clean that street." I'd say, "Well, why is your equipment breaking down three out of four Tuesdays?" Then I found out it's because I have all the old equipment in my district. "Okay, so here's the budget, and in this budget, we're going to buy all these new trucks, right?" And the department had said, "Yes." I said, "No, you're not going to get them." And he looks at me like, "What are you talking about?" "I'm going to fight you on the budget, unless these trucks are going to my district, because you've already told us I have all the old equipment."

NICOLAIDES:

So who's saying this?

HERNANDEZ:

This is Street Services, the general services department. So they agreed that they equipment should go into the yards in the inner city, but it wasn't initially designed that way. So I was getting all the new equipment. Now I'm getting my streets cleaned. Well, no, that didn't happen. Called the department head again. I said, "Look. You've got new trucks. Why aren't you cleaning my streets?" He says, "Councilman, we hadn't been cleaning your streets for so long, we didn't have the personnel to drive the trucks." "Do you mean you stopped hiring people? So you consciously were not going to be cleaning my streets."

I had my streets cleaned, but that's what I had to do with that department. I had to do it time and time again where they knew we were going to be watching them. You know, I have a yard here, Department of Sanitation. I showed up on one night and there was all these beer cans and this partying that was going on in the yard and trash wasn't being picked up at my house. So I'm talking to the department head and I'm saying, "You know what your guys were doing last week?" And I'm showing him pictures of the parking lot and stuff. I said, "Now, I'm trying to figure out why you guys can't clean our streets." So I got my streets cleaned. But I was very confrontational when I first got on the council, and I didn't believe they cared about my district and I just wanted what they had. The way I learned how City Hall worked was by looking at my colleagues, what they did. All I wanted is what they had. I didn't want more, but I wasn't going to agree to less, and that became my style.

NICOLAIDES:

How did you get others onboard with this? I mean, were you able to get--

HERNANDEZ:

It took issues. It took issues, and I'll give you--there was a big issue we fought, and I think it was the first time I broke the council quorum. I remember we were having issues with water rates, and I'm trying to figure out why--there's tiers, and they charge you these rates at these tiers, different tier levels. We had a system that basically charged more to people who lived in apartments than people who lived in houses, and we charged more because of their meter system. The Valley argued that they should have a lower rate because they have bigger yards, they have swimming pools, and it's hotter than in the inner city. We just argued we should pay less because we're poor. We shouldn't be subsidizing the people who own more land, have swimming pools, and choose to live in hotter environments. So we won that vote.

Then Laura Chick came in with a motion and all the Valley councilmembers all got together and they were going to change that and they wanted to change those rates, and it was a huge debate, because we'd already exposed the inequality. So Mark Ridley-Thomas knew his constituents were paying more than they should be paying. Alatorre knew it. And I put them in a position where they were going to have to vote with me or with the rest of the colleagues, knowing what they knew. I counted. There used to be a rule in the council. When I first come in, everybody always pounds you with this. "You've got to learn to count to eight. When you've got eight votes, you're sitting all right. You don't have eight votes, you're in trouble, kid." They would always remind me I had to learn to count to eight. One day, I figured out I only needed to count to five. There was fourteen members present. While we were debating, the fifteenth didn't show up because they didn't want to be part of the decision. So we're debating it, and I knew that to break the quorum, I needed five votes, because you need to have ten members on the floor to vote and to debate. If there's nine, no. I called Alatorre, Rita Walters, Mark Ridley-Thomas, myself. We walked out. I remember looking at Richard. Richard joined us, and Richard was like hesitating and he ended up walking out and we broke the quorum. That evening, Ferraro called me up and we went to have some margaritas in Glendale at the Acapulco (Restaurant). I remember that. Ferraro's like, "Nobody's ever done that, broken a quorum consciously, and in front of the media. What's it going to take you to come back?"

I'm sitting there saying, "All we need to do is have fairer water rates. Let's redo those water rates and we're back." We ended up breaking quorum about three times. Another time we broke quorum was on the 187 vote, which was a huge vote. But the council had taken a position against 187.

NICOLAIDES:

This was on Prop 187?

HERNANDEZ:

On Proposition 187. Council had taken a position against. You have an election and it passes. Now council takes a position to basically support the lawsuit against 187, but because it passes, my colleague Joel Wachs decides to come in with a motion for us not to join the lawsuit, and so because he made that decision, the council was getting ready to vote to stop Jimmy (James K.) Hahn from issuing--I guess it's a writ of habeas corpus where we basically joined the lawsuit, and we had to break quorum in order to not take that vote on a Friday.

NICOLAIDES:

Because it would have tipped the other way, you think?

HERNANDEZ:

Because it would have tipped the other way and he wouldn't have been allowed to file the lawsuit on behalf of the city. By us voting to not do that, he still could file that, and he filed that lawsuit that afternoon.

NICOLAIDES:

So who else was coming with you on breaking--

HERNANDEZ:

Primarily the inner-city votes. Ruth Galanter joined us sometimes. But primarily the inner-city votes.

NICOLAIDES:

Jackie Goldberg too?

HERNANDEZ:

When Jackie got on the council, she was part of that liberal coalition.

NICOLAIDES:

And you said there was a third time you broke quorum. It was the water rates, 187, and do you remember what other thing was?

HERNANDEZ:

I don't remember. But I've seen it now, I've seen that used more than once now, when you have some of those crucial votes.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you feel like--I mean, was there the possibility of kind of reaching across that aisle to connect with those other councilpeople from the Valley?

HERNANDEZ:

I think so. I think so. I didn't know them that way then. Marvin Braude reached out to me. We went out and had dinner one night. Zev and I went and had a lunch one day and we talked. They were trying to understand me better, and I appreciated that. You know, the members, we're really a private club, and we all experience the same thing. When we're out of office, we're all close, but when we're there, we're fighting tooth and nail for our constituents. I mean, I chose a strategy where I was going to be aggressive with all of them, because I thought that I was going to try and change an institution and I had to kind of knock some of the blocks down, and they needed to know I was real. Now, on my side, we had some debate on Olvera Street at one time on some of the issues, and I used to be a commissioner, so I kind of became the expert on Olvera Street. Joel Wachs was the Chair of the Recreation and Parks Committee, and he basically allowed me to run with the Olvera Street issue because he knew I was a commissioner, and he did not like Alatorre and I was taking on Alatorre. But that work as commissioner gave me the ability to be at the forefront of the issues there, and the issues there were primarily between Gloria Molina and Richard Alatorre trying to represent the merchants.

Now, as a commissioner, Congressman (Edward) Roybal had chatted with me about Olvera Street. I remember I was visiting in Washington, D.C., talking to congressmen, and he's telling me the story of Walt Disney. Now, he's telling me why he believes the merchants deserve to be long term at Olvera Street, because they made the decision that that's what they were going to be. So what happens is Walt Disney's friend, this guy named Howard Hughes, owns this land out in the Westside that he wants to build an airport on, but in order to get passengers over to his airport, he wanted to transport them through with a helicopter. So he wanted to put a heliport at Olvera Street right there by the kiosk. So he wanted a heliport there by Union Station so they could transport people to his land over there. In order to do that, you'd have to move the merchants, and Walt Disney was building this amusement park in Anaheim and he wanted the merchants to create what he called his Fiesta Town and he was offering them all their own shops at Disneyland. Merchants had a big meeting and they chose to stay at Olvera Street, and Roybal was part of the discussions and he felt that the merchants just felt that they were part of the history of Los Angeles and they should remain there and it shouldn't be something that's part of an amusement park. So the congressman taught me that, so I was going to fight to preserve the merchants.

Meanwhile, I have an administration who basically believes the restrooms at Olvera Street are no different than the restrooms at the beach, and we're saying, no, it's two different locations. They shouldn't be compared. So I had an administration who didn't know how to manage businesses. He was a Rec and Parks guy, and the merchants were all up in arms. Merchants had month-to-month leases, so they could never do any improvements. Tom Bradley assigned me to deal with those issues, and I started working on negotiating long-term rent negotiations. Fast-forward, I'm a city councilman. Issues are still there. I'm playing the lead role. I'm dealing with the negotiations. I'm bringing everybody onboard. The question was, how do you guarantee merchants long-term leases when the city charter doesn't allow it? City charter doesn't allow anybody more than a three-year lease. So that became the issue. Solution was, introduce a charter amendment. Have the voters vote on it. And we introduced Proposition H. What's Proposition H? I called it H because my name was Hernandez. At the time, I didn't know better. They asked me to pick an initial for this charter amendment. I picked H. We put it before the voters. I remember going to talk to Gloria Molina about the strategy at her office--she's now a supervisor--and she kicked me out of her office. She said, "You're never going to get that thing passed, Mike. Why are you stroking the merchants? Why are you misrepresenting what you're going to be able to get done?" I'm telling her I'm going to get it passed and she's telling me it's not going to happen, so she kicked me out of her office. Make a long story short, Proposition H passed. The merchants have that security. Today, they have long-term leases, and that was the reason why that happened.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you know why she didn't think it would pass?

HERNANDEZ:

Most people didn't think it would pass. I believed the voters would support the merchants, but all you had was the narrative in the ballot measure. But it passed, and that's what provides protection, to this day, to those merchants. There have been several controversial issues, but they've survived because of Proposition H. Now, I kind of mention that because me being new on the council, the other members were busy trying to pass ballot measures to hire more cops, and the people weren't supporting it. Now, that's important because two years later, I also introduced Prop K and everybody thought Prop K wouldn't pass. My colleagues did not think Prop K would pass, and it was like pulling teeth trying to get that on the ballot. I remember one day Nate (Nathaniel N.) Holden basically was voting no on it and I needed his vote.

NICOLAIDES:

This was the open-land initiative, right?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, mm-hmm. I needed his vote, and he was telling me he wasn't going to vote on it and he's giving me the speech why he shouldn't vote. I was stepping on his foot, putting all my weight on his foot, and he finally, in his speech he said, "I'm under a lot of pressure right now not to fight this, and so I'm going to support it," and Nate supported it. That's kind of an inside story we tell. But he ended up supporting it, and because of that vote, we were able to put it on the ballot. We put it on the ballot. We negotiated with the county. Make a long story short, the county had Prop A and I had Prop K, and they both passed. Nobody believed the people would support the kids. I did.

NICOLAIDES:

So that was like '96. I wonder if we can circle back to those early years, because I know that jumped ahead a bit, but I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about when you first came into office. You had told me earlier that you felt like you were baptized through crisis when you first joined the council. Can you talk to me a little bit about that and what happened?

HERNANDEZ:

1991, the state of California was in a recession, economic recession, very limited resources. I got elected and I started analyzing the city's budget priorities and the formulas. I'm looking at them completely different because I'm trying to get resources for my district, and I was basically organizing people to take on the city budget. In that process, one night I'm looking at the CRA budget, not understanding it, and I went out to the rotunda and I screamed because I was frustrated. I went back to my office to do my studying. The next night, Tom Bradley shows up in my office about 10:00 o'clock, and Tom Bradley used to keep late hours. I remember him showing up and he wanted to chat with me. He goes, "Councilman, one of the janitors was telling me that last night, you screamed out in the rotunda. What was that about?" I believe Mayor Bradley was the best mayor this city's had. (Telephone rings. Recorder turned off.)

NICOLAIDES:

Okay.

HERNANDEZ:

So the mayor wanted to know what was going on, and I'm sitting there saying, "I'm looking at this budget, the CRA budget," which is a sub-budget of the big city budget, "and I'm seeing six years of income being spent in one year. I'm trying to figure out why." So the mayor looks at me, Tom Bradley, and he's like, "I think you should ask that question." And I said, "Well, I thought you'd have the answer."

He goes, "No, no, no, Mike. Other people prepare this budget for me. This is the first time I'm seeing this, but I think you should ask the question." I said, "Okay." So I was right in my concept. So when I asked it on the council floor, nobody had an answer. When CRA was before them and CRA tried to answer it, we figured out I was right. They were spending six years of money, six years of income in one year, which meant they were going bankrupt, and we had to change their whole budget. We looked at things differently, ended up getting a new executive director. All those things changed because I looked at the budget.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you feel like your business background kind of helped you see that sort of thing?

HERNANDEZ:

Business and math. It always has to add up, and if they don't, you've got to ask why. And I think that if I hadn't had that chat with Bradley, I might not have asked the question, because I just didn't understand it. Well, I did understand it, it was just wrong, and Bradley's the one that said, "No, ask the question." So I've never hesitated to ask the question. If I have a question, I ask it, and I tell other members to do that. One of the issues at Olvera Street early on when I first got elected and I'm dealing with the Olvera Street issues, the day we were going to take a vote, I called for a demonstration, and there was about three, four thousand people marching around City Hall. Nobody had ever done that, where a councilmember generates that kind of activity.

NICOLAIDES:

How did you do that?

HERNANDEZ:

Because we were organizing in the field, and we were organizing in the field to kind of look at the city's budget priorities. Now, I get elected in August. I'm breaking formulas down. In December, we had the worst floods in the Sepulveda Basin. I remember I'm being helicoptered out there in the rain and I'm watching the councilmembers basically providing all these resources, basically, "Yes, yes, yes." What do you say no to? But council needed to be aware, because they approved the expenditures. So they have a subcommittee that shows up. They approve it, permission of the council, it's going to be good for the rest of the council. So they select individuals who sit on certain committees, and I chaired the Economic Development Committee and what they called the Administrative Services Committee, which at that time was in charge of all the city resources, the general services and everything. That's why I was out there. So I watched Zev and Hal and they were, like, moving Ferraro, and I got to see them act in that kind of environment. This is December. Come April, we're having the Rodney King verdict, and I knew we were sitting on a powder keg. We had started organizing community groups to get ready to come and testify during the budget process on issues like street cleaning, street sweeping, trash pickup, police coverage, all these kinds of things, and so we're meeting with community groups, organizing, talking about their issues.

And I should share with you that I had a network of what we call MASH networks, MASH chapters, and Gloria Molina had started the concept, but I was one of the organizers who worked it for her. So I was working on the ground what Gloria wanted to see implemented. MASH stood for More Advocates for Safe Homes. So we were creating these chapters throughout the district. I would show up at a meeting, let's say in Pico-Union, Westlake, and we'd invite all these folks--and let's say there'd be sixty, eighty people--to complain about the city. I would call that the first gear, which I'd show up at the meeting and everybody would be there ready to yell at me, yell at the city, and I would start my patent speech, "I didn't walk in here wearing a white hat. I don't have a white horse. I'm not going to solve your problems. First, I need to understand what our problems are." So we'd bring out a big blackboard and we started writing down all the complaints.

NICOLAIDES:

So this is coming from the floor?

HERNANDEZ:

Coming from the floor, and we're writing down what they're complaining about. "These complaints over here have to deal with street services. These complaints have to deal with LAPD. These complaints have to deal with--," some other department. Then I'd say, "Okay. We're going to have another meeting, except now what I can do is I'm going to bring all those department heads to the meeting and they're going to talk about your issues, because we're going to let them know and they're going to tell you what's going on."

So we'd have a second meeting, and now we're developing a roster, asking them names, addresses, phone numbers. And at the second meeting, the department heads would show up. Now, I would like to play the role of constituent with departments, so I'd watch my constituents ask the LAPD chief of the Rampart Division, "What happens Friday nights? We call in and it takes fifteen minutes for a police officer to come." The police officer would say, "Well, we try the best we can. That's our time." Then I'd raise my hand. "Chief, do you mind telling people how many people you have working that shift at that time?" And he'd say, "Six." I'd say, "Six. And how big is your district? So what happens if they're dealing with this crime over here?" "Well, there are four over there." "What about if there's something going on over here?" "Well, two over there." "What about if there's something going on--?" "Well, I have nobody to send."

NICOLAIDES:

So do you know about how many people were in that division, the Rampart?

HERNANDEZ:

No. But the idea was to get people to--them talking to each other. So the chief would basically now start asking the community to work with them because they didn't have as many of the resources. But I did that with the fire department. I did that with all the departments. And then we'd put together a plan that had to be implemented. Then I'd suggest, "Why don't we have an election so we have some officers for this MASH unit." So we were starting these neighborhood MASH units throughout the district, and that was my network to communicate with people.

NICOLAIDES:

So each of these MASH areas had--like, how big would each of these units have been?

HERNANDEZ:

It depended. They could be two blocks. What I found happening, the safer the community, the less MASH units I had. The more issues that community had, the more units I had. It was like they were smaller. They'd make themselves smaller. So what was going on in this block was very different from what was going on in this other block, and so I'd have two different MASH units. They ended up falling apart, and the reason they ended up falling apart is I gave them a budget and they started fighting over the budget, and fighting. And some people were absconding some of the monies. They didn't know how to govern and didn't have the same ethics, so they had a hard time.

NICOLAIDES:

And were these mostly in the Pico-Union?

HERNANDEZ:

Pico-Union, Westlake, Echo Park.

NICOLAIDES:

Were they throughout your district?

HERNANDEZ:

They were throughout. We had about seventy units.

NICOLAIDES:

Seventy?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm, MASH units.

NICOLAIDES:

Wow.

HERNANDEZ:

At its peak. The main organizer was a young man named David Marques. He was one of my field deputies. But he started them with Gloria, then he worked for me.

NICOLAIDES:

And around how long did they exist, do you think?

HERNANDEZ:

About four years, five years.

NICOLAIDES:

And then they just kind of--

HERNANDEZ:

They started falling apart. They started fighting with each other. You see the same thing going on with neighborhood councils, and it's because, again, they need to learn Robert's Rules of Order, how to conduct a meeting, how to respect each other. Those kinds of things have to happen. And it gets too close, gets too close.

NICOLAIDES:

So that was happening. And then you mentioned the Rodney King uprising.

HERNANDEZ:

So when the riots hit, I shared with you I was chairing a Committee on Economic Development, and we had just finished the data for the census, because we had just had redistricting, which had created my seat and so forth. I took that census data and I put it on GIS maps. So I took the population under the poverty line, put it on a GIS map, population that doesn't have an automobile, households without an automobile, put it on the map. Took all these poverty indicators, put them on a map, and we had a geographic map of how the poverty extended throughout the city. Those maps became very--I called them the "zones of need," and that was my tale of two cities. I could actually show on a geographic map where we were treating people differently. Then what happens is the riots hit. Now, I have a map, and this map is intense in color. Where you had the most intense color is where they started, Florence and Manchester, and I saw the riots progressing according to the zones of need.

NICOLAIDES:

So you did that zones-of-need mapping before the riots happened?

HERNANDEZ:

Before the riots. So we could see which way, so we knew it was going to hit Pico-Union, Westlake, it was going to hit Hollywood. We even had two census tracts in San Fernando where they rioted, and they were on the zones of need, those two census maps. So clearly this was an economic riot. Everybody else wanted to call it a social, ethnic riot. No. It was in your areas of strongest need. And I had it mapped out, by coincidence, not by design, and I showed everybody those maps and everybody knew I had the maps. Anybody who came to a meeting with me knew about the maps and the zones of needs, and that's what I was trying to address to the city. After the riots, we had a program called Weed and Seed that came in, and the government was proposing these enterprise zones. They basically needed to have 20 miles of contiguous area where you had a certain percentage of poverty census tracts and so forth. Because of the zones of needs map, we could provide five of those applications as a city, and our problem was, because they had to be contiguous, we could only have one application, and how do you do that. So I worked with the Clinton administration on the enterprise empowerment zone legislation, and they agreed that they wouldn't have to be contiguous. They could be separate. So we, the city, actually applied for five applications and we didn't get any, because in other cities, like Baltimore, you'd apply and you're getting almost the whole city. So from the federal perspective, it made more sense to help the East Coast cities than it did to help the West Coast cities.

NICOLAIDES:

So L.A.'s spreading out was working against it, it sounds like.

HERNANDEZ:

It was working against us. But they allowed us to be non-contiguous and they gave us a program called Weed and Seed.

NICOLAIDES:

Instead of the enterprise zone?

HERNANDEZ:

Instead of the enterprise zone. And we renamed Weed and Seed to Communities Participating in Reconstruction, CPR, we being Mark Ridley-Thomas and I. CPR, we wanted to build communities, and so we got additional resources and so forth because of that program.

NICOLAIDES:

So this was federal money, then?

HERNANDEZ:

This was all federal money. I kind of came out during the riots. Everybody found out who I was.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you talk a little about that?

HERNANDEZ:

Sure.

NICOLAIDES:

I wanted to really dig into that a little bit, like sort of what was happening actually during the riots, if you can like walk me through what you were seeing.

HERNANDEZ:

When the verdicts came out, we had a game plan for all of us to go to First AME Church, primarily the progressive councilmembers, to try and urge the community to stay calm. The verdicts hit, the riots started before any of us showed up at AME Church, so now we're in the middle of this madness in South L.A. I ended up coming back to City Hall, and I had my staff with us. We were watching TV. We understand the zones of need, and we wanted to make sure we didn't get blamed. The TV camera is showing this rioter carrying a TV set, and he's carrying this TV set and he says in plain English, "Look, Grandma, what I got to take home." And the reporter standing next to him listening to this guy says, "Look at the looter. Doesn't he look like an immigrant?" And when he said that, I figured they were coming after us. They were going to blame the riot on us. I don't know where that instinct came from, but prior to that, I had a policy where I didn't talk to media. I didn't need to talk to the media. I wasn't going to talk to media. That night, we decided I was going to come out. I was going to talk to the media on the issues impacting the riot, why I believed people were rioting, and all the zones of need. So my staff starts doing their work.

All of a sudden, I'm headed to Channel 7 News, and this is, I think, the 6:00 o'clock news. I think her name was Ann (Martin) Williams. She was a blonde anchor reporter for Channel 7. While we're sitting there, I have a mic on like this. She asks me, "Who are you?" I said, "Mike Hernandez." And she says, "What do you do?" I said, "I'm a city councilman." And she said, "What city?" I said, "Los Angeles." Now, that's how far the media was. Didn't know who the first Latino elected city councilman was, right?

NICOLAIDES:

Wow.

HERNANDEZ:

So I started talking about the social reasons why the riot was happening, and the media picked that up.

NICOLAIDES:

So what were you saying?

HERNANDEZ:

I was saying that people were frustrated because government wasn't paying attention to them. They were dealing in atmospheres that they didn't have to. The poverty was real, and we weren't connecting. "People drive through our neighborhoods. They're not part of our neighborhoods." And I was talking about the two cities. Somehow, I ended up on Channel 9 News, Jerry Dunphy, and he started his questioning with, "Councilman, what are you going to do about these illegal aliens?" And when he started the conversation like that, I remember getting my mic, taking it off, and I was holding it and I said, "Until we understand that it's not us versus them, because it's us, we're going to have a problem with the city." And I walked out on Jerry Dunphy's newscast. Because I did that, I ended up on Nightline with Ted Koppel and Jim Brown, talking about the riots. So I was out there conveying a message of hope. Meanwhile, a friend of mine who I thought was my second cousin, because my father told me I was a Cisneros. Who calls me is Henry Cisneros, and he says, "I want to help." He's no longer mayor of San Antonio. He's not running for President. He's not Secretary of HUD or anything. So Henry comes down to help. I called Eddie (Edward James) Olmos, I called some other folks, and we put together a game plan where we were going to clean up the city. We were going to go in there and provide resources for people to clean up, give people something to do positive, and everybody responded very positive to that message. But you have TV images of Eddie Olmos out there on the streets with cleanup buckets. Henry Cisneros was out there on the streets. All my staff was out there on the streets, and that's all we were doing. And I remember going in front of the council trying to get more of those resources to give out to the community to clean up and my colleagues fighting me. I think it was Zev who said something, "What makes you think these riots are going to stop?" And I said, "If they don't, we're not going to have a city." That's how bad things were on the floor.

NICOLAIDES:

So, I mean, do you remember what else they were saying about--

HERNANDEZ:

I had the impression most people didn't know what to do. We were all in shock. I didn't know what to do, I was just doing something about it, but because I was doing something about it, the spotlight kind of shined on me. I know Alatorre was asked a question and it was interpreted wrong, but he was asked a question about the people in Pico-Union, Westlake, and Alatorre's response was something like, "I don't represent those people," and people interpreted that as he doesn't represent the immigrants. So I became the honorable Mike Hernandez during the riots because I was fighting for them. I understood what Richard was saying. The other folks did not understand what Richard was saying at the time, and it was the way it was presented. And so they presented me as the guy who was out there fighting.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you sense that Alatorre was on your side with this?

HERNANDEZ:

Oh, yeah. Richard was definitely on my side on this. I just happened to be the guy who represented Pico-Union, Westlake.

NICOLAIDES:

So were there other councilpeople that were behind you on what you were trying to do?

HERNANDEZ:

I think the Jackies of the world. You know, I didn't get a lot of support--Mark Ridley-Thomas and I had a very strange relationship. We used to fight a lot, but we figured out if we fought each other, we'd get more resources, because the rest of the council would be scared, and so we would actually act like we were fighting.

NICOLAIDES:

So can you talk me through that a little bit?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah. Well, there was a time when Mark was introducing some legislation for an afterschool program, and now it's (unclear), but he's introducing this legislation, and it was basically to deal with gang violence. It was after this child was killed. He's introducing this, and the program, we were going to spend like $15 million. When the schools all came out that were going to participate, none of the schools on the east side were on the list. It's like we didn't have no gang violence, and I was trying to figure out why, when we had all these gangs. So somehow, in the formula, they figured out that if you use math scores, no English scores, use the math scores, don't use the English scores, the schools would score high enough that they wouldn't qualify on the list, and so more money would be available for the schools that did qualify. Well, that was a strategy that I believed impacted communities that had strong immigrant populations, and that's why our schools didn't show up. When we looked at the formulas reversing those two scores, all our schools were in, and I kind of exposed that to Mark. And Mark knew me as someone who was always fighting for resources, so Mark thought I had more than my fair share of resources, but this was a different program.

So when I exposed that issue, and Mark was going, "How can you explain we don't have gang violence in East L.A., Northeast L.A.? The Avenues, and that's where all the stories are," the council basically doubled the budget. So that we wouldn't exclude any of his schools, we included all my schools. And that's what used to happen, but I used to have to argue it. Rightfully so, Mark argued against me on housing money, because he exposed the fact that I was getting like 85 percent of all the housing money in the city to build housing, and it was because I was. But I was building housing with social conscience, and so I needed to subsidize it. And I built housing with built-in childcare centers, New Economics for Women, built-in Boys & Girls Clubs. I was building low-income housing with some kind of social equity component attached to it, and it was costing more, but that's what I was doing. I was knocking down walls in single-occupancy residences so I could have more family housing. So I was getting most of the housing money and they all found that out, and it's because he didn't want that kind of money at that time. He didn't want low-income housing in his district. My attitude was, "I already have low-income people. I need housing for them." So I kind of had a different approach to it, and so I went after all the housing money and people thought I was, like, the housing guy at the city. So I'm developing a reputation as being a budget guy, I'm developing a reputation of being a housing guy, but also developing a reputation of caring about the kids, and those were my primary areas. But the riots helped me stand out as someone who was talking about the zones of needs and social equity issues, and I was doing it very publicly so that people could understand better what was going on in L.A.

NICOLAIDES:

So you really saw poverty as like a driving force behind the riots?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm. I knew it was. I knew it was.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you actually go in there when it was happening?

HERNANDEZ:

I was on the streets.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you remember--like, can you recall any things you were seeing?

HERNANDEZ:

I'll tell you a story. On basically Pico and Alvarado, all four corners were burning down. I showed up there, and there were all these firefighters getting ready to go on, but they weren't going in because there was all these men with machetes. I'm asking what's going on, and I would do that. I'd just walk up and, "What's going on?" And I'm being told by the guys with machetes that they're there to protect the firemen. Okay. So I'm telling the firefighters, "These guys are here to protect you so that you can go in and fight the fire." And then the firefighters went in. But those kinds of stories were happening all over the district.

NICOLAIDES:

Oh, my god.

HERNANDEZ:

But we were out there in force. I was real proud of my staff. I had Raphael (Gonzalez). Raphael, he worked for the Youth Council, Youth Policy Council, but he was an organizer. David Marcus was a community youth gang worker, but he was an organizer. Rita Moreno was an organizer. My staff were organizers. And I'll tell you a story. I hired this one young man. He's a playwright today, Enrique Berumen. He came up to me one day because--and I'm trying to empower my deputies--someone had been killed on Beaudry (Avenue) and 3rd Street, and the people in the building, they basically wanted a traffic signal. They wanted something to deal with the fact that this person had been killed. So Enrique's talking to me and I said, "So what are you doing about it?" He said, "Well, I'm organizing candlelight vigils." I said, "Candlelight vigils, that's nice, but I don't think that's what they want. What about a traffic signal?" He says, "Well, I don't know, councilman. I don't know. How do we get a traffic signal?" I said, "Well, let's work on that." So we start looking how to get a traffic signal, and each traffic signal costs about $300,000. So then what happens is I find this fund, this public works fund, that had all this money in it, and I found it because there was a project on 3rd and Beaudry that deposited money into that fund. What happens is whenever you have a development project, the city anticipates some future mitigation that needs to be done and they'll require that developer to make a deposit to pay for that future mitigation, and when the city's ready to do the work, they do the work. So if you're trying to expand a street, you've got to buy ten lots or at least the right-of-way along ten lots so you can expand that street, so it takes a while to do these projects. So when we looked at that account, there was all this money, and there was money in there for traffic signals. So I brought in the Bureau of Engineering. I'm asking DOT, "How come my signals never went up there?" And they're explaining to me, "Well, we never got to do the work." I said, "But meanwhile, you're spending all the interest and stuff from the fund, right?" They said, "Yeah." "But you never did this work, and someone's been killed."

You go there today, there's seventeen signals up at 3rd and Beaudry and there's a traffic box on the corner, has a plaque on it, the name of the person who was killed, and Enrique Berumen made sure that happened. But that's how I was training my organizers. I gave them projects, I had them work on them, we figured out a solution, and then we followed through. But the community then understood that they had a voice. And I wanted the plaque to commemorate this person, which DOT thought I was crazy, by the way, because of putting a plaque on a utility box, but it was important to those people who were demonstrating who brought it to our attention that we, the city, had not put up a traffic signal we should have been put up and that person might not have been killed in the first place. That was my attitude.

NICOLAIDES:

One of the other big issues the media picked up on during the unrest was the INS, and you were kind of right in the thick of that. Can you talk to me about that?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, and I'll tell you a story, because these are the stories nobody's going to hear, and my staff's always telling me I've got to tell them. So someone just reminded me of this story on Monday. There was an article written someplace, but I haven't found out. He said he carried it in his wallet for the longest time. Rick Orlov wrote it, is what he told me. Tony Perez you might want to talk to. He was my press, communications guy during that period. But I'm so frustrated because they assigned all these different personnel, but they put INS in Pico-Union to calm the unrest, and all that did is--

NICOLAIDES:

Who's "they"?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, the authorities, the LAPD. In coordinating where do you put, who do you put, they put INS there. So I'm determined to get INS out, so I called Tom Bradley's office and the mayor wasn't in, and I left a message for the mayor. I said, "I heard they're picking up Nigerians in South L.A.," that INS was arresting Nigerians in South L.A. About twenty minutes later, I get a call from the mayor. He said, "Councilman, I heard you heard INS is picking up people from Nigeria in South L.A." And I said, "Did I say Nigeria? I think I meant Central America. And I didn't mean South L.A.; I meant Pico-Union." After the mayor kind of--there was a pause and he was like, "Councilman, why would you do that?" I said, "Mayor, I just want to know if you care about my constituents as much as I'm going to care about yours." See, I knew Tom Bradley used to represent Pico-Union as a councilman, and so we had that special relationship where we could talk to each other. And, "I just want to know if you're going to represent my constituents." So Bradley was onboard. Next day, I show up at council and I put on a protest ribbon, black ribbon. I think Ruth or Jackie was the first one to put one on, then Ruth put one on, then Alatorre put one on. When I got eight of them, we introduced a motion to remove INS from Pico-Union because it wasn't right, and it passed.

NICOLAIDES:

How long did that take? I mean, do you remember?

HERNANDEZ:

About a week, I mean, three days, about three days. I introduced an emergency motion. But we introduced a motion and it passed. The council passed it.

NICOLAIDES:

How did you know what was happening down there with the INS?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, again, my deputies were out there. We were part of this community. We were out there and we were talking to people and we were hearing horror stories of INS picking up people and just deporting them.

NICOLAIDES:

Was it just random sweeps?

HERNANDEZ:

They were putting them out in buses and they were deporting people that day.

NICOLAIDES:

Was it people who had been arrested?

HERNANDEZ:

People on the streets.

NICOLAIDES:

Or I guess they were doing the arrests. So it was just people on the streets?

HERNANDEZ:

People on the streets. And I had to get them out, and they got out. INS used to have a detention center in Pico-Union. We closed that down, and that became a property that was run by CARECEN (Central American Resource Center), Central American Refugee--

NICOLAIDES:

What was your sense, in general, of how the city was responding to the riots, and Bradley too?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, one, I was surprised the city wasn't aware of the condition of the city, the fact that people were frustrated, they were hurting. I think the lack of representation was catching up to them. You've got to remember, the courts forced the city to create the 1st Council District. I don't think the members wanted to create the 1st Council District, and they all knew they were boundaries of their districts. And that made it easier for me to work on things, because I'd be doing something in Cypress Park and I'd been talking to Mike (Michael) Woo and telling Mike Woo, "Mike, you represented this area." And I'd tell Mike, "You wanted to hire me to help you understand this area. I understand it, and this is my problem. I need your help to solve this problem." And I would have his help. I think at the end of the day, the members respected me, but it took a while. The first four years were tough.

NICOLAIDES:

One question I had is there was some talk during the riots that the riots kind of exposed some rifts within the Latino community between the newer immigrant communities and the more established, like, home-owning Eastside. Did you sense that, or would you have agreed with that take on it?

HERNANDEZ:

No, I did not. Part of that rift they talk about was that Alatorre comment when he said he didn't represent those folks, and he was talking about Pico-Union and Westlake. My zones of need didn't go into East L.A., never showed the riot going that way.

NICOLAIDES:

So, in other words, if you said the zones of need wasn't--was it not showing poverty in East L.A.? Was that study not showing that?

HERNANDEZ:

Didn't show the same level of poverty, percentage of families with one parent working. There's all these demographics that we used to create the zones of need, and East L.A. was not as apparent as Pico-Union was, as Westlake was. And there was no concept of the riot going on out there.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, do you think that was a fair assessment?

HERNANDEZ:

No.

NICOLAIDES:

You don't?

HERNANDEZ:

No, no, no.

NICOLAIDES:

Why?

HERNANDEZ:

I'll give you an example. I called myself Chicano, Latino. I never used the term "Hispanic" because that was an East Coast term that was put when they first created the census. But I was Mexicano first. But I found out when I got elected to office if I wanted to be more inclusive, I used the term "Latino." And when I was doing my work in Pico-Union, Westlake, I understood the difference between El Salvador and Nicaragua and Mexico. I used to go events at MacArthur Park and have to listen to seven national anthems because each country was celebrating their independence, but they all celebrated September 16th. But I distinctly knew I had different communities, but the term "Latino" was more inclusive, and so I would use the term "Latino." But that was inclusive of East L.A. and Pico-Union, in my mind. In terms of education, we all have the same issues. We just don't come from a war-torn country. I understood Central America much better once I visited, but I didn't understand it before that. No different to me than the Greek community, the Jewish community, or the Korean community. I kept on talking about the flavors of L.A., the people of L.A., and I was just fortunate that I got to bless the area that basically represented those communities more so than any other district, I mean when you include Chinatown, the (unclear), part of Koreatown, Westlake, Pico-Union. So I had to deal with all those issues, but my style was more inclusive.

NICOLAIDES:

Right. I mean, I think you were understanding that situation, but I guess I'm maybe asking about, I don't know, the more middle-class Latinos. Was there a sense of empathy about what was happening in the riots by people like Alatorre? Like, from your vantage point, were they understanding, like, what was driving that?

HERNANDEZ:

I think so. I think so. You know, our community is scapegoated more than most people understand because of this immigrant issue. To me, the immigrant issue makes it a class issue, and immigrants are treated differently. Basically they're being discriminated because they're being put into a class, and our Constitution doesn't defend immigrants. It only defends gender, it defends ethnicity. But the immigrant community is the scapegoat, and this administration's definitely showing that. I think I have my position on immigrants, because I always tell people the only time I was illegal, I was in Mexico. But I got the benefit of being there and being here, and the issues of learning English and forgetting English and learning English again were real and kind of haunted me my whole life. I was considered an immigrant when I wasn't, but the reality was I was treated like an immigrant, and I understood that. I had that empathy, and I fight for them to be treated no different than anybody else.

NICOLAIDES:

Back to the riots, can you talk a little bit about what you think, like, the major fallout from that was? Or I know you did mention that CPR program, but what was your sense of sort of what came out of that, for better or worse?

HERNANDEZ:

I was part of RLA (Rebuild LA), and I thought that that was a phenomenal effort. Some people were very critical of it. But when Peter Ueberroth took over his chairmanship, Bradley brought Peter Ueberroth in and they held a press conference and Peter Ueberroth was going to solve all these problems. I was a big fan of the Olympics, but I didn't know Peter Ueberroth from Adam. So I show up at this press conference and they're making this announcement. This is as the riots had just started, had been going on maybe two days. The media's asking questions, and I raise my hand as like if I was a reporter, right? And, "Okay, councilman." I said, "I want to know if we're going to be a part of this." And everybody knew I was asking are Latinos going to be part of this. Peter Ueberroth said, "Of course you are. You have to be part of the solution." I said, "Okay. Well, because I don't see us up there." There was nobody up there from the Latino community. And when the earthquake happened two years later, I rushed to City Hall so I could interpret for Tom Bradley, and it's because the reality is in those days, we didn't have interpreters. We weren't talking to the Spanish-language community. I was. The Latino elected officials thought we had an upper hand on everybody because we could talk to constituents in their district in Spanish, and that, I think, made our colleagues feel a little bit insecure, the fact that we had Spanish-language media on our side, and we were trying to include them in City Hall. Your mainstream news media didn't have Latinos. I mean, you know, we had maybe Henry Ramirez on Channel 7 and Frank Cruz, and they were fighting the struggle to get more Latino newsmakers--I mean not newsmakers but newscasters--and I sit here now watching TV, every station has Latinos on them. But it wasn't like that in the nineties. So we had to emerge as--again, the council pretended we weren't here by not giving us a voice, and then we earned a voice because the courts required it, and now we are here.

NICOLAIDES:

Could you talk a little bit about how you were involved in Rebuild LA?

HERNANDEZ:

I was part of the board. Basically, I had recommended Tony Salazar, Linda Griego, who was the deputy mayor. They were both chairmen, co-chairs, of the L.A. board, and I was working with them. Most members chose not to.

NICOLAIDES:

Most councilmembers?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, South L.A. And it's because there's a need to control things, because you want to get the credit, and they didn't feel that they controlled it. Peter Ueberroth did. I could care less. My staff will tell you I had a standing saying that said, "There's no limit as to what can get accomplished, as long as you don't care who gets the credit." So we didn't care who gets the credit. We just want to make sure things got accomplished. I always tell people we don't go to ground openings, we go to ribbon-cuttings, because the project's done then. So it was kind of like how do you complete things, and it was a different style.

So RLA, I thought, was the largest gathering of community participants in the city of L.A., whether they be activists, businesspeople, educators and whatever, and we were brought together in a boardroom. And even though people might not feel we accomplished a lot, I think that the fact that we brought us all together talking to each other was a huge accomplishment in the first place. It was the largest endeavor of that sort, and it was part of the healing process for the city, for people to actually be listening. I'm talking to a guy from the James Irvine Foundation because we're sitting at a table next to each other who happened to go to Oxy, and in that discussion, we talk about the Urban Fellows, how it is that Oxy could have a program to train young people to be part of the inner-city representation. And that resulted in like $2.5 million to Occidental College to run that program, that conversation on an RLA board. But Oxy got that money and that was a big thing. But it happened there on that table. So I think a lot of that happened, more so than people talk about. And it was around for about a year, year and a half.

NICOLAIDES:

So did you feel ultimately that there was enough adequate Latino representation in that?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, mm-hmm. At the end, I did. I felt that. I thought Peter Ueberroth was a fair man. I thought he dedicated himself and applied a plan that worked. But he had resistance all along, and I didn't see why we would be resisting when people were volunteering to do this.

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah, yeah. Let's see. Let's talk a little bit about immigration, if we could. I mean, so definitely by the time you're in office on the council, late eighties, nineties, it's a very contentious issue in California, in L.A. Did you see this, that contentiousness? I mean, let me back up for a second. One thing that is really fascinating to me about the 1st District is it's pretty diverse, even within your district. So you had the suburbanites like up in Mount Washington and then all the way down to Pico-Union where you said you felt like that was kind of the heart of your--

HERNANDEZ:

District.

NICOLAIDES:

--who you felt like you were representing, in a way. Did you ever see that contentiousness around immigration? Like, how were you seeing that show up?

HERNANDEZ:

Immigration's not a new issue to me. It's been around forever. I think I understand California history better than most people. But immigrants in California have been part of its history. There have been lapses where the federal government came in and started deporting people, whether it was in the twenties, the thirties, after each World War. We, as a state, put LAPD on the Arizona border because we didn't want people from Oklahoma coming to California. Our reality is we're a state of immigrants, and in the nineties and the eighties, the courts basically said you had to let someone of color represent the people, and that reality is that someone was going to represent the immigrant community, because it had to be Latino. But I don't believe Latinos are immigrants in California. Just the rest of the world does. But I look at history, and there's been--whether you go back and forth, since the beginning, California has been California. So today, what I'm seeing today I was predicting was going to happen.

There was a guy named Joe Sanchez, was part of the Mexican American Grocers Association, and Joe used to talk about we're not going to overcome; we're going to overwhelm. And it's because we're already here, and people are just going to, all of a sudden, realize our numbers are real. You know, they're not pretend, and you can't pretend they're not there. I always say, why do we need to educate our children? Because that's our future, and for us not to be educating immigrant children is basically defining our future that way, and it makes no sense to me, because they're going to be here. So today, the state of California is much more welcoming to immigrants, but it's because the political establishment has changed. It's much more reflective of the state, and I just think that that's going to be the continued pattern. I believe strongly that California's leading the rest of the country, and we just have to kind of survive these bumps right now, but we have a successful state.

NICOLAIDES:

When you were on the council, were you thinking in terms--I know recent immigrants were obviously a huge part of your constituency, especially in some of those neighborhoods you've talked about, but did you have in your mind a kind of sensibility of wanting to sort of stand up for immigrant rights through your capacity on the council?

HERNANDEZ:

Yes.

NICOLAIDES:

Like, was that a driving issue for you?

HERNANDEZ:

That was one thing that--if an issue came up, we had to stand up--yeah, we stood up. But the goal wasn't for me to represent the immigrant community; the goal was for Councilman (Bernard) Parks to represent the immigrant community. When I was working for Councilman Parks, he took on the tough legislation that normally I'd be taking on, but he was actually representing the immigrant community, giving them a voice, but it was coming from Councilman Parks, coming from Jan Perry. Everybody would always ask me why did I choose to work for African American elected officials, and my response was, "Have you seen their districts? Their districts are more Latino than they are African American. That's part of the change that's going on."

NICOLAIDES:

So that was kind of maybe--I guess that was after your time on council, then.

HERNANDEZ:

When I was working with the members?

NICOLAIDES:

Were you involved at all in the whole movement of like the gardeners--

HERNANDEZ:

Leaf blower issue?

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah. (laughter) No irony there.

HERNANDEZ:

Cindy Miscikowski and I took that issue on and we worked together and we resolved it, trying to get DWP to do something that it wasn't accustomed to doing. But that was actually to invent a battery that would work on leaf blowers.

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah. Okay.

SESSION FOUR (September 14, 2018)

NICOLAIDES:

This is Becky Nicolaides interviewing Mike Hernandez on September 14th, 2018, at his home in Los Angeles. So I wanted to start out by kind of going back to some of what we talked about just for a couple follow-up questions from our last interview, and I wanted to talk a little bit about the period after the 1992 riots when the city was, like, struggling to recover from that massive civil disturbance. You talked to me last time about the Weed and Seed program, which was later renamed--

HERNANDEZ:

Community Participation and Reconstruction.

NICOLAIDES:

And from some of the newspaper accounts at the time, it seemed like that was fairly controversial when that was first proposed. I mean, some people were criticizing it for emphasizing, like, policing over actual community rebuilding. And then you and, if I've got this right, you, Rita Walkers, and Mark Ridley-Thomas worked out a compromise solution with Tom Bradley and--

HERNANDEZ:

And the feds.

NICOLAIDES:

And the feds as well. Was Willie Williams involved in that too?

HERNANDEZ:

I think Willie Williams was part of the dialogue, but I don't remember him specifically. I know it was more Mark Ridley-Thomas and I were going at it.

NICOLAIDES:

So can you talk a little, can you kind of walk me through that negotiation?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, part of the dialogue when the civil unrest hit, the riots hit, everybody thought it was the African American community, and the reality, it was an economic reality. It hit low-income communities hardest, and, therefore, you were having the civil unrest. So I already mentioned the press conference Tom Bradley had when they were talking about creating RLA (Rebuild LA), and I show up and I act like I'm a reporter, raise my hand and I wanted to know if we were going to be part of it, and it's because prior to that, the council, in terms of its policies and its direction, tried to pretend the Latino community was not there. That became one of my roles, to become that conduit between the city and the council, and it started during the civil unrest.

So now when we're talking about how do we deal with the remedies of it, I wanted to make sure people understood that the Latino community was impacted very much by the civil unrest. The zones-of-need issues were the primary reason why we had the civil unrest, poverty. In doing that, we had to negotiate, play hardball, because when you're determining the boundaries where they were going to basically put the program in, the Weed and Seed program, and the kind of mitigation they wanted to implement didn't make sense in my district. So we had a lot of dialogue.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you expound on that a little? What do you mean by that?

HERNANDEZ:

I think that, again, when you have the immigrant community, they initially started by putting INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) there. When I came in with the SBA (Small Business Administration) to talk to some of the businesses that were impacted by the civil unrest, that were destroyed by the riots, the first thing they found out, they showed up with no translators. And they found out that they were in a mini mall and they needed about thirty translators, because every business spoke a different language in Westlake. So they found out they were nowhere near prepared to deal with this diversity and the fact that these immigrants were conducting business in Los Angeles in a legitimate way and were impacted by the civil unrest. When you talk about an elementary school or a junior high school with 2,000 and 3,000 kids, the reality is you can't talk about quality education in the classroom when you have forty kids in a classroom. That's the kind of activity that was going on in those communities. So we were pointing out, because we felt that the Weed and Seed program needed to have more seed in it than weed, and in our dialogue with the feds, we were given some latitude in developing the program that we thought would work in the community, and the boundaries that were going to be included in that program, and we used the zones of need as part of that. The demographics of that money could be used in those areas to basically deal with mitigation. And the feds provided us additional funding for that purpose, but at the end of the day, all communities were part of that dialogue.

One thing that happened in Pico-Union, when the Justice Department came in, they were holding some hearings and trying to find out what were the causes. I remember we were at the Park Place Hotel right across from MacArthur Park, and that's where they were holding the testimony. Most of the people who were initially coming to give testimony didn't live in North (unclear) Pico-Union, and I knew that. I kept saying, "I want to hear from the residents. I want to hear from the people who are here, not from instigators or outsiders who want to help them. We need to hear what their issues are." And as our people came up, they started talking about the kinds of issues that the immigrant community was impacted the most.

NICOLAIDES:

Did any of those testimonies stand out in your mind that you remember, that made a real impression on you?

HERNANDEZ:

No, I think what stood out during the discussion was the fact that I did not want to listen to outsiders, and that was reflected, I think, and reported by the media that I was very much concerned about hearing from the residents in the district as to what they felt they needed to do. We ended up working closely together on the Weed and Seed program. I think it made a difference.

NICOLAIDES:

When you mentioned the small business people, owners in your district, were they hit by the riots too?

HERNANDEZ:

Their buildings were destroyed, they were looted. Westlake/Pico-Union was hit just as much as South L.A.

NICOLAIDES:

I remember reading one newspaper account saying--or somebody wrote an editorial, maybe, saying that the areas that were hardest hit had sort of the least community cohesion because I guess there wasn't a connection between the people and, like, the store owners. Do you think that was a fair--and I think he described the Pico-Union area that way. Do you think that that's a fair description of how it was there?

HERNANDEZ:

Not so much in Pico-Union, more so in South L.A. I think you had some disparity between the African American community, which was stable there, and the Korean community that was opening small businesses, primarily liquor stores, and the reality is those venues were where people went to buy their products, and there was conflict there, lack of understanding. I think the civil unrest brought out that issue more so than anything else, and then we started working on race relations and how do we communicate. I think the Korean community stepped up and wanted to introduce its culture to the rest of the city, and the rest of the city was willing to listen, finally.

NICOLAIDES:

But even within your district, I mean, I guess I'm trying to get a feel for the dynamic, like, in some of those really poor areas, because you said a lot of those stores were hit pretty hard. Do you have any thoughts about what the dynamic there would have been? Do you think there was disconnect? Was there--like, why would they have gone after those stores, maybe even run by, you know, not--

HERNANDEZ:

I think the rioters were just basically looting, and that was for economic reasons. They weren't doing it because they were targeting a particular business to go after, at least in Westlake/Pico-Union. We didn't see that kind of direct going after someone because of their ethnicity and this business. In the immigrant community, there's a strong desire to mainstream and basically make money. In the 1st Councilmanic District, they talked about illegal street vendors, illegal mechanics. All the activity going on there was considered illegal.

NICOLAIDES:

So this is what the business owners are talking about?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, this was--

NICOLAIDES:

Or who's talking about this?

HERNANDEZ:

The mainstream media. They believed that. What I saw in the immigrant community was a strong desire to be American, to invest. For example, we had mini malls with 100 businesses in them, and they were all immigrant businesses, and what a lot of people did not understand is, it's easier to start a business if you have a limited amount of square footage, a limited amount of inventory, a limited amount of investment, and that allows you into the picture. So we had 100 of them, but they were all different ethnic groups, different nationalities, and they were all trying to fulfill the American Dream. See, that's how I saw all those businesses, and I didn't see them as illegal or trying to do something wrong. So my job was to try and figure out how to legitimize them so that they could be contributing to our economy and be part of our group.

NICOLAIDES:

Did that sensibility apply, too, to, like, street vendors and the small--like the--

HERNANDEZ:

Exactly. We created a program at MacArthur called PASEO (Pedestrian Areas to Secure Economic Opportunities), and I don't remember exactly what the acronym, but they had to do with the Pedestrian Areas to Secure Economic Opportunities. We sold it because it was going to be a street vending district, and we basically needed to understand what the neighbors felt about street vending, the property owners, how they felt about street vendors. We know what the street vendors want. They want the opportunity to sell. But we couldn't let them make the rules because you had to bring together a coalition to make the rules. When they made the rules, they decided that they didn't want--the vendors wanted to sell food. Well, all the restaurants didn't want the vendors selling food. We had to break it down as to what kind of food they could sell. So nobody had problems with tamales, so tamales became kind of like the vendor food, and we opened Mama's Tamales so it could be a commissary and allow the vendors to do that. But all the vendors were trying to sell, for example, (unclear), ceramic ashtrays. They had a hard time selling that.

But PASEO also stood for security, and so having a street vendor out there working hand-in-hand with police, we thought would make a difference in dealing with the crime issues. Having street vendors making sure they cleaned up their area would help in terms of the trash, and basically giving them--and we worked with them, the Episcopal church, Father Jon Bruno, to basically create a street vending program where street vendors could actually borrow up to $5,000 for their carts, so they all had common carts. This was all being designed so that the street vendors could compete, and we wanted quality carts. So they were able to borrow the money, then they would pay it off in payments. In order to quality for that loan, they had to take a short ten-week course on how to be an entrepreneur and the taxes you had to pay and everything else, and how to conduct an inventory that is profitable. In doing that, we were legitimizing them. The district worked for a while. What killed it was the street vendors that were legitimate fighting with the street vendors that weren't legitimate, trying to regulate the activity. That was a little bit more difficult and was not able to sustain a long-term commitment. So right now they just re-legalized street vending. When you look at an issue like street vending, I think me being in office allowed a different set of eyes to look at issues, a set of eyes that the city hadn't been using before, and so, again, I came in not thinking the activity was the worst thing in the world, and trying to figure out how to legitimize it. Most people were trying to eliminate it. I saw street vending happening throughout the city. I'd go to the zoo, a city facility, and they're selling you ice creams out of a cart. You go to the mall, and you've got all these street vendors all over the place. But nobody looks at them that way. Small spaces, small inventory, a guaranteed spot to sell. But people didn't look at those as illegal, and the reality, they were looking at our community as illegal, yet street vending's been part of the history of the city forever.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, do you think that's because of who the vendors were, I mean their ethnic--

HERNANDEZ:

I think that was part of the issue. And again, we as government have a role to protect the public, and so if street vendors are selling food, you want to regulate that activity. You want to make sure the product they're selling to the public is safe, so the only way you're going to regulate it is by legitimizing it, and that was part of my goal.

NICOLAIDES:

Were the other Latino councilmembers also on the same page with you on these issues, or how did that play out?

HERNANDEZ:

I think so. I think so. It just didn't stand out as much in their districts, so the focus was in my district. The 2nd District started working on, vending district, was CD 14, (Richard) Alatorre's, and I think they're working on some of the Valley.

NICOLAIDES:

So okay, yeah. So it seemed like it was more prevalent of an issue, but they weren't sort of coming out and embracing this as, you know, an issue that was affecting a lot of Latinos.

HERNANDEZ:

Right. When it came to rebuilding the city, you know, you had the riots, and ten years later, Ted Koppel comes back with Nightline, and he's talking about Pico-Union recovered and South L.A. didn't, and he was trying to figure out why. And the reality was, we came in with a strategy to help the small businesses, so when Tom Bradley--and, again, a lot of people don't understand this, that Tom Bradley, as a councilmember, represented Pico-Union/Westlake as a councilmember, so he understood what I was looking at, some of the issues. When we were talking about how do we rebuild, Bradley's strategy was "Let's demolish all the burned-down buildings. Let's clear the lots and let's get them ready for development."

I bought into that strategy, but I wanted more. I said, "Look at our public works programs and let's prepare these properties for development." So that meant expanding the sidewalks, hooking up to the Internet by providing cable, I mean fiber optics, the sewer lines, and so we used the strategy that basically said "Let's not require development to do that work, because that would be an inhibitor. Let's do it as the city, because that will be a stimulator." And we were able to do that strategy in Pico-Union. The other thing that was going for Westlake/Pico-Union that wasn't happening throughout the other cities was the fact that our businesses were small and immigrant communities, and they were able to step up back again to basically make a difference. And a lot of people don't understand this. If you look at the corners of Pico and Alvarado, all four corners had burned down, were completely destroyed, two mini malls, and one of the corners' main tenant was King Taco on Pico and Alvarado, and I happened to know Mr. (Raul) Martinez, the owner of King Taco, a family friend. They're the ones who bought my mom's business, Bea's Bean Bandit in East L.A. (laughter) So I'm talking to Raul Martinez, and he wants to know what he can do to help Pico-Union as a businessman, and I said, "Open your store as fast as you can." And he redid that whole corner mall himself, and he got that King Taco there.

Then what happened is we put out an RFP to develop the corner. Basically, it was the northeast corner of Pico and Alvarado, with a supermarket. Now, we didn't put out an RFP for mainstream supermarket, because that corner had been held up for decades by Vans Market for a potential store that they were never going to build. They just did not want to deal with the issue of market share. So they were trying to stop the store from going in. So I put out an RFP asking for a non-traditional store, an independent, which meant I wanted independent stores to bid on the RFP. Liborio Market stood up and basically had the best bid, and they built their flagship store there. It's changed. Now it's a Ross, but right after the riots, Liborio was built. What I found was because we put out that RFP, one of the ones who didn't get it, Uno Market, competed to build their own store on the kitty-corner market. So that one got developed. And the last corner that got developed, I think they were Persians who wanted to redo their whole corner. But all four corners got done, and that's what we took to Nightline, and they were trying to figure out how that happened, because in South L.A., they still saw empty lots since the Watts Riots. But there wasn't a strategy like the one we developed to basically develop.

NICOLAIDES:

So it sounds like you were taking a pretty on-the-ground, almost grassroots approach to encouraging piecemeal, like, development, of redevelopment, to have entrepreneurs come in, small and larger. How would you--I mean, I'm thinking about the Rebuild LA effort, which was a whole different type of approach, I guess.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

How did you see your efforts kind of meshing with what Rebuild LA was trying to do, or did you--

HERNANDEZ:

Again, I thought the main thing Rebuild LA did was create this huge network of opinion leaders who could discuss the issues and the policies and reach determinations, and then basically develop a network of resources for people. So to this day, in Northeast Los Angeles, one of the largest developments, Taylor Yard, a real controversial project going on in Highland Park, is led by McCormack & Baron. In McCormack & Baron, their lead player in Los Angeles is Tony Salazar, and he was one of the co-chairs of RLA. So I was talking to Tony about housing in my district, he was trying to understand it, and to this day, he's working on that issue. So I believe that's part of RLA.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, some have criticized RLA for taking a very privatized approach to solving the problems of the poorest parts of L.A.

HERNANDEZ:

And I didn't have a problem with that approach.

NICOLAIDES:

With the privatized approach?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah. And again, I came from the private sector. I had my own business. Part of being able to relate your own experiences to policy is important, so I come into office with a business attitude, a management attitude. I learned my management skills working for corporate America, with the phone company, and then my leadership skills, I was constantly trying to develop them. So I'm kind of a Republican in terms of my economic development attitude, and I saw the private sector of how you be a part of it. Peter Ueberroth used to say you had 50,000 small businesses in South L.A. If we can help those businesses hire one person, you create 50,000 jobs. So how do you create an environment to allow that to happen? And a lot of dialogue going on. When we talked about the ethnic issue between the Korean and the African American community, Mark Ridley-Thomas was trying to represent the African American community, was closing liquor stores down, and even though they burned down during the riots, that was his opportunity to kind of cleanse South L.A. of all these liquor stores, and we had more than our fair share, not only South L.A., but Westlake/Pico-Union. So we worked on a program where we allowed those liquor stores--again, RLA did this survey, and what they found out was that what we were lacking in South L.A. was laundromats. We didn't have laundromats. So we created a program where we provided discount on water and electrical use to laundromats, trying to encourage the Korean community to replace the liquor stores with laundromats.

NICOLAIDES:

When was this?

HERNANDEZ:

That was back after the riots.

NICOLAIDES:

Right after?

HERNANDEZ:

That was a program, and we were providing them tax incentives and all these other things to try to convert the businesses, and that worked to some degree.

NICOLAIDES:

Did that approach that you mentioned earlier about really focusing on building and rebuilding infrastructure that seemed like a key thing that helped revive, like, Pico-Union, was that being applied as well in South L.A. more broadly?

HERNANDEZ:

I think each district had their own strategies, and I don't know what theirs was. You get elected to office, there's no school to teach you how to get there or how to be a good elected official. So now you're sitting in office, there's very little training, and so you don't know what you're supposed to be doing, so you kind of learn as you go along. When you have things like riots and earthquakes, it makes it hard. So I was depending on a lot of my skills that I had prior to being an elected official. It was not anything I was learning new. And so, for example, I had issues with planning, and it's because we didn't have community plans in place that were reflective of the community today, so I had three planners on staff, and that was unusual for a council office to have three planners. Their job was to help me through the planning process, because I was not a planner, and understanding the zoning and everything else. We have beautiful hillsides here. (interruption)

NICOLAIDES:

Let me ask you, regarding this planning emphasis, how did that become a priority for you? I mean, you said it--

HERNANDEZ:

When I ran for office and I was walking precincts, clearly up in Mount Washington, the community plan, the northeast community, the Mount Washington Hillside Ordinance and everything, was very important to that community. In Highland Park, I knew that was important. Now, I didn't understand how the community plans worked at the time, but I did have three planners on staff. Things aren't as simple as I initially thought they were. But I remember we were sitting right near the office, we'd come up to Echo Park Library, and they were having problems with the community, where to put the library and how to develop parking. They had a model sitting on a desk, and I walk in the room, and all three of my planners are there talking about this model, and I'm like, "What's the problem?" And they said, "Well, we can't figure out where to put the parking. We've got these buildings, and the community's having issues." And I'm looking at it and I'm looking at them, and I picked up the building from the model and I moved it this way, and they said, "Oh, solves the problem." Now, I had no idea that that wasn't really the problem. (laughs) The problem was more of getting the community to accept that they were going to have an entrance not on Sunset, but on a side street, because that was going to be the access the library had to parking, and it took away the frontage from the library. But because I did that, the library department, the architect of the project, they all agreed to do that. You know, the councilman did it. But I should have been listening to my planners. So, listening to my planners, they put an emphasis on community plans and they talked about infrastructure. So the Northeast Community Plan, I was the vice chair, as a citizen, not as an elected official, of the Northeast Community Plan Citizens Commission.

NICOLAIDES:

When was this?

HERNANDEZ:

1988 to '91. And so I was part of the formulation of the Northeast Community Plan, and the planning department kept saying it would take like six years to adopt. I get elected in year three, and we're done with the plan and I'm trying to figure out--so I'm pushing for this plan to get adopted, and it got adopted. Well, that was one of eight communities I represent, so we started looking at all the community plans, and that became our goal, to update all our community plans. I learned very early on that I didn't have to reinvent the wheel. All I needed to do was watch what my colleagues were doing. So I would look at what Joan Milke Flores was doing in her district, what Zev (Yaroslavsky) was doing in his district, what Hal (Harold M.) Bernson was doing in his district, what my friend Marvin Braude was doing in his district, and I'd look at what they were doing in their districts and I'd want to duplicate it for my district.

NICOLAIDES:

Who did you feel was particularly effective in that way on the council?

HERNANDEZ:

When it came to land use, Hal Bernson.

NICOLAIDES:

Hal Bernson?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm. When it came to the budget, Zev. When it came to public safety, Marvin Braude. Each one had their areas of expertise based on their committee assignments, and a lot of people didn't understand that, so what committees you had was very important. So when I first came in, they gave me the last committees that nobody wanted. Administrative Services kind of handled all the city's general departments, and they provided all the supplies for the city and this other stuff. Well, that, to me, was a real important committee, and the rest of the council didn't see it that way, but it became a very important committee when you're having all these floods, riots, and I'm chairing the committee that had to approve all this stuff. So it became an opportune committee.

But when I was chairing the committee, there was a motion up. They gave me a list of all the stuff that's still pending, and one of the things that was pending was to create Channel 35, make it a public TV station that would show City Council meetings, the city's work. And all the infrastructure was there, it just hadn't been implemented, so I came in to basically implement it. John Ferraro was asking me, "What are you doing? You're going to put all the council meetings in front of the rest of the public?" And I said, "Yeah." I didn't think there was anything wrong with that. Again, I'm a rookie councilmember. And he didn't tell me I couldn't do it, but he suggested I should be looking in other areas. Make a long story short, I conducted hearings, and I conducted hearings in each one of my colleagues' districts, and I put them on cable. Everybody would come out. They thought it was a great idea. They wanted to see these city hearings. And I'm showing up conducting these city hearings. Well, my colleagues wanted to be on TV too. So what was a bad idea didn't turn out to be a bad idea, but that's how Channel 35 got put on the thing. In dealing with that committee, I dealt with the cable system, cable franchises. I also got to work on issues of the record retention. It wasn't a question of just destroying records when it was LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) files, for example, and what files should be kept and how long should we keep them. We also dealt with supply chain for the city. It became a very important committee for me. So now new members come in and they've kind of learned that you make your committee.

NICOLAIDES:

What do you think were some of your most important accomplishments on that committee?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, again, creating Channel 35 cable system was, I thought, important, or allowing it to move forward. I didn't create it. One of the last committee things I did was we separated phone services from general services and we created ITA, the Information Technology department--it didn't exist--where we combined Wi-Fi info and phone service, so we created that whole department. It didn't exist prior to that. So ITA is now a bona fide department that I created as Chair of the Administrative Services Committee. But I had that committee. I also ended up chairing Economic Development. That was the committee I wanted to chair that dealt with all the federal block grant monies, and I chaired that for almost ten years. That allowed me to be the Chair of LA Live. What used to happen is the Housing Economic Development Committee dealt with all the federal dollars that came, and my understanding, it was a very smooth-working committee because at that time, I believe Art (Arthur K.) Snyder, Bob (Robert C.) Farrell, (David S.) Cunningham, they all had their ways of dispensing the money, and they were very comfortable with the system and didn't question everything. When I became the chair, I started questioning everything, and we would hold block grant hearings that would go till midnight, because I wanted to hear all the applicants, I wanted to hear why they were applying, wanted to hear what staff's response was to those applications. Then when staff brought back the block grant based on the recommendations of the hearings, I was able to kind of have a better understanding because I took the time to listen to everybody. I used to be criticized for that, because everybody said, "He's going to listen to everybody who shows up in the room," and people knew that was going to happen, and that was more my style.

But through that committee, I did a lot of economic development projects throughout the city. We got a little innovative on projects. Yesterday I was talking to a friend about site-specific tax increment financing, and tax increment financing has always existed. I found out about it in 1976 when my son was born. I was working on a campaign in Pasadena for a friend named Dr. Daniel Castro, and he used to be a majority consultant up in Sacramento, so he's coming down and he's running as a Peace and Freedom candidate against Bill Ivers, a Republican. Make a long story short, Danny lost. My son was born election day when my wife's water bag broke when we were on the phone bank that night. I'm at the hospital. We find out--I contact the campaign, let them know my son's born. They invited me back to the headquarters where we had all this champagne to drink. At that meeting, Danny Castro talks to me for the first time about tax increment financing, and they were passing this legislation in Sacramento where they were going to create a district that would allow the tax (unclear) to stay there to benefit that area, and that was called Old Town Pasadena, and Danny Castro was asking if I wanted to be part of an investment team to buy some of the properties in that area, and I chose not to. Well, Danny bought a couple of buildings and became a multimillionaire, because now you see what's going on in Old Town Pasadena. He owns some key real estate in that area. But that's when I found out about tax increment financing. That was kind of like the first CRA (Community Redevelopment Agency). So when I come to the city, the city has tax increment financing programs, and we created a program where we allowed that up to 50 percent of the tax increments that were going to come into the project could be used to pay for bonds to help develop the project in the first place. So I'll use the Lawry's California Center, which is now the Santa Monica River Center. We tried to acquire it because the developer wanted to raze it and build like a mini mall there. Its anchor tenant was Home Depot. I remember taking a tour with the Home Depot folks and showing them some other stores, and then I took them to my district and I had no stores in my district. I'm saying, "How do I get a Home Depot?"

So they were interested in developing a Home Depot. They got a developer. I had all this community opposition because they didn't want to see the Lawry's California Center, the restaurants come down. So we worked out a deal where the Santa Monica Mountains would become the purchaser. We would make it a River Center to help with the development of the L.A. River, and in order to acquire it, we were going to use up to 50 percent of the tax increments generated by the Home Depot that they were going to build, and those taxes included sales tax, included real estate taxes, utility taxes. So we could use up to 50 percent because of the policy that was created. We only needed 19 percent, so we financed the acquisition of the Santa Monica River Center using bonds, and that money was being generated by the Home Depot. That was the first site-specific tax increment financing project that we were doing, and I did it for that project. Now, traditionally, those kinds of projects were used for hotels, to develop a hotel downtown, where they used tax increment financing. I took that concept and I applied it to Home Depot, where it made a difference in the community. So we developed a Home Depot on 6th Street in Westlake/Pico-Union, and they've both been extremely successful stores, over 100 employees. I remember walking into the store and asking an employee, "Where do you live?" They'll tell me Highland Park, tell me Lincoln Heights. I say good, because I took a lot of heat trying to create it.

NICOLAIDES:

So they're living near where the stores are. They're pulling in from the neighborhood.

HERNANDEZ:

It created jobs. And what Home Depot found out is the reason we're only 19 percent of their income, this is one of the best-selling stores they have, and it's because the people in this community are laborers. They all work in construction fields. They might not belong to the unions, but they all go get supplies. And, again, the motto of Home Depot is they only sell you unfinished supplies, they won't sell you, like, unfinished products. I mean, you find that with their appliances, but everything else is raw material as opposed to a Lowe's, whose material is already pretty much finished. You don't need to hire labor to do the work, mix the cement, mix that stuff; it already comes mixed for you. So that's the difference in the store models. But extremely successful. So the River Center became successful and the Home Depot became successful using that model. When we talked about community plans, that was extremely important to me because, again, my wife and I, we've lived at this house for forty years. This neighborhood I grew up in my entire life. My wife grew up in this neighborhood her entire life. So I remember 1986, I'm running for Assembly. One of the outstanding issues out there was where do you put a light rail, and at the time, MTA (Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority) wanted to come down through Alhambra, Lincoln Heights on Broadway to downtown, and the Lincoln Heights community was fighting it tooth and nail. They did not want a light rail system. So I show up at meetings and I started suggesting Highland Park. "Let's look at this other route." MTA started looking at that other route. Because Lincoln Heights didn't want it, they ended up going through Highland Park. So I encouraged the development of the Pasadena Blue line through Highland Park.

Then I was fighting it, and the reason I was fighting it, now, I'm not an elected official yet, but my neighbors down the street, they decide they're going to fight the station. I had been involved with my neighbors in fighting some liquor licenses that they wanted to put off (unclear). So they got me involved in the light rail battle, and I remember attending a meeting at Loreta Elementary School, where we were talking about the light rail, and Neil Peterson was the executive director. He basically said, "We're going to build the system whether you want us to or not. And if you want to change it, you'd better get elected to office." Well, he said that to me, and he didn't realize I was going to be elected to office. And when I got elected, they had to deal with me. Initially, the line was going to have two stations in Los Angeles, one in Highland Park and one at Union Station. Meanwhile, they had six stations in Pasadena, and I had an issue with that. I took an attitude that "It's not going to go through my district if we don't have equity."

NICOLAIDES:

So, more stations.

HERNANDEZ:

So we negotiated six stations in Los Angeles, six stations in Pasadena, one in South Pass, and we were able to dialogue as to what station was going to have parking. Nobody wanted this Arroyo Seco station, a block from my house, to be built because it wasn't going to have parking, and they felt that everybody would come down from the hill, Mount Washington, Montecito Heights, and park in the neighborhood, because they were going to try to catch the train. So we wanted a parking lot, and that was our battle. Now you have a 140-car parking lot next to that station, plus the Avenue 26 has 80-car parking next to that station, and the Highland Park stations all have parking. But that was part of the mitigation to put in the line, and it's because I knew each station was going to be an economic development hub, and you had to have parking. MTA was trying to sell the concept of--what did they call it? Kiss and Ride? And that is where the spouse drops off the spouse at the station, gives him a kiss, sends him off on his ride. But they didn't believe you were going to need parking, so they wanted to build stations without parking. We didn't let that happen, and now we've got the parking. But Neil Peterson didn't anticipate how I was going to become the chair of the passing of the Pasadena Gold Line Authority, and I think that was one of the things that happened. But all the issues I fought for were generated by the community, and what happened is the community had a--there was a tri-community lawsuit. There were two lawsuits against the Gold Line, and I became the negotiator, trying to bring the community together with MTA and that mitigation.

NICOLAIDES:

Were the lawsuits around some of these issues that you were just describing?

HERNANDEZ:

On the Gold Line, yeah.

NICOLAIDES:

Or were there other objections or other community objections to it in general?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, there were objections to the proximity to houses, the noise issue. We basically got a train to travel at a much lower speed during the community, and that allowed them not to have to use the horns, certain bells and whistles. There were lots of studies being done. And so a lot of mitigation went into the process, but it took years, and I was just in a position where I was the middleman.

NICOLAIDES:

How were you getting that community input?

HERNANDEZ:

Meetings. And I was very fortunate in my staff, because when I ran for office, I ran with organizers, and when I got elected to office, all my field deputies were organizers, and so when there were issues involved, their job was to help organize around the issue. We weren't here to fight the community; we were here to represent the community. So we liked the issues that came out of the community.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you talk a little more about the Northeast Community Plan in general? Like, you mentioned a few aspects of it, like the transit aspect, the economic development. What were some--I mean, I guess can you kind of tell me what your involvement was in developing that and what that vision was? Like, what were some of the priorities?

HERNANDEZ:

There's some projects called TNIs.

NICOLAIDES:

What is that again?

HERNANDEZ:

Targeted Neighborhood Initiatives, and LANI, Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiatives. I was in Washington, D.C.--and, by the way, when I was talking about my training, there's no training, there is training for elected officials if you join the California League of Cities. They have these regional league cities, and the problem when you participate in those is El Monte's issues are not the same as L.A.'s issues or South Gate's issues. You learn something, but you can't learn about tax financing projects, because they don't have projects the size of our projects. So I didn't go to those meetings. But when I went to California League of Cities' meetings, I started hearing from cities like San Diego, Sacramento, Long Beach, made a little bit more sense. Then they got me involved with the National League of Cities, and at the National League of Cities, it was suggested to me that I join the FAIR Committee, Finance Administration and Intergovernmental Relations. So you've got to go through a process to get selected to a committee, and that kind of introduced me to all the other members. But I got elected and it's because I needed the endorsement of the California League of Cities to become a board member at the National League of Cities, to become a committee member. At the National League of Cities, I learned a tremendous amount, every meeting I'd go to, and now I'm talking to New York, talking to Miami, Chicago, I'm talking to other big cities, and the seminars I'm attending are seminars those other big cities are attending, and I learned about how other cities function, and I was able to use that education in working with my issues here.

NICOLAIDES:

Were there any standout things that you took away from that involvement that you learned, things that you learned?

HERNANDEZ:

I think that's what helped me become my post-City Council career as assistant chief of staff to councilmembers, and it's because a lot of people don't understand that there's funding methodologies that you need to go through in terms of planning. Just like I put an emphasis on community plans, there are basically the housing element for the state of California that requires the state to have a housing plan, and in that housing plan, each municipality has to submit how much housing they're going to be building based on the last census and how they're going to build that housing, how much of it is going to be senior housing, how much is going to be low-income housing, how much is going to be market-rate housing. And, of course, all the cities want it cheap, everybody wants the best, but they don't want the negative, so they don't all take their fair share. But if you're not in compliance with the housing element, you can't get any transportation funds from the feds, and most transportation dollars, the huge dollar figures, they come from the feds. So you want to be in compliance with your housing elements so that you can get transportation dollars. So, understanding that gave us some leverage on the housing. But I learned that at the League of Cities. I remember what Councilman (Bernard) Parks, I got him involved with SCAG (Southern California Association of Governments), and I suggested he get on the Transportation Committee, and he followed my suggestion because he was already sitting on MTA. Then sitting on MTA, I said, "We need a project," and he kept on saying (unclear), because that's how we learn, right? And I said, "So this abandoned light rail system, there's this abandoned rail line that goes through your district, called the Alameda Corridor, the Harbor Gateway." I said, "We need to work on putting that on the transportation plan as an eligible line for development."

And Parks said, "Okay." Had no idea why. So he got it on the SCAG transportation plan, and then he got it on MTA's transportation plan, and that made it an eligible corridor for funding, and Parks will never get credit for this, but right now the extension to the airport is the Harbor Gateway (unclear) Line. But he put it on the transportation plan, so when Prop R was going to pass, they were looking for projects to finance that they would be able to use for purposes of getting the electorate to support the initiative. So we needed a project in South L.A., so a connection to the airport was a very important line for development and the passage of Prop R, and that's how it got funded, but if it wasn't on the transportation plan, if it wasn't on SCAG's plan, it wouldn't even have been eligible to submit.

NICOLAIDES:

And how did that loop back to the housing element you mentioned?

HERNANDEZ:

I learned all that through the process, and that's what I was trying to explain. So now I'm transportation a councilmember and I'm trying to get him to understand. I'm giving him a project that I think at the end of the day he'll learn a lot from, and he did, but it became a very important project in his district because it provided funding. So when I say I chaired the Gold Line Authority, I fought MTA, I understood all the processes we were going through. I did not understand how you put these projects on these transportation plans until I sat on SCAG and also participating with MTA, fighting their battles, and then it became my job to train the councilmember on how to do it, and that project just happened to work great for us. But he's the one who basically got that line eligible for purposes of development. And so I worked on passing the Gold Line, worked on that line. I also basically staffed the Expo Line for Jan Perry and Parks, because they both were part of that district, part of that line, and in doing that, I worked on three of the light rail systems of the city. Very few elected have had that opportunity.

NICOLAIDES:

Wow. And that kind of went past your time in office then, like after the--yeah.

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, definitely, definitely.

NICOLAIDES:

Kind of coming back to the Northeast Community Plan, so transit, I mean, sounds like that was a key element of it. Did you have in your own mind like kind of a vision for the sort of priorities that you wanted to see, or were you being led by the planners on your staff? Like, what was your own gut sense of--

HERNANDEZ:

I was being led by the planners on my staff. I was learning from them. I understood the importance of infrastructure. I understood the importance of the community plans. And you have to understand I represented part of Eagle Rock, Highland Park, Lincoln Heights, Cypress Park, I started with Echo Park, and part of Silver Lake. Today when people are talking about the most desirable communities that people want to move into in urban Los Angeles, those are the communities. Why? Because they have a community plan and they're all accessible to the regional transportation of the state. So you get on this light rail, you go to Union Station, you can go to San Diego. So now that we're trying to get people out of their cars, that's become important.

NICOLAIDES:

Were there other aspects of the plan, besides transit, open space, economic development, is that--

HERNANDEZ:

I was a big open space advocate, and it's because I had the least amount of park space in the entire city when I first got elected.

NICOLAIDES:

In your district?

HERNANDEZ:

In my district. And that changed. But my colleagues became very supportive of my efforts to get more park space, but in doing that, we were able to--Debs Park (Ernest E. Debs Regional Park) was important to me because it was important to Congressman Ed Roybal. Ed Roybal ran against Ernest Debs and lost. It was a controversial election. That's when Roybal ran for supervisor. It was one of these elections where the ballots in Boyle Heights went missing, and to make a long story short, when they counted, Roybal was short. So some people will tell you Roybal felt that the election was stolen from him.

Ernie Debs, to his credit--and I had a chance to work with the man--believed very much in community plans and park space, and he accumulated all this land, this (unclear) that is called Debs Park, but because he was a supervisor and Roybal was a city councilman, it was a county park. The city basically gave to the county the park, a thirty-year lease or something like that. I'm in the council now, and the lease is getting ready to expire and the county wants to extend it, and I said, "No." Everybody is asking why, and I said, "It should be a city park." And at the time, the county was trying to pass Prop A, and I was trying to pass Prop K (Proposition K 1996 ballot initiative), and we put money, both Prop A and Prop K, named Debs Park as a designated park. So it was turned over to the city, and that became part of my parkland and it had financing that came with it, $4 million for improvements that we could use at the park. We also got the Cornfields. It's below China Town. It's about 130 acres. That's about 60 acres, but it's all parkland. It's a state park now. Then we got Taylor Yard. Taylor Yard is a multifaceted development project that we got (unclear). We had cleanup issues, we had the cleanup, but now you have a major housing project that's been built there, you have a park that's been built there, you have manufacturing space. We had about, I don't know, 500,000, maybe 750,000 square feet of manufactured building that was put there. So it's more of a whole community, but you've got housing, you've got the parkland, you've got the job creation. It's all part of the Taylor Yard plan.

NICOLAIDES:

And you were pretty instrumental in all of that, weren't you?

HERNANDEZ:

We put the Taylor Yard plan together and we basically stimulated community people to get involved in the development.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you talk about that a little, just talk me through how that all transpired?

HERNANDEZ:

Taylor Yard was always a major parcel, and, again, my father-in-law worked there as a laborer. We all knew about the railroad tracks. I had an experience where we had a toxic cloud in Lincoln Heights because one of the manufacturing places got water that leaked in some of the chemicals, and they basically closed down the Boys and Girls Club, (unclear), because this cloud was deadly. And I'm driving by to find out what's going on. I've got all these guys in these spacesuits, right? And they're out there cleaning up this area, and it freaked me out. And that's when I figured out that zoning is not always compatible with housing. I mean, light manufacturing, industrial uses don't mix with housing, and it was because of a toxic cloud. Taylor Yard, the railroad was threatening to leave, so all the jobs, it was going to be abandoned, and then the question became what happens to the yard. Well, the first thing that happened was MTA decided it would make a great maintenance yard for the regional Metrolink, and basically Gloria Molina got elected County Board of Supervisors, and there's a vacancy period between my election and her departure, and during that period, MTA decides to put a Metrolink storage yard at Taylor Yard.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you think that timing was on purpose?

HERNANDEZ:

I do, I do. I don't think Gloria would have supported that. But make a long story short, I walked in fighting it. The decision was already made, and I'm going to fight it.

We found out that in order to get it done as fast as they did, they used an EIR (Environmental Impact Report) for the Pasadena light rail. They had done a story, because they were thinking of putting a maintenance yard there, so they used that EIR to justify putting a Metrolink maintenance yard, and then they were going to do a light rail yard. So they were determining this rail land to be used for maintenance purposes. I'm questioning that, and there were other noncompatible uses that were being suggested. Someone put a helicopter maintenance facility there. Again, I'm fighting all those kinds of projects.

NICOLAIDES:

What was driving your--I mean--

HERNANDEZ:

That toxic cloud.

NICOLAIDES:

The proximity to the houses (unclear)?

HERNANDEZ:

The proximity of Cypress Park and everything else, and I wanted a project that would be compatible with the community, and it was going to be a long-term project, because in order to change the zoning from manufacturing, industrial, you go one level at a time. You change it down one level, then you change it down another level, then after that last level, you can change it down to uses that allow for more compatible uses. So we were playing hardball with the railroad. Another one of my battles was with Phil Anschutz, who wanted to put a pipeline, oil pipeline, down that corridor, and we found out he was putting fiber optics along the corridor. So I'm fighting this pipeline. Nobody thought I would win the battle. Everybody told me I'd lose. But I didn't know better, and I'm saying no to everything. One of our partners at the time, who agreed to fight with me, was The L.A. Times, and the reason they were part of the battle is the pipeline was going through their property up at Tejon Ranch, and they didn't like the terms. So they didn't want the pipeline to go through their property, so they assisted me with resources in fighting the pipeline down here. That only lasted as long as the terms was an issue. Once they reached terms with agreements on their land, they left me on my own.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you remember approximately how long they were with you on that?

HERNANDEZ:

I'd say they were with me a year on the battle.

NICOLAIDES:

About a year.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm, a year on the battle.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you sense that their coverage of the issue was affected by any of that?

HERNANDEZ:

No, not at all, not at all. But what I found is--that's when I found out how those partners come about. See, they wanted to help me fight the pipeline here because it would help them with their negotiations up north. I didn't really understand those dynamics, but I took their assistance. And I already mentioned how Anschutz became a key player in developing LA Live and was part of that battle. So he agreed to--they lost that, because what he agreed to do was put fiber optics--he was already putting a fiber optics line, but he agreed to allow the local schools in the area to hook up to those fiber optics, agreed to put some computer labs in the schools, and it was going to be part of the learning. So we basically allowed the line to go in with the mitigation, but it was a long, protracted battle. I learned a lot. And, again, I lost, but--

NICOLAIDES:

What do you think you learned?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, I learned about these third-party partners, because they basically end up--it's a third-party partner. I learned a lot about the issues of land use. We were talking about cohabitation. There was so much under the ground already, that if we had a fire, let's say, a leakage or fire explosion, it would hit these other lines, these other pipelines, so it would be a cumulative effect. Council Alarlon (unclear) was also fighting them, so he joined me, because they were going through his district. And we started stimulating the community to become part of the battles.

When the opportunity came to buy Taylor Yard at the state level, Jackie Goldberg, Gil (Gilbert A.) Cedillo, Richard Polanco, all of them saw me getting a lot of credit for fighting the pipeline, and I think they wanted to work on some mitigation. So at the time, the state had passed some state bond money for parks, and they gave us a good chunk, about $130 million to buy Taylor Yard. So everything kind of came together then, so we were going to buy some parcels, create the park. That issue was a little bit more complicated, because we were going to buy the parcels, but the state only builds what they call passive parks. They don't build recreational parks, so you can't have basketball, soccer, and all that other kind of stuff, whereas the city builds recreational parks. So we actually negotiated a trade with the state where we traded part of Debs Park, the passive park, allowed them to claim that as part of the state, and they allowed us to use recreation at Taylor Yard. Both negotiations were all done by Ed (Eduardo P.) Reyes, the councilman who took my place, and Ed Reyes was one of my planners, so he was with me from the beginning in terms of the Taylor Yard plan, when we took the ten citizen groups to San Antonio to the River Walk, so we were training him for his future role as the councilmember to take my place, and his role in developing Taylor Yard, I give Ed the credit for the development of Taylor Yard Park, El Rio Park. He did all that work.

NICOLAIDES:

What was the community's, if you can summarize that, or maybe you can't, but, like, what was the community's input on this? Like, what did they want? And can you talk a little about, like, the workshops you were holding?

HERNANDEZ:

We had a lot of workshops with the American Institute of Architecture. They basically were the third party who held the workshops for the community. We brought in stakeholders, including the railroad, potential developers, residents mainly of Cypress Park. Some people wanted to make the area huge. I remember one of the plans I saw of Moctesuma Esparza's. He develops theaters, and he wanted to do a big theater chain, but he wanted to do a big like an Aztec Land, where you had pyramids for slides and water parks, and he wanted to do this big thing, and Taylor Yard, that didn't fly. But I had all these proposals. One of the proposals was to bring a Mexican food manufacturing incubator system, where we would allow for a lot of Mexican can companies and the tortillerias and all these folks, that would become like their area, and we would have a lot of Mexican food manufacturers, job creation and so forth. But that didn't emerge. So the Taylor Yard plan emerged and we started with the manufacturing. Lincoln Properties developed the Media Center at Taylor Yard, and manufacturing, we had tenants like the Playboy Channel, Department of Sanitation, (unclear). Quite a few tenants moved into the manufacturing space, and it was definitely needed, because (unclear) vacancies. That was the first phase. The second phase became Del Rio Park (Rio de Los Angeles State Park). I also brought in--I had this concept that there were going to be a lot of jobs, and I was trying to create an emphasis in the city on logistics. I learned that from my MTA work in terms of light rail stuff. But there was going to be a need for jobs that create logistics, I mean deliveries. So I worked with UPS. They had a small operation at Pico-Union, but they wanted a huge operation, so we put one on Main Street. They developed about 100 acres. They got a huge UPS facility there, and they deliver goods from there throughout the city, and that's in Lincoln Heights. In Cypress Park, we put a DHL, delivery manufacturer. And it's because I believe that there was going to be a lot of employment and logistics.

NICOLAIDES:

How did you get that sensibility, which I think was correct in terms of how L.A.'s economy has evolved?

HERNANDEZ:

When my wife and I ordered delivery on Uber, we were talking about that twenty years ago. The reality is, see, policy that you're making today is already over, it's already stale, because the population's growing so fast and the issues are developing so fast. So information is just moving so much faster. I understood that the whole reason we were building light rail systems was to get 26,000, 27,000 people out of a car each day and taking the train, and that the future, in terms of space, you'd rather use the space to live in than to park a car. So there's always competition for the square footage, whether it be in the retail market or be--so I understood cars were going to be a problem, which is why my neighbors did not want light rail stations without parking, so we knew we were going to have to have parking, but we also knew that the future direction was trying to get people out of cars, because you see it every day you get on the freeway. So "logistics" kind of became the term I heard back east at the League of Cities.

NICOLAIDES:

Oh, interesting.

HERNANDEZ:

I hear the term "logistics" as being something important. And you look at a city like New York where taxis and all these transportation systems exist, but very few people own cars, everybody travels around in someone else's car, that type of thing. So I started pushing logistics here.

NICOLAIDES:

So you really first were keyed into that through the National League of Cities.

HERNANDEZ:

What I saw happening in national movements. And that's why I saw the importance of light rail systems.

NICOLAIDES:

Were you plugged in at all to the L.A. development of that, like the Alameda Corridor, the Port?

HERNANDEZ:

I was part of the Alameda Corridor development.

NICOLAIDES:

That was really kind of coming up around that time too.

HERNANDEZ:

I was one of the players who understood that, so I was very supportive because I understood that direction, that that was happening.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, one of the critiques, I think, of the logistics industry, because some, I think, had seen that as a way to fill the void that was left by all the factories that left in parts of L.A., but a lot of the jobs in logistics don't pay very well and, you know, they're not unionized, maybe, or I don't know.

HERNANDEZ:

Not yet, not yet.

NICOLAIDES:

That's kind of been a problem with that sector. Were you aware of that or, like, was that a consideration at all, or--

HERNANDEZ:

Yes and no. My attitude towards labor is labor serves great purpose and represents the masses and basically helps the whole ship float, and those are the issues. But before you can join a union, you need to have a job. So I know the work of organizers and I believe organizers can organize the workforce, but I don't necessarily support a union shop from the beginning, so I'd like to see evolution of job creation, job stability, unionization. When they're at that level, I have no problem supporting unions. I was one of the strong supporters of HERE (Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union), the hotel workers, I think Maria Elena (Durazo) will tell you back in the day. I was not a strong supporter of the Teamsters, although the Teamsters and I worked together on a lot of projects and they honored me, but they tend to organize at a different level as opposed to organizing down here. And when I say organize, you basically sit down with people and you understand their self-interests and you start developing a plan as to how to implement them and develop those interests.

Right now, Vera Gallant, who you know was very important to me and was one of the founders of UTLA (United Teachers Los Angeles), I think she'd be turning in her grave. Well, I don't think she would. But I do charter schools. I'm building charter schools today as part of my retirement, and I decided to get into the charter school field because I was so disappointed in the public school education system, and I've taken that position through an evolution of my understanding of public policy and my understanding of the success they've been having at LAUSD. And me being a public school product, I just think that charter schools are doing a much better job, and I have no problems with supporting them in low-income minority communities.

NICOLAIDES:

Right. Just to loop back to the Taylor Yards, I mean, was there some tension between people who wanted sort of to protect the environment versus business development, like striking that balance? Like, how do you sort of strike that balance between the preservation of open lands versus--that seems to be a--

HERNANDEZ:

Right. And that'll happen on every project. I tend to call it "creative stress," and I appreciated it. I just needed to understand it. So we would go to meetings, and it doesn't matter what project you're working on, you're going to have some controversy, so Taylor Yard, I mean, had its controversy, but we were pushing a plan that was inclusive of all the stakeholders and people wanted housing, and they need to understand that was going to come in as phase two, and we were doing the manufacturing. Then the open land happened, and then the housing happened. I mentioned DHL. But the other thing that happened is we build a huge school at Taylor Yard, Sotomayor (Sonia Sotomayor Learning Academies). It's five academies, and two of them are charters, and it's all at that location. So I didn't have a problem pushing a plan that was developed by the stakeholders and using that creative stress to help secure funding to implement a plan. It was people fighting that Mexican manufacturing business that allowed us to get the funding for the state park, so, again, I kept on telling people my worst-case scenario is instead of job creation, I end up with a park in a district that's park-deficient, and I didn't think that was a bad choice. So I was pushing for both and I ended up with a park. But today I drive around, it's great, made a big difference.

So I had this rendering done, and it's a hotel, retail, underground parking, restaurants, and it's at the level--so the Chinatown station's elevated, and the Chinese community wanted an elevated station because they didn't want to have to climb up the hill, but you've got to have a development that puts you at that level, and so we pushed to develop this station that was elevated, and we got funding to build what we call Monument Station, Museum Station in Chinatown, which is why it looks like the dragon and everything else. And the development happened, but when I was selling it, I would show people this picture (demonstrates), that this is what we want to do, we want $26 million to develop this. (laughs) But I had no plan, just had a picture. The other day I was showing it to Gil Cedillo, because the development happened, they had the ribbon-cutting this year, and it looks 90 percent like the rendering I was showing everybody.

NICOLAIDES:

That was back when?

HERNANDEZ:

I was showing it to everybody in 1992, '93. I had set aside $2.5 million of Chinatown's parking meter money to develop the parking structure, but it was nowhere near enough. We needed a developer to come in and develop the rest of the site, and that would supplement the project. But a lot of our projects kind of evolved that way, where we developed a vision and then we worked towards that vision. A lot of people didn't understand that. One of my communities that felt marginalized was Chinatown, and they were constantly questioning things.

NICOLAIDES:

During your council term?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

What sort of issues were coming up?

HERNANDEZ:

They questioned the Cornfields. That was a big battle, and I think that that community helped me in the battle to secure funding, because we secured an additional $68 million to buy that parcel, and they were very much a part of that. To me, I complied with their requests for an elevated station. I also rebuilt the Broadway Bridge, and the Broadway Bridge, a historic bridge, is called the Buena Vista Bridge, and it has these viewpoints. You can see Taylor Yard, you can see the Cornfields, a good part of the Eastside. And that project, the bridge cost like $35 million because I didn't want just to replace the bridge, I wanted to replace the historic bridge and I wanted to have the historic elements. So we had to get special funding from the feds to do that. Well, the fact that we got that bridge funded and built basically established the direction for the Main Street Bridge, the Sixth Street Bridge, Seventh Street Bridge. All these bridges were getting this funding to preserve what was there before, based on the Buena Vista Bridge on Broadway. So I called that my north entrance to Chinatown. I called the Chinatown station my east entrance to Chinatown, the Chinatown Library as the west entrance to Chinatown, and the Chinatown Gateway, the dragons, that was my south entrance to Chinatown. So I actually had a plan where I was going to have something built on each one of the corners of Chinatown, and it all got implemented.

NICOLAIDES:

What were some of the other community challenges you had in Chinatown, or was it mostly around--

HERNANDEZ:

The frustrating thing about Chinatown, I didn't speak the language personally, and so I always had translators. I'm not sure if they translated correctly. When we did the dragons in Chinatown, one side of the street on Broadway had this temple, and the temple participated in the development of the Gateway and they participated in the funding. The Gateway's right in front of the temple. And on the other side is the senior project, has about 560 tenants, the senior project. When we built the Gateway, they were fighting tooth and nail.

NICOLAIDES:

What were their objections?

HERNANDEZ:

To this day, I'm not sure. But I show up at this important ceremony in the Chinese community where I'm dotting eyes of the dragon, and they had me on this crane, and I'm looking down at these people getting ready to fight each other and they're spitting at each other, I mean spitting on each other. So I get down, I'm trying to find out what's going on, and it's between the senior project and the temple. I could not get my staff to tell me what was going on. So then I started finding out that you have all these dialects and these ethnicities that everybody calls Asians, and our assumption is that they all mix, but the Vietnamese are very different from Taiwanese, who are very different from Mainland China. I mean, the politics are part of that community. So what helped me understand Chinatown more so than most people was talking to Wilbur (Michael) Woo, Mike Woo's father, and Wilbur Woo would give me the history and would explain to me these breakdowns. So during Chinese New Year, you go to all these family dinners, and I'm talking about the Woos, the Wongs. I mean, you go to about eight family dinners you have to attend. Each family has their dinner, and that's part of the politics, the family politics and the politics between Chinatown and San Gabriel Valley. Very few people understand Chinatown has like twenty-seven jewelry stores and twenty-three banks, and it's because they were concentrating all their wealth in that small community. Then they started expanding to the San Gabriel Valley. So I basically did not understand that community enough.

NICOLAIDES:

What was that like for you going to those banquets?

HERNANDEZ:

It was interesting. I learned a lot. My wife and I, to this day we have dim sum every two weeks and we love it.

NICOLAIDES:

Could you talk a little bit about what you were feeling at those banquets?

HERNANDEZ:

That was all new to me. It was all new to me. And it's not just Chinatown. It was the same thing for me with the Jewish community. I grew up very isolated in my neighborhood. I take kids to Dodger Stadium randomly, and they yelp when they get in the parking lot. Dodger Stadium's just down the street, but they've never been to a Dodger game. The reality is, I grew up very isolated, and so going to Oxy (Occidental College) was a whole experience for me trying to figure out how to deal in a non-minority environment, because the only thing I knew then was the Latino community. Then in Upward Bound, I met the African American community, and I'm at Oxy getting into politics, trying to raise money, also finding out about the Jewish community and its politics. I went to Israel with Mike Woo and some other people, took the trip so I could understand that a little bit better. Came back, and I sat down with my friend Bob Hertzberg. That's when I told him the reality, "Now I understand why you guys protect your borders so much and you believe in the border, but you've got to understand why I don't, because my relatives are on the other side of this border and I'm being told I can't see them, and that doesn't make sense to me." But I had to learn about all these communities I didn't know anything about, and I think part of my ability to learn was walking in there and telling them, "I know nothing about you. I'd like to know more about you," and sharing with them who I was.

NICOLAIDES:

That's interesting. I wonder if we can kind of maybe--this is a little bit of a segue, but I wonder if we can circle back to when you first got on the council, because I am curious about maybe if you could talk a little more about your relations with the other councilmembers, which you have said something about, so if you can even just remember back to, like, '91, when you first were elected, and you were elected at the same time as Mark Ridley-Thomas and Rita Walters, I mean, do you remember, like, did you have a sense of what was the climate like on the council at that time?

HERNANDEZ:

No. I knew that Mark and Ernie (Ernani) Bernardi were going at it, because Ernie called Mark "Hurley." I knew that the older members had an attitude towards us younger members that said, "You guys have to learn." And we kind of were a coalition of new members, but we were all minority, so we had the same interest. I think we approached it very differently, and we all benefited from it. I didn't walk in there with any friends, but I walked out with all of them being my friend. I think I gained their respect and they gained my respect.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you tend to gravitate towards certain council people that you kind of felt more an affinity toward or that you could work with?

HERNANDEZ:

My mentor, John Ferraro. I learned a lot from John Ferraro. And my entire life, I'd looked for those role models, someone I could emulate, someone I wanted to be like, and for whatever reason, John became that person on the council, and he was the council president.

NICOLAIDES:

What was it about him that drew you?

HERNANDEZ:

I think he was a football player, I was a football player. I walked in, he said, "You look like you're a linebacker. You can tackle people." I said, "Yes, I was a linebacker. I was a roving linebacker, but I was also split end. I can catch a pass," I told him. So John and I had these conversations. His main cohort was Ron (Ronald F.) Deaton, the CLA (chief legislative analyst), and Ron Deaton and John became my teachers and I would listen to them. Deaton would walk into my room when he knew I was having a problem, and we'd talk about it and figure out how to solve it. I found out that Deaton did that with all of his team. That was his style. But he primarily worked for John. John, when he went through a process of making committee assignments, basically went through a process that he put the member that he felt would be best at that committee, and associates on that committee that he thought would work together. None of that happens today. John did that, very much so. Basically, we had fifteen committees for fifteen members, three members on each committee. You go today, you've got about thirty committees, twenty committees. Some committees have five members, some committees have four members, and it's all done for political reasons, to try and appease the members, but it's not an effective way of running government. So we knew that any issue that came up had to go through a committee, then basically (unclear) into committee, and if something was complicated and would take the work of several committees, that's when you would create an ad hoc committee. John had, for example, LA Live was an ad hoc committee and I sat on that. I became one of John's primary lieutenants after we had our margaritas at the Acapulco in Glendale.

NICOLAIDES:

What do you think were some of the key things that you learned from him?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, I was complaining, which I did a lot at the beginning. We had a shooting at Fairfax High School that (unclear), and a kid was killed, and the council was in the middle of this heavy debate that to me made no sense whatsoever, but they were talking about supporting legislation to put metal detectors at schools, and I'm asking how is that going to help. So in those days, I was very typical of bringing up these issues in public. I was known as the guy who asked the "no-no" questions. I'm, like, challenging my colleagues to do more. And John said, "Mike, you want to do something about it? Then do something about it." And he appointed me as the chair of the ad hoc committee to deal with this shooting at Fairfax High School. He said, "Now, if you're the chair, you've got the CLA on your side. You decide what to do." And that's when we decided, okay, we're going to have these hearings throughout the city, we're going to discuss shootings at school campuses, bring in all the stakeholders, and get a better understanding, try to get a better understanding. Mike (Michael N.) Feuer just went through the same exercise.

NICOLAIDES:

Mm-hmm.

HERNANDEZ:

When we held these hearings, what was very evident to us is that the shootings wasn't the problem; the problem was what's happening in children's homes. We find out from the school district psychiatrist that there's more suicides committed on school campuses than anybody understood at the time, and the number was huge, and we didn't know about it. And the reality is, it's not just dealing with a child, but it's dealing with what's happening with a child at home, not just what's happening at school. So what ended up coming out of all these hearings was the creation of the Commission on Children, Youth, and Families, and that commission was to basically study the status of children and families in the city of L.A. Now, I'm doing this movement at this level. The same movement is starting at the National League of Cities, and everybody's beginning to focus on children. Nancy Daly, who was Richard Riordan's spouse at the time, she had an affinity towards children. And so the question became who creates the commission, Mayor Riordan or Mike Hernandez, and we both did, but we created the Commission on Children, Youth, and Families. I think her name was Sally Thompson was the direct executive director, but her assistant director was a young lady named Richelle Huizar. Richelle Huizar is José Huizar's wife. And the commission basically did that work, and we thought they did good work. We would have some activity going on in the neighborhood, they'd come in and they'd tell us the kinds of resources the city was spending in that neighborhood towards that activity and maybe what we should be doing differently. And Antonio Villaraigosa let that commission die, but I thought it was a very important commission and the work that they were doing, I thought, was very important.

NICOLAIDES:

So what else did you feel like they accomplished?

HERNANDEZ:

I also was the author of Prop K, and the commission was the first body overseeing the development and spending of Prop K, so that became one of their projects, got them involved.

NICOLAIDES:

So you were saying John Ferraro, it sounds like one of the lessons you took from him was you might feel passionately about something, but translate that into policy through--

HERNANDEZ:

Process.

NICOLAIDES:

Through a process, through committee formation and listening. I mean, do you think that that's--one of the questions I had for you was what was your sense of how to best get things done, but it sounds like you've sort of just described--

HERNANDEZ:

Well, once I understood those dynamics, you know, there's work at the committee and then there's the work prior to committee level. So I used to train staffers. I trained over 200 staffers. A staffer would come in to me and, okay, "I want to be the legislative aide. I want to develop legislative policy." And I'd say, "Okay, how are you going to do that?" And they'd say, "Well, what do you mean?" I said, "Well, you want to develop policy. This is the issue. The councilmen want to see some traffic signals at these two schools. How do you get it done?" So the first thing I suggested when I trained staff is, "You get a department report. Nothing happens without a motion, so you have to do a motion, asking the Department of Transportation to tell you why we don't have two signals and what it's going to take to get two signals to put there. So you're going to get a report from the department. Then you're going to ask the CAO (city administrative officer) the same question and ask them to give you a report. When they give you a report, you're going to find their report's different, because they're going to give you a report based on the fiscal situation as to whether we have a backlog of streetlights, and the reality how are you going to fun the installation of the two that you want. Then you're going to ask for a CLA report." And they ask me, "Why?" "Because then you're going to get a legislative report from someone who wants to help the councilman get his signals up, and they're going to tell you what the CAO needs to do to get your budget dollars in order to get it done. But you're going to get all these three reports, you're going to read them, and you're going to make a recommendation to the councilmember." And I said, "That's how you start developing policy. Now, I don't want your recommendation to be cut-and-copy what these guys say. I want your recommendation to be what you absorb from what all three said and what you think the councilmember should say." Now, dealing with (Jan) Perry, that was a very important report, because she's going to read that report and make her decision based on that. You're dealing with (Bernard) Parks. I tell staff, "It doesn't matter. What you need to know is Parks is going to read those three reports, so he's going to be asking you for advice, but he already read the reports. And that was Parks' file. But that's how I trained staff to develop policy.

NICOLAIDES:

So were you using this sort of approach when you were on council too? Were you guiding your own staff to be doing things this way?

HERNANDEZ:

Again, in my own staff, I wanted all three reports, so I used to always read what the CLA had to say, what the CAO had to say, and that's because when I was in committee, I could forward to council the CAO's report, the CLA's report, or the staff report or something completely different. I got to choose what I wanted it for at the council. And what I did not choose to forward was never seen by the council.

NICOLAIDES:

So did you--I mean, I don't know if this is typical operating procedure among all councilpeople or--

HERNANDEZ:

No, I don't see that today.

NICOLAIDES:

You don't. How about while you were on council?

HERNANDEZ:

You know, I had a very aggressive--people used to refer to me as someone who did his homework. Not all members do their homework. They referred to me as someone who questioned everything because I wasn't happy necessarily with the first answer I would get, and I always was going to question. People understood that. Then people learned that I always asked questions that I knew the answers to, but it made me very effective in committee, made me very effective on council.

I had lunch with one of my young students the other day. She is now assistant head of the Department of Transportation, and she was thanking me. She says, "I don't know if you remember, Mike. I came in to do housing for Parks, and the chief of staff said I had to do whatever you decided I was going to do. And when I met with you, you told me I was going to do budget." And I said, "Yeah." And she said, "So you proceeded to make me Parks' budget person." I said, ‘Yeah." "That's the best thing that ever happened to me," she says. Because she ended up being Mayor Villaraigosa's budget person, and then from that assignment, ended up going to work for Department of Finance, the person overseeing all the auditors, and from that assignment, got her job with DOT.

NICOLAIDES:

Who is this?

HERNANDEZ:

Her name is Monique Earl. But she credits me because of that. Steve Ongele will tell you the same thing. He's now over at Buildings and Safety, but I trained him to do the budget. Most of my staff members will tell you I trained them a certain way.

NICOLAIDES:

So did you coming to this approach, was that kind of an evolution while you were on council, or were you sort of picking this up from people like Ferarro or--

HERNANDEZ:

I think it came as an evolution. Part of it started with that day when Keith Comrie came in with my list of capital projects in my district and I had none, and I started realizing what the role of the CAO was, what the role of the CLA was.

I believe my last four years--this is after my arrest--were my best four years, and it's because I fought to stay on the council, and people clearly understood I knew what I was doing. Then as a staffer, I was known as the problem solver, the fixer whenever there was a problem on the council. So it was funny, because I'm working for Parks and I'm working for Perry and had worked for (Nathaniel N. "Nate") Holden, but Tom (Thomas) LaBonge was having a problem at the zoo with the gorilla, and he can't get the funding. And Tom comes to talk to me. I said, "Why are you talking to me?"

He said, "Because you're going to talk to Parks and he's the budget guy, so I know I've got to convince you in order to convince Parks." So he told me what the problem was. I said, "Have you talked to Fujioka, the CAO?" He said, "Yeah." "What'd he tell you? You've got to get the CLA to do this, and then you've got to get the report to reflect what the CLA is saying, that it should be funded, and I think Parks will support you." And that would happen. But then Tom knew me as somebody he could go to and ask for advice when he was having a problem. To this day, councilmembers call me for advice when having issues, and it's because I had a certain approach, but they all understood I did my homework.

NICOLAIDES:

Back to your relations with the other councilpeople, can you talk a little about your relations with Alatorre, especially given some of the things you had described earlier when you were running for Assembly? Like, how did your relation kind of evolve when you were on council together?

HERNANDEZ:

Alatorre is a mentor, someone who taught me a lot, probably got me into politics because I started by raising money for him. When we were on council, he supported me for the City Council when I first got elected, (unclear), and I had good relationship with him and Art (Arthur)Torres. So on the council, we took pride in saying our committees have two votes, and it's because we're not going to be fighting with each other. Now, once we resolved the Olvera Street issues and Richard let me play the lead on that, it became very clear that we were going to be working together and that we had a good relationship. Richard, at the time, was Chairman of the Budget and Finance Committee, and I knew that if I needed anything from Budget and Finance, I needed to talk to Richard. Now, prior to that, it was Zev, and Zev and I actually went off to lunch one day and we were talking about Pico-Union. What I did was I held a budget hearing in Pico-Union right after the riots, and Zev shows up, I think Mark Ridley-Thomas showed up. There were five members that were there, and they were shocked because they had like three hundred people there. Whenever I held a committee meeting, it's like hundreds showed up. Zev would go to budget meetings in the Valley, ten people would show up and they'd be gadflies, they'd be arguing about stuff that didn't make sense. He showed up here and people were talking about why the streets don't get cleaned, the trash isn't being picked up, bulky item issues, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and Zev heard stuff he hadn't heard before about how the city was lacking in doing services. So then Bradley said, "You've got a bulky item problem. Ask them for more money." So Zev and I met for lunch, and I said, "I need more money for my bulky item pickups, and you understand the number of apartment buildings I have in Westlake/Pico-Union. I don't have single-family residents, so I don't get trash picked up. They don't get their trash picked up. I should get a supplement." So we agreed that he would give me an extra $350,000 a year just for bulky item pickups in my district, and now it's the only one to have that kind of arrangement. So it was additional funding we had to supplement the stuff we need to do. Once Zev did that, we were buddies, because I could talk to him about my issues and he kind of understood from a different perspective.

When I got arrested, Zev left a message on my phone, said, "Keep climbing the mountain, kid. You have to keep climbing the mountain." That was very emotional for me. But he became a very good friend. When he left council, he talked about my role in the Latino community, and there was nobody else filling that role, so I appreciated him saying that.

NICOLAIDES:

So it sounds like you had a pretty close connection with him, yeah.

HERNANDEZ:

I think we ended up with a close connection, and I understood him. I mean, there was a time when people thought we were going to have a fight on the council floor. He was very passionate about his issues and I was very passionate about mine, and I just needed to understand better. Marvin Braude and I would go out to dinner at his home. Hal Bernson actually offered me a job when I left the council. Again, I think that we all became colleagues.

NICOLAIDES:

So it sounds like you had pretty good relations with--

HERNANDEZ:

At the end. At the end, I think I did.

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah, yeah. Did you feel like there was interracial--like, what were the interracial dynamics from, I guess, your own personal level with interacting with some of these other councilpeople? It sounds like you were building bridges. Did you feel that there were rifts in terms of that on the council, or can you talk a little about how the racial dynamics were playing out when you were serving?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, I think during the civil unrest, there was a group of councilmembers, non-minority councilmembers, non-color, who didn't know what to do. I thought they were frozen. It was the first time--I mean, I'd walk into the building and it was like these guys didn't know what to do.

NICOLAIDES:

So who are you thinking of?

HERNANDEZ:

I'm talking about Zev, I'm talking about Hal, I'm talking--they weren't part of this mix. If it wasn't happening in their district, they didn't know what they could do about it, and it was ugly. I mean, the town was burning, the city was burning. So I think they appreciated a guy like me who wanted to do something and was arguing to do stuff, so they saw us doing things. They saw me on the media, they saw me cleaning up, they saw me believing that the city had some hope, and then I think they kind of converted as part of that. But that was coming out for me as an elected official. I think during the earthquake, what kind of shocked them is I'm at City Hall at 7:30 in the morning. Earthquake hit at 4:44.

NICOLAIDES:

This is the '94 Northridge.

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, '94 earthquake, and my staff were at our field office at 6:30, because that was the game plan. Whenever an emergency, we'd all get together. We were at the field office, and I'm headed over to the Emergency Response Center, and we all gave them assignments to check out the district and see what was going on. And I remember showing up at the Emergency Response Center, it was like four stories down from P3 (phonetic), and I'm going down these stairs (unclear), and nobody has any idea what's going to happen when you get down there. They open the doors, and there's all these lights clicking (unclear). (laughs) But I was there with immediate response to the earthquake. And I got on a helicopter and we went to survey some of the damage. That freeway that collapsed, you couldn't tell it was collapsed from on top, because we were looking on top, but we could see the people and then we could see all these different things. So I'm trying to look at the city on this helicopter, looking at what's going on, and my staff is calling me, telling me there's a man who died of a heart attack at a bus stop on (unclear) Boulevard, (unclear) 50, 60. They were telling me damages that they were seeing. I saw this manhole blow up, just fly up to the sky from methane gas up at Westlake.

So we were out in the streets. I remember sitting at the Emergency Response Center and it was like people were getting power from Colorado, and yet everything in the city was dark. We got this power coming from Colorado, and they're actually showing this big map. Where do we send it first? And I'm sitting there, everybody's looking at me because I got there before the mayor, right? As far as I'm concerned, we send it downtown. So it came downtown. The Valley didn't get power for a week. So me being there was important. Riordan shows up and he comes in with all these donuts and all this other stuff, and everybody's all jumping up and down because the mayor finally got there, but I was already on my way out. I was just trying to find out what's going on in my district. We walked, and we had buildings where people were outside the buildings. They wouldn't go in. We were asking why. The buildings weren't red-tagged. And they said, "Come on in. Let me show you." You walk in the building, you walk down the hallway, there's no back wall. The whole back wall had collapsed.

NICOLAIDES:

Was this in the downtown area?

HERNANDEZ:

In Westlake, Westlake/Pico-Union.

NICOLAIDES:

Oh, in Westlake, in your district.

HERNANDEZ:

And the Building and Safety guys had just done a drive-by. So I got all over their case. Henry Cisneros gives me a call at night, and he says, "We're up here in Reseda, and we need some translators, Mike. Can you help us?" The city didn't have translators. So I get all my staff going out there to park in Laura Chick's district, and we're translating for all these earthquake victims in her district at the park, based on Henry's call. But that was the kind of work we were doing. But we were on the streets. We found this colony in this apartment building of these Native--they were like Mexican Indians who didn't speak English. They spoke some--

NICOLAIDES:

Like indigenous--

HERNANDEZ:

Indigenous language. They spoke some other--and they were all freaked out. So we were trying to help them.

NICOLAIDES:

Where was this?

HERNANDEZ:

In Westlake/Pico-Union. But we had a food market guy, the Flores Brothers, who basically called me, wanted to make donations, and they had a truckload of food supplies and, I guess, diapers and other stuff, and they parked it in front of that apartment building so those people would come out and get all their supplies, and that's how we started communicating with them. But we were involved in the earthquake, trying to figure out how to solve stuff.

NICOLAIDES:

Were you going to all areas of your district in moments like that? I mean, the earthquake, obviously, is different from the Rodney King uprising, but, like, were you able to go to Chinatown or other areas?

HERNANDEZ:

We worked throughout the whole district. Like I said, we already had a system where we had reps in each one of the districts that they were in charge of, so they understood that they needed to report back. And the big thing about the earthquake was trying to get the funding for our projects that basically got damaged during the earthquake, public and private projects. It was hard to get funding for the public projects unless they were on the list, so I put most of my projects on the list and they were able to get some funding to help them during that process. But, again, that was operating during an emergency, and that was all federal dollars that came in for that purpose.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you think the riots that preceded that--I mean, it was sort of like two things right in a row. Did that help put things in place in some way to be able to really tap into--

HERNANDEZ:

The earthquake was, I believe, a much bigger crisis than the riots, but it didn't feel that way. The riots were first, we learned there, and then the earthquake, we were able to handle things better. When the earthquake hit, we had aftershocks. I remember I was sitting in a stairway. The reason I sat down was because the building started shaking.

NICOLAIDES:

Where was this?

HERNANDEZ:

In City Hall. I sat on the stairway and I watched this crack going down the wall coming, and we not knowing whether I should go up or down, but I had to wait for the shaking to stop. Then I left. (laughs) Because I had to speak at a meeting at 8:30 in the morning at the Wells Fargo Building, and so I left and I'm headed up the elevator in the Wells Fargo Building, and while the elevator's going up, another aftershock. Then I'm sitting there and this building's going like this (demonstrates). I'm sitting in this elevator waiting for the building to stop moving because it was on rollers for that purpose. Helped me understand why we should put City Hall on rollers when it came time for those votes. But I actually sat there and watched that happening in the earthquake, and I showed up for a breakfast meeting that nobody showed for. (laughs)

NICOLAIDES:

Oh, gosh, after all that. So you said you felt like the earthquake was a much bigger crisis?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you talk about that a little or--

HERNANDEZ:

Because we had to assess the damage, and then we had to basically put a plan together to deal with that, and a lot of it was out in the Valley, a lot of the housing had collapsed and a lot of the issues were out in the Valley, so we were creating special districts. That's when people found out that I cared about the people in the Valley just as much as I cared about the people in the city, because I was going to try and help them get whatever resources they needed to deal with the earthquake. In my committee, there was the Valley Economic Corporation that was evolving, just starting as a mechanism to help small businesses develop in the Valley. We were creating CRA areas out there for purposes of the earthquake, and I was supportive of all those efforts. My committees were part of them.

NICOLAIDES:

I know in that moment of crisis, it sounds like your support there was clear, but I think I remember reading there were some accounts where I think--we talked about this in some of the earlier sessions, but it seems like there were moments where when you did talk about the two cities and that maybe the Valley was kind of the symbol of the other city, in a way.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, does that kind of resonate with how you were thinking about things or--

HERNANDEZ:

I was working to help the Valley in regards to the resources and creating the CRA areas. Their issues didn't compare to our issues in terms of the--I don't know what you read what the rift was, but--

NICOLAIDES:

Okay. So when you talked about two cities, there was the poor, and then what was the other one?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, the affluent one.

NICOLAIDES:

So, like--

HERNANDEZ:

The suburbs of the city.

NICOLAIDES:

So not within L.A. city? Are you thinking about, like--

HERNANDEZ:

Within L.A. city. You basically had the poor, you had the rich.

NICOLAIDES:

Right.

HERNANDEZ:

And our policies favored the rich, not the poor. But I was talking about that issue, basically citywide issue that existed prior to me getting elected. Once the earthquake hit, I mean, first you had the riots and a real emphasis on the inner city, RLA and everything else. Then you had the earthquake, and the reality is the real interest is on the Valley. I got to play the same role with both, and I understood what was going on the Valley, but I don't think they understood what I understood in terms of, for example, the CRA areas were not very effective out in the Valley, and it's because CRA is there to help develop low-income communities, but the CRA I knew didn't do that. The CRA in South L.A. that was created was created in a way where they didn't have tax increments being generated, so they didn't have revenue to spend, and they didn't want them to have the power of eminent domain, so they didn't have power of eminent domain. So they didn't do development. So you have a CRA-designated area, takes up most of South L.A., and I'm finding that they're getting very little services. So the City Planning Department would let CRA do the planning for South L.A., which is nothing. They weren't doing planning. CRA would come up with a community mitigation plan as to what they were going to do, but then they wouldn't implement it because they didn't have tax increments. They didn't have the ability to do that. The rest of the city felt secure pretending that CRA was taking care of all that stuff in the inner city. So now we're creating CRAs in the Valley. Were those CRAs going to operate differently than the CRA in South L.A.? And that was some of the questioning that was going on.

NICOLAIDES:

And what was the answer to that?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, they work and operate differently, because there, they're going to use planners to do the planning and the community plans to do the restoration, the stuff they weren't doing in South L.A.

NICOLAIDES:

So it was sort of two different--

HERNANDEZ:

Approaches.

NICOLAIDES:

--approaches. (laughs)

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm, approaches.

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah.

HERNANDEZ:

And again, just the fact that the members were willing to consider having a CRA area in their district, because they would never want it. Because of the earthquake, they were willing to consider it.

NICOLAIDES:

Right, yeah. I guess that on some level also speaks to sort of that perennial resistance to affordable housing in certain areas. I know you did work on that issue too. Would you want to say anything about that or--

HERNANDEZ:

Well, housing, what I found is most of the members did not want to build housing. They didn't want low-income housing in their districts, and it was a misnomer, because they thought that would attract poor people. I kept on saying the poor people are already here. So I took advantage, particularly in CRA areas, of developing subsidized housing, but the subsidy was more than just for the construction of housing units. I wanted social service components integrated into the projects themselves so it would make a difference in people's lives. So when you look at New Economics for Women, they have Para Los Niños Childcare Center built in their 138-unit housing project. They also have a built-in Boys and Girls Club and they have meeting space and so forth, so that the tenants--their childcare center has an infant care center, and that housing is for single parents. Now, right on the next block, they have--I forget what the name of the project is--Mariposa, and Mariposa is family housing. And then they had La Paloma, which is single teenage pregnant housing. Then there was a Clark (phonetic) residence, which was an old historic home in the old days, that we converted to SRO housing, single-room occupancy housing. And it was very expensive. All these projects were very expensive because I was breaking the mold, and we were doing things that they weren't accustomed to doing. But I was determined to build housing that would change people's lives, and that was the district that we were creating in the middle of Westlake. We actually took old apartment buildings and knocked walls down so that we could make them bigger units, so that wasn't a very effective way of using housing money because we weren't developing more housing, but we were basically improving the quality of the housing that existed in the areas. And I was the only one doing that.

NICOLAIDES:

So I was going to just ask you, on this affordable housing issue, what you felt at the time you were on council, you know, how could the city best tackle that issue. Like, what were your ideas about that at the time? You were clearly taking a lot of initiative within your own district, but did you have any sense of what ought to happen at the larger level of this?

HERNANDEZ:

I've always been a supporter of mixed-income housing. I think poor people should live with market-rate people. You shouldn't separate the housing. That's part of the problem, is right now we're building affordable housing only in some communities and not in others. The reality is, out in the Valley you've got a lot of single-family homes and if we were to build more density, it would allow for more affordability, but because they don't build the density, you don't have the affordability. So, to me, the Valley has all this land, has all these issues because of lack of an infrastructure and the proper planning, and they're fighting everything that you try and put there. But you're not mixing incomes, and that's the biggest problem the city has.

When I talk about the tales of two cities, I always say if you take a young man from the inner city and put him out in the Valley or the Westside, you change his life automatically. It's no different from me being in Tijuana and me being in Los Angeles. But all of a sudden, he has more opportunities, more open space, more parkland, and it changes his life. So, to me, the issue has been how do we mix incomes in the city of Los Angeles, and how do we become more tolerant of people who don't have as much as we do. Everybody's always said education is the solution to getting out of poverty, and my perspective is the entire environment impacts that. So we have environments we've created in the city that basically the majority of the participants in that environment are going to have negative experiences, and we've created them because of the lack of opportunities. So, you know, when I talk about the Boy Scouts playing a game in the inner city and not really created troops, that's part of that game. When you have an inner city that's very densely populated and no open space, that's pretty much part of the picture. We have schools that aren't educating in the inner city because of the sizes and the issues impacting them that's not part of it. I sat on the Neighborhood Parent Council for Nightingale Junior High School as a community member because the principal asked me to, and I could not believe the discussions that were being held between the union representatives and the principal and the parents. It was like parents didn't matter. It was all negotiations between the principal and the union. And I sat there saying, "Wait a minute. Your child's not coming to school on time. You've got to talk to the parent, but you've got to understand why. That parent has to do all these tasks before they can get there. So how do we deal with that issue?" But they never had those discussions because the union was so strong in the school. So it had nothing to do with the kids. People ask me why am I so anti-L.A. Unified (School District). Well, I'm not anti-L.A. Unified. I just want them to do a better job with the kids.

NICOLAIDES:

And do you think the union is part of the problem or--

HERNANDEZ:

Okay. I recognize the union's role is to represent the union. We shouldn't let the union determine children's education. And part of what's frustrating is when I listen to all these commercials, these political commercials, you have the CTA (California Teachers Association) going against charters and they're explaining to you their side, and then you've got the charters going against the CTA. Again, nobody's talking about the children. But that's one of the things lacking in education.

NICOLAIDES:

Back to your point about that you feel like it's important to create mixed-income areas, how does a city go about that? I mean, do you have any sense of what policies--

HERNANDEZ:

If we took our low-income housing money and applied it to the Valley, the problem would be the councilmembers wouldn't want to allow it to be built. When we created earthquake (unclear) areas, guess how much money wasn't spent? The housing money out in the Valley.

NICOLAIDES:

So how do you overcome that?

HERNANDEZ:

You change the representatives. Joe Sanchez taught me, "We're not going to overcome; we're going to overwhelm." And I keep on trying to explain to people the inner-city issues aren't going to go away, and so as the inner city grows, they're going to end up being the Valley's problems, so our reality is, our opportunity to change the quality of people's life is here now, and we have to be doing it on a daily basis because those same issues will be in your neighborhood if you choose not to.

NICOLAIDES:

So do you think that really the only way to make change in this is to share, like, demographic change? I mean, do you think there is the potential for a change of political will, even in areas maybe that may be a little more affluent, or is this just--

HERNANDEZ:

There's a change going on right now, and I think it has a lot to do with (Donald J.) Trump. People are being more understanding of other people's issues and they're finding out more about the #MeToo Movement, they're finding out more about the Gay (LGBT Rights) Movement. People are getting more political and now they're paying more attention to some of the issues. I think that's the beginning of that process.

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah.

HERNANDEZ:

But it happened because something threatened our freedom, like a president who basically is making statements that doesn't make sense to everybody. So now people want to be more involved. But what I'm finding is I'm finding Latinos throughout the city. That means they're growing. And they're voting, so I think slowly but surely, the elected officeholders will change that way. I think we used to have three Republicans. We only have one now.

NICOLAIDES:

So I'm going to shift gears a bit and ask you about when you were on council, if we could just talk a bit about the LAPD, because that was certainly an important issue for a lot of the--well, really kind of a lot of the time in L.A. history. So one of the first questions I had is if you can maybe talk a little bit about Daryl Gates' departure after the Rodney King uprising, I mean, were you involved in any of that or in any of those changes right after the riots or--

HERNANDEZ:

I think Daryl Gates and I started on a positive light because he went to Franklin High School and I went to Franklin High School, and he lived in the 1st District up in Monterey Hills. I thought we had a breakdown when they were selling us some statistics. I was looking at the numbers, and they didn't look right. I went to Parker Center to talk to the guy who got the statistics, and he gave me a sheet with all the statistics.

NICOLAIDES:

What were these statistics on?

HERNANDEZ:

On crime, number of rapes, number of (unclear). And he gave me this sheet, and then I'm walking out with it, and all of a sudden, people are looking for me. They want the sheet back. I actually was running out of the building without the sheet, because the sheet I had had different numbers on it from the sheet they were giving to council. Daryl Gates did not appreciate me actually going and questioning the numbers and then proving they weren't there. So that caused me to support Bradley. Gates and Bradley were having a big battle, and I remember I got a call. I think it was Rick Orlov. They had exposed all the issues with LAPD with the Rodney King case, and I said something to the effect that he was asking me how long I thought the riots were going to go on and I said, "I think there's a big dark cloud over the city, and that cloud is Daryl Gates." And they interpreted that as me saying Gates has to go, and they interpreted that as being the eighth vote to say that, and that meant that the Chief had to go. Shortly after that, Chief announced his resignation.

NICOLAIDES:

Was that an accurate read of where you were at with it at that point?

HERNANDEZ:

I think I was ready to vote no, and I disclosed that at the time. Then the Chief resigned. But I don't think he liked me.

NICOLAIDES:

Why?

HERNANDEZ:

I just picked that up from people, that Gates had a problem with me. Willie Williams and I got along great. I was not supportive of Willie Williams to become the Chief. It was funny.

NICOLAIDES:

Why not?

HERNANDEZ:

I didn't know him and I didn't know Parks at the time. I mean, I knew Parks at the time, but I wasn't supportive of Parks, but I knew Parks to be the number-two guy. I think I was supporting a Latino who was also running for Chief. Once the decision was made that Willie Williams was going to be the Chief and he kept on (unclear), we developed a relationship on that. I would give the Chief tours of my district and he would implement a lot of stuff.

NICOLAIDES:

What was your sense of how the LAPD, how well they were working in your district, especially like the Rampart Division had so much coverage.

HERNANDEZ:

I kept on exposing stuff, right? So I had Northeast, I had Hollenbeck, I had Central, Wilshire. I think that's it, all in my district. I think I had one more. I can't find it. But all in my district.

NICOLAIDES:

Where is Rampart in relation to that?

HERNANDEZ:

Rampart is Westlake/Pico-Union.

NICOLAIDES:

Right. Okay.

HERNANDEZ:

I don't have Rampart in there. That's the last one. So I had boundaries of all these police areas, so they would take the crime stats and divide them up. So a crime would happen on that side of the street, that's Hollenbeck, and on this side of the street, that's Northeast, right? I'm worried about the crime on the street, and I've got two divisions supposedly serving it, and neither one paying attention. So that's why I was getting all these statistics and I exposed the fact that having the boundaries of a division wasn't a good thing, and I figured that out right away, but I couldn't change where the divisions were, but I had to talk to the chiefs about how do you cover it, and that's when Parks and I had a lot of discussions. But it was based on crime statistics they were showing in the surrounding area.

NICOLAIDES:

So how did you--I mean, what plan did you come up with?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, by making them aware of the boundaries and the reality that their crime statistics is not enough to tell me crime statistics by division. I want to see them by census track. That way we can get a better picture of where the crime was happening. So they started presenting facts that way and looking at them that way, and all of a sudden, we saw a whole different picture of the crime.

NICOLAIDES:

In what way? Like, what was different?

HERNANDEZ:

It was more intense.

NICOLAIDES:

More intense?

HERNANDEZ:

Uh-huh. In all the boundaries, it was more intense, and it's because they were dividing the statistics. When they put them together, it was a much bigger problem. And they divided their resources that way, so that was part of the issue.

NICOLAIDES:

So were there any changes that came out of that realization?

HERNANDEZ:

I think an awareness, and they didn't get away--to this day, people question the crime stats of LAPD, and it's because they misinterpret them. You know, they announce, "We've had low crime for six months," right? Well, all of a sudden, they took aggravated assault and made it a misdemeanor, and so unless you were raped, that's a felony, but if you were "just assaulted," that's a misdemeanor. So we put that in this category and this in this category, and it doesn't look like you have as many felonies. The reality is, they used to keep track of aggravated assault with rapes and it was a much larger figure, but now they're saying we have low crime rate. That's not necessarily the case. So we've always questioned their statistics. And who taught me to question those statistics was Bernard Parks.

NICOLAIDES:

Bernard Parks.

HERNANDEZ:

When he became councilmember.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, were you--I know the issue of the INS, like, during the riots was--we've talked about that. Did you sense that there were any other problems in how the LAPD was policing your district besides this issue? I mean, I've read some reports about how there was already some evidence of, like, problems in the Rampart Division, even by the early nineties before the whole scandal broke out.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

Were you aware of that or--

HERNANDEZ:

My staffers mentioned to me that they believed there was an organized group within the Rampart Division, and that group, they were called the Rampart Reapers. My staff had picked it up out in the field. So one day, Willie Williams is giving testimony on the council, and I'm asking him about the Rampart Reapers, and I was the first member ever to disclose the fact that there was an organized group in Rampart Division.

NICOLAIDES:

When did you--do you remember when this was?

HERNANDEZ:

I don't know, but there was a newspaper article. And what happened, it was during a closed-session discussion that that was disclosed, and it wasn't supposed to become a public record.

NICOLAIDES:

So you did have some awareness of it.

HERNANDEZ:

My staff had told me about it. I hadn't seen it directly, but my staff had told me about it, and I asked the question.

NICOLAIDES:

And what was the response?

HERNANDEZ:

That they didn't know about any group like that.

NICOLAIDES:

They didn't?

HERNANDEZ:

Nuh-uh. Then it came out afterwards that it did exist.

NICOLAIDES:

Had you had any complaints from constituents or--

HERNANDEZ:

We hadn't picked that up, nothing extraordinary. What you've got to understand about Rampart, crime was rampant. It was ugly. We had a task force in there dealing with drug dealers, and we always had these special task forces in Rampart. And the reality was, they came back and--I forget what it was called, but they came back and they said, "Councilman, you have a tidal wave of crime in that district. There's nothing we can do to change that." I mean, the crime was just paramount throughout the district. So we did a lot of different kinds of things, like actually servicing the district. Daryl Gates had a press conference where he said, "I don't have a problem with Rampart because people know who I am, and if I show up, they don't sell drugs." And I was questioning him, "Well, why aren't you there? Because there's drugs being sold." So we had some issues there, because he thought he was doing a good job in Rampart and I thought it was a terrible job. So I started doing all kinds of stuff to get make the police more honest. That's when I had that news crew in West L.A. versus downtown L.A., so they could see the difference in terms of police coverage.

NICOLAIDES:

So when you said when he'd--so was he talking about the police division, the Rampart drug deals and all that was happening within the division?

HERNANDEZ:

Exactly. And he just didn't understand how Rampart--I mean how ugly it was. But they were able to tolerate--and they didn't have a problem with having all the crime right there. They just didn't want it to go to the rest of the city. I had a problem with crime right there.

NICOLAIDES:

Sure.

HERNANDEZ:

So I questioned the police department in a lot of ways. I also found I needed them to be my friends.

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah.

HERNANDEZ:

Because they were the ones we needed to provide the service, so I was a supporter of the police. I have a little restaurant on the corner called La Abeja that I go eat at all the time, and I grew up with a friend named Joe Galindo, who's now a LAPD officer, beat officer, and Joe used to show up there at La Abeja with his friends, whether they were detectives or beat cops, and they'd all talk to me about what was bothering them, so that I could lay it out to them. I remember them talking about how old their cars were. Their cars would break down on the chase and everything else. So I came in and I started asking about the city cars, and I found out our cars were eight years old and they should have been replaced at five, and they were breaking down on the way to calls, so I passed the motion to order more police cars, and it passed and they got the resources for our cars. But those beat officers would never forget that, that I was the guy they could call on. When I was arrested, some of those guys would knock on my door and make sure my wife was fine and my kids were fine, and they wanted them to know they were here to protect them.

NICOLAIDES:

Right, yeah. Okay. And now let's shift another gear and bounce forward somewhat to talk a little--I wanted to ask you about charter reform, which was a huge issue kind of towards the end of your council term.

HERNANDEZ:

I was one of the few members who supported term limits. Richard Riordan was pushing that initiative as part of his election.

NICOLAIDES:

What was your thinking on that issue?

HERNANDEZ:

I just thought that ten years was more than enough time to do your work. I'm this new kid on the block, and I didn't believe in lifetime politicians. And I wasn't running for office because I wanted to be President of the United States; I was running for office because I wanted to be a city councilman and that was it. And I had a very successful private life that I basically felt that I was sacrificing that to do this, and so I didn't have a problem with ten years being a term. I thought all these lifers hadn't been doing the job that should have been done, so I was supportive of term limits, two terms. Then I became supportive of three-term limits. Right now I'm comfortable with three terms. But I thought that the only way you could make that change was through term limits.

NICOLAIDES:

So when you came to the end of your second term, that was the limit at that point.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm. Right. I was termed out of office.

NICOLAIDES:

Would you have run again if it had been three terms?

HERNANDEZ:

It's hard for me to tell you, because after my arrest, I had to make a decision. Do I stay in office or do I leave? It made more sense for me to leave, but I honestly did not believe my colleagues would take care of my district, and my district had already suffered from all these vacancies in the past, so I made the conscious decision to finish my term and finish my work, without any intention of running for any other office. Then I was offered opportunities to run for other office by labor. They said they could get me elected and they wanted me to run, and I told them I didn't feel like I deserved to run. So I was done, and I just wanted to finish my work. So we actually had a reverse calendar in our office. I had everybody had a reverse calendar on their desk, and we counted how many days we had left, but each day we took off, we were very conscious of how much time we had left to finish our work, and we tried to do as much work as we could. Now, I was fortunate to be replaced by Ed Reyes. He was my planning deputy, and I felt more confident that the work would continue. I'm talking about work like Taylor Yard, the community plans, and that type of stuff, which is long term. So I felt comfortable with that.

NICOLAIDES:

Back to the charter reform issue, I mean, that was--I guess there was a lot of energy and some controversy about those efforts, like in the late nineties. Did you have any other--like, were you involved in that issue at all beyond your support for that one thing? I mean, when the executive committee and the other committee, when they were trying to push through their plans on charter reform, was that an issue that you were involved with?

HERNANDEZ:

I was involved with charter reform, and we voted on each one of the reforms.

NICOLAIDES:

Right.

HERNANDEZ:

I don't know what issues were controversial. I don't remember what issues were controversial.

NICOLAIDES:

Well, Riordan eventually came on board with it, but there was a lot of hammering-out between those two committees that were working on it.

HERNANDEZ:

It was a question of governance. There's always an issue between the mayor and the council. And, you know, we have a strong council. A weak mayor (unclear) government. In charter reform, Riordan was trying to get more power.

NICOLAIDES:

Right.

HERNANDEZ:

He basically got the power to hire and fire department heads, as well as assistant department heads, and that was a big change because that meant the departments reported to him and not to the council, but the council retained the control over the budget and policy. But the governance issue was big. So whether it be the relationship of the mayor and the council and how much authority he had over the council, or the chief of police and the police department, there was a lot of controversy. We were trying to recreate CRA and we weren't able to create an economic development department because we couldn't reach agreement on the governance structure, how many appointments the mayor would make versus how many appointments the council would make.

NICOLAIDES:

Right, right.

HERNANDEZ:

And because we couldn't reach those agreements, that did not move forward. So we ended up moving forward with the things we agreed about.

NICOLAIDES:

Like the Neighborhood Councils, formation of that.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

The other big thing that seemed to come out of it was the formation of these Area Planning Commissions.

HERNANDEZ:

Area Planning Commissions. Initially they were proposing six. I changed that to seven. That's because I wanted done in the Central District. So I was the reason why we had seven, not six.

NICOLAIDES:

And then in your post-council time, when you were working in the 8th, 9th, and 10th Districts, helping those councilpeople, how did you see those reforms kind of playing out in those districts, like the Neighborhood Council? Did it seem like it was effective? Was it--

HERNANDEZ:

The Area Planning Commissions were more effective than the Neighborhood Councils, and they both did the same thing: they decentralized government to a certain extent. Neighborhood Councils had issues in the governance structure, in their elections, and all politics are local, but the wars become even more local. So Neighborhood Councils we found were not very effective in primarily the minority communities, and it's because--when did you learn Robert's Rules of Orders?

NICOLAIDES:

Probably when I was pretty older. (laughs)

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah.

HERNANDEZ:

Doing what?

NICOLAIDES:

Serving on, like, you know, committees, service committees.

HERNANDEZ:

So those opportunities don't exist for people in the inner city, and so something like how to conduct a meeting made it very difficult for them to do that. So the Neighborhood Council people asked me if I could go around and do these little seminars on Robert's Rules of Order to all the Neighborhood Councils, and I agreed to do that. I would go and try to teach them Robert's Rules of Orders, and I was shocked at the involvement and lack of involvement of these Neighborhood Councils. So I go out in the Valley and I'm talking to a meeting of forty people on Robert's Rules of Orders, and it's a very healthy discussion. I go to South L.A. and I'm talking to a group of three who are fighting with each other and don't want to agree on anything. And I saw the difference.

NICOLAIDES:

And so these were the Neighborhood Council meetings that you had--

HERNANDEZ:

Neighborhood Council meetings.

NICOLAIDES:

You saw forty people showing up in the Valley, three showing up--

HERNANDEZ:

In the inner city. And I was trying to teach them the same thing, how to conduct a meeting, just how to conduct a meeting, but I saw the difference. So some communities were ready for that kind of experience and other communities weren't, as opposed to the Area Planning Commissions, which there are seven, where they're appointed and you don't go through elections, and they're representative of the community if the councilmember does his job in the city, and they have health debate, trying to approve projects that are going in. That doesn't happen at the Neighborhood Council level.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you think it's because they're appointed? Like, what is the difference there, why one was so much more effective than the other?

HERNANDEZ:

I was a much better elected official than I was a candidate, but I became a much better candidate the second time I ran than the first time I ran. So nobody knows what it's like to be a candidate, to have to be out there naked, explaining your position on issue, and listening to people and then trying to convert that to a vote for you. So there's a whole process to being a candidate. There's the campaign where you build a team and you do all this stuff. Now, elected officials, you don't go through that exercise, but now you're elected. Now this group (unclear). Neighborhood Councils, they're fighting at the election level and they're fighting as to who gets to vote and what are the boundaries. These are things that we, the elected, already understand. There's a process for creating the boundaries, and you're limited to those boundaries when you run for office, and that's who you're elected to try to convince. You don't have any of that understanding at the Neighborhood Council level. The other thing that happened with Neighborhood Councils is we started giving them budgets. I explained my MASH experience. When I started giving my MASH people budgets, it started all falling apart. At the Neighborhood Council level, we found out people were printing tee-shirts from their brother's store and paid for with Neighborhood Council money, but they weren't getting any approvals, and that was spending public funds, so we had to figure out how to get that done. But we found the money was being, in some cases, absconded with. Again, they didn't have that ethics responsibility that came with it.

Electeds have a lot of laws that regulate us, and we get in a lot of trouble because we don't follow those laws. Neighborhood Councils are public. They don't have those concepts of those laws. So I created a group of people who I need their advice to help me decide on a liquor store and a restaurant, a liquor license, and they already have a lot of licenses. The chairperson of the committee comes in and says, "You know, that owner of the store is real nice. He took us all out to dinner. We had this fancy dinner. He explained to us his project. He offered my son a job. My son's working for him. I think he should get his license." And I'd sit there saying, "That wasn't what you were supposed to do." (laughter) Again, they don't understand that.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, one of the goals with forming the Neighborhood Councils was to kind of create a more democratic, responsive government, so, you know, in these poorer communities, like, how do you build that kind of civic capacity? Like, if it's not this, you know, what--

HERNANDEZ:

You need organizers organizing communities and building that capacity for that purpose. If you're not doing that, then you don't get there.

NICOLAIDES:

So it's not enough to just impose a structure onto that--

HERNANDEZ:

Remember my MASH units?

NICOLAIDES:

Yes.

HERNANDEZ:

We started with talking about issues.

NICOLAIDES:

Although you also said that didn't really work out too.

HERNANDEZ:

At the end of the day, it didn't work once I gave them a budget.

NICOLAIDES:

So, like, how do you create a governance structure, which charter reform was trying to do, that would work in these poorer communities, do you think?

D Well, and again, each community is a little different, even though it's the same city. I know that when I go to a community meeting, the first thing I try to find out is what's the problem, what's the issue, and I'm trying to talk to everybody to try and figure that part out. Many communities--how do I explain? You can't even start talking economic development if you don't have an organized group of businesspeople to create a Chamber of Commerce, and all my Chamber of Commerces were dying. I didn't have a Chamber of Commerce in Westlake. Lincoln Heights Chamber of Commerce had the same leadership for the last thirty years. Same thing was going on with Highland Park. And the problem with that long-term leadership is that it dies off and you don't have no new blood circulating.

NICOLAIDES:

Why do you think that was, like, there was no energy going into those--

HERNANDEZ:

So when I came in, one of the things we implemented, I implemented as Economic Development chairperson, were BIDs, Business Improvement Districts. The state passed legislation where it allowed districts to be created where businesses could either use part of their tax increments or they could use property taxes or contribute to a fund, and that fund would be set up to deal with mitigation issues that they determined. So I thought if I could create BIDs, I could help stimulate Chambers of Commerces. So I brought in this guy Marco LiMandri from San Diego, and he was the guy who did the little Italian district in San Diego, did several BIDs, was very successful. So he came in and he started with a survey. He sat down with each businessperson and conducted a survey. "How do you feel about the crime, public safety, trash pickup?" Asked all these questions, and people answered the survey. He found that 70 percent had issues with crime. So then he came up with a program. What if we hired extra security? Makes sense. Or ask people to clean up or ask people to do this. When we put the marketing budget together, we have these sidewalks sales and all this stuff, so they buy into the program. Then he says, "Okay, now this is what it's going to cost. If we pass this district, every business has to contribute, not just you. But now this is what it's going to cost you, because everybody's contributing (unclear)." So he kind of organized them through the survey, put them together.

They developed a plan, and now I've got a BID. Every place I put a BID, I have a Chamber now. I have a Chamber of Commerce in Highland Park. I have a Chamber of Commerce in Lincoln. They don't always agree, but they're both (unclear) in those communities.

NICOLAIDES:

So it's kind of reviving that--

HERNANDEZ:

That conflict. And those BIDs are doing even better now because you've got all these new businesses coming in and paying more money into the district and they're providing services.

NICOLAIDES:

So do you think those are the kind of crucial element to creating the sort of civic capacity in those areas?

HERNANDEZ:

You have to organize people, you have to train them. When we were doing Jaycee chapters throughout the state, you have to teach them Robert's Rules of Order, you've got to teach them how to conduct a meeting, you've got to teach them how to conduct a community project, how to basically put a plan together, how to get it done, and basically you're teaching that to them, and that was part of what I was learning. My wife would tell you everything I do has a time frame attached to it. I break everything down. That's just the way I think. But that's how I get things done. So I told her four times you were coming today at 12:00. She kept asking me, "One o'clock? One o'clock?" I said, "No, she's coming at 12:00." She kept on asking me why I was pushing buttons earlier. I was pushing buttons because you were coming at 12:00. But that's the way I think. She doesn't think that way.

NICOLAIDES:

So maybe we can just talk quickly about your work after the council. I know we're going long on this interview. So when you were at the end of your term, I mean, did you and your staff sort of strategize about what you were doing to do next, or how did--can you kind of walk me through what happened?

HERNANDEZ:

We were counting down our days, and that meant we were looking forward to leaving the city, that's all. Some of my staff got involved in Ed Reyes' campaign. I'd like to say something about Ed, if I could. Ed was my planner, he was my chief of staff for a while, and he wanted to replace me. I did not support him initially. The person I was supporting was an old enemy of mine named Richard Polanco. Now, I was supporting Richard Polanco because as a state legislator, he probably did more to get other Latinos elected throughout the state than anybody else, and he chaired the caucus. When he started with the caucus, I think there were like four members or six members. When we ended, the caucus had like thirty members, the Latino caucus. So he did a lot of work in that area. I also worked with Polanco on trying to get funding for the passing of the Gold Line when we were trying to get the authority transferred over to us. Even though we were enemies in terms of our campaigns and we ran ugly campaigns against each other, we worked well together, and I did not believe him to be a bad politician. I think he made a mistake when he was supporting a prison in East L.A., but that made me look better because I was fighting the prison in East L.A. But when it came time for him running for City Council, I had to assess who would be the best person for my district to serve the district, and I clearly understood that if he ran, he was going to win, so I made the decision not to support Ed, and one of the reasons I made that decision is I didn't want Ed to carry the baggage of the reality of him working for me and I got arrested while I was in office, didn't think it was fair to him or his family. So I made a conscious decision not to support him. That hurt him a lot. He took offense to that. At the end of the day, Polanco chose not to run, and I think that was because Ed had something to do with forcing him not to run, and he chose not to run, and Ed became the city councilman. I was happy with Ed being the city councilman because he knew my work.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you ever come around to supporting him after Polanco--

HERNANDEZ:

I supported him after Polanco dropped out. He was my guy and I was supporting him and working with him. One of my old consultants ran his campaign, and I wanted Ed to win. And when he won, I tried to help him, but he was very resistant because I didn't support him initially. And we had a discussion where he shared with me that his father was worried about him because of me, and I thought that was a little strange, so I didn't want to threaten him in any way. So at the end of the day, he got elected. I'd show up at a meeting and Ed would be there, and everybody would gravitate to me and talk to me, and it was like he wasn't in the room. That happened at the first meeting I showed up.

NICOLAIDES:

What sort of meeting?

HERNANDEZ:

A community meeting where they would be talking about community plan, whatever might be the case. But when I saw that, I made a conscious effort not to show up at any more meetings.

NICOLAIDES:

So this was, like,

HERNANDEZ:

First District, yeah. And I wanted Ed to be the councilman, and I had confidence that he would be a good council man because he was part of that work we did. I didn't have to question it. So I made a conscious decision to stay out of the district while he was the councilmember, and I didn't have a problem with that. But I found Ed had problems with me. So, this last election, Ed ran--well, Jose Gardea, who was his chief of staff, ran for City Council against Gil Cedillo. Jose Gardea was one of my field deputies in Echo Park who I had helped evolve. He graduated from UCLA, and I believed him to be a very conscientious young man, but there came a point where he was getting married and he wanted to leave my employment, so I actually helped him get a job with L.A. Live, Staples Center, and he was a community relations guy. That was Jose. And he did that for two years and then he came back and wanted to work for me again, so we brought him back in.

Ed Reyes had a period where he left to go work with Riordan, and that lasted two days, and then he came back and asked if I would take him back, and I brought him back in. So when Jose ran this time against Gil Cedillo, I'm put in that situation. Gil's an old-time family friend who I've been working with for friends, and Jose was my guy. So I made the decision to go with Jose over Gil Cedillo. Make a long story short, I was on the outskirts of Jose's campaign and I watched this young man lose to Gil. Gil Cedillo and I have a great relationship. I just had lunch with Jose the other day, and I'm talking to him, and now he's managing Jim McDonald's campaign. Now, I didn't talk to him about it, but I want to talk to him about it. The difference between Ed Reyes and Jose Gardea, Ed Reyes was able to get elected off my coattails, no questions asked. Jose wasn't able to get elected off of Ed Reyes' coattails. What Jose and Ed never learned was how to organize. Now, they might think they learned that, but they were never organizers and they didn't work on the '87 campaign, so they didn't know what it took to build this base of community people and all this other stuff, which is how I run my campaigns. And I realized that that was his weakness. He should have never lost. I mean, after ten years of me and twelve years of Ed, Jose should have been the primary candidate.

NICOLAIDES:

Did Gil Cedillo have more of that kind of grassroots--

HERNANDEZ:

No, Gil was coming from the state level, which is why they thought they would win, but Gil was able to generate more support based on him being the state senator and his work for the immigrant community.

NICOLAIDES:

So it just is higher profile, you think?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm, long term. Gil was an assemblyman, state senator, now city councilman. Now, I've always made my decision based on what I believe to be the best for the district, but I realized that Jose was lacking that basic level of understanding, and Ed, I think, was lacking that basic level of understanding, and they didn't have it. So that made a difference.

NICOLAIDES:

So when Nate Holden decided to hire you on as a consultant after you termed out, can you talk about that a little bit?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm. And I don't know how much I talked about it previously, but my wife and I were very happy sitting in Cabo San Lucas when I get this phone call from Ron Deaton telling me to make sure whenever I get back to L.A. that I go see him first--

NICOLAIDES:

Right, right.

HERNANDEZ:

--and don't read the newspapers. And I'm like, "What's going on, Ron?" He goes, "Well, Nate's flying off the top. He fired all his staff, and he's going to hire you." I wasn't even thinking of working, but I had these two and a half months, ten weeks I had to make up to get vested. So I agreed to work for Nate. I went in, and he had fired his entire staff, so my task was to rehire staff, and I interviewed everybody and I rehired 90 percent of the staff. I think there was two people I didn't pick up. Basically, I'm putting together an operation, prioritizing projects and stuff, working with staff, when his chief of staff, Louis White, a man who I respected a lot and was very welcoming to me, you know, you'd think he would be intimidated by me coming in to work with him, but he welcomed me and gave me my desk and said, "You're the guy. We want to learn from you. Let us know what I can do to help you."

Then Louis White has a stroke, and Nate doesn't have a chief, and that was the only person Nate really kept. So I agreed to stay with Nate on the condition, that I wouldn't be the chief of staff, I'd be the assistant chief of staff, that Louis White would stay the chief, and I would continue to do the work I was doing. Some people believed that was Nate's best two years, because we were focused on his projects and we kept his projects. Nate Holden's a great man. He doesn't shy away from a fight. He used to be a boxer. He would walk in the morning into the office and he'd say, "You guys see my name in the paper this morning?" And we'd all be happy saying, "No, we didn't, Councilman." And he'd sit there saying, "Something wrong. We got to do something. I got to have my name in the paper." But that was Nate. He liked to be in the paper. I got to work with South Seas House on his district, create some historic overlay zones in terms of the community plans. We had a lot of outstanding sanitation issues we were able to clear up. But his staff became a much better staff for it.

NICOLAIDES:

But then what about when you began working with Jan Perry and Bernard Parks?

HERNANDEZ:

The next thing that happened is Bernard Parks got elected, but Mark Ridley-Thomas has spent his entire budget. Oh, I take it back. Rita Walters got elected, and I was working for Nate and Nate was supporting Jan Perry to replace Rita Walters, and I started working with Jan. Jan had a problem with me when I was on the council, but her and Rita basically talked to Ferraro about me. They thought I was too sexist and that I treated women differently. I took that into account, had to figure out, okay, I've got to figure out what I'm doing wrong. So Jan was part of that discussion with Ferraro. Ferraro had that discussion with me, and I had to figure out how to solve it. But she was running for City Council and she got elected, but I helped her a little bit during her campaign, and Jan and I became friends. Then her chief of staff was arrested by the feds. He used to be the mayor of Carson, Daryl Sweeney, and he was arrested by the feds, and Jan asked if I could come in and talk to her staff. Ron Deaton basically asked me to go and talk to her staff, and they were all in shock over the arrest. So I went and met with them, talked to them. "This stuff happens. Don't expect him to come back." And Jan needed a chief of staff. In talking to staff, I found this woman Kathy Godfrey, who I thought was very compassionate, very well educated, very mature, older than most of the staffers, and she used to be an emergency head nurse in the trauma room, so she was used to crisis, very compassionate, especially on the homeless issue. So I suggested to Jan that she make Kathy Godfrey her chief of staff, and Jan asked me, "You're not interested?" I said, "I'm not interested." And Kathy Godfrey became her chief of staff, and Kathy would always ask me what to do. Then Parks got elected to office.

NICOLAIDES:

So were you officially on her staff?

HERNANDEZ:

Not at that time.

NICOLAIDES:

So you were just kind of working more informally as an advisor?

HERNANDEZ:

As an advisor. And again, I was working for Nate, then helping Jan.

NICOLAIDES:

Okay.

HERNANDEZ:

Parks got elected, and Parks didn't have a budget. I'm working for Deaton. Deaton asked me to go help Parks put his staff together with his chief of staff, Joe Rousan. We became very good friends. And I started working for Parks. Two years later, Ron Deaton went over to DWP (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power) and people were trying to figure out what to do with me. I'm this anomaly. They wanted to move me over to the payroll of Parks and Perry. I had an issue because I wanted to make more money. Because of my arrest and because of the situation, I agreed to work at like one-fourth the salary I was making. I think I started at about $45,000. When I left, I was making $132,000. So I went back to a $45,000 level. So after two years, I'm like, "I've got to make more money." So we changed the city administrative code that if any one person works for more than one member as an assistant chief of staff, he can make as much as the chief of staff or more. So then I became the highest-paid staffer, but I was working for two members at the same time and dedicating myself to both of them pretty much the same. But I worked for Jan and I worked for Parks. I developed their staff, and they kept me.

NICOLAIDES:

And were you working on particular issues down there or--

HERNANDEZ:

No, I worked on their staff and whatever their issues were, so, you know, I had a lot of pet projects that I worked with, and it was more using that project to teach staffers how to get work done. So I knew Kathy Godfrey, she had an issue with a women's alcohol center. They were at one building and they wanted to develop it at another building, but there was issues with the Department of Labor, who had given this other building a grant years ago and they had to take it off in order for the city to be able to acquire this building. Make a long story short, I worked with Kathy in negotiating an agreement between the Department of Labor and the economic development department of the feds to get credit for the twenty-three years of services that they had so that they wouldn't have to pay it, and they basically turned over and took the lien off, which allowed us to give the building to the women's alcohol center. Meanwhile, they were raising something like $20 million, and you have this great homeless shelter right now by the women's alcohol center in downtown L.A. It's probably the most effective one of all. But I worked with Kathy Godfrey on that project, and it became a reality. So each one had their little projects that I would work on. I would teach them some of the project.

NICOLAIDES:

I remember you mentioned earlier about how one of the other reasons I guess you went to work for these particular council people was that their districts had become--

HERNANDEZ:

Latino.

NICOLAIDES:

Latino by that point.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm, and they're Latino today.

NICOLAIDES:

Did that factor in? Was that an important factor or--

HERNANDEZ:

No. Again, they weren't my colleagues, but they were people I knew. I'd worked with Parks. He was in charge of Central Division of my district. I'd worked with Jan, had an opportunity to work with them in the districts, but their districts were very similar to mine, and they lacked the resources that they didn't have, so I was able to come in with an attitude that that can improve, that can change, we just need to focus on it more. But it wasn't because the elected hadn't been doing their job; it was because the previous elected had let that happen. It was more, again, I think the city operated as two cities. That was just my own personal position.

NICOLAIDES:

And did you take on any other work in those years, or was it mostly just that work on those staffs?

HERNANDEZ:

Prior to working for either one, when I came back from Cabo, I had a friend who I was going to be working with. His business is called Diverse Strategies for Organizing, DSO. He was going to hire me. We had one project we were working on, was in Sacramento, trying to get some basically cleanup site, major cleanup site, at an old Air Force base. They wanted me to obtain the water tables, and we needed to get the water district's approval on a cleanup plan so that we could clear that area up to develop it. Literally I'm talking about working for him, right? And they tell me, "Okay, we'll start Monday. Meet us at this airport." And it's a private jet taking us to Las Vegas to talk to some players about the financing, taking us to Sacramento to meet with some legislators to talk about the project, and coming back to L.A., I'd be making $2,500 a day for that kind of work. So that's what I thought I was going to be doing, and then I agreed to accept this job where I was going to be making $45,000 a year, to try to help Nate and them. But I clearly understood I'd make more money on the outside than I was making on the inside.

NICOLAIDES:

Right. And then what compelled you to stay on the inside?

HERNANDEZ:

Just the fact that I was going to put in ten weeks to start with Nate, and then as the need arose, I was the guy who got to do it, and I was enjoying my role working with staff. I always told people I enjoyed being a staffer much more than I enjoyed being an elected official, because I had a different kind of freedom. So I was a staffer, and I had to learn that acceptance was a wonderful gift. You understand my whole life was changing because I was sober now and I had a different set of priorities in my life. It was very simple. It was my sobriety, my family, my work, in that order. So I spent a lot of time going to actually (Alcoholics Anonymous) meetings, a lot of time understanding my addiction, and then focusing on reestablishing my relationships with my family and my kids. Every vote in this household was three-to-one, and I was the one, and I wasn't used to that, but I found out that's what I had to accept. That became important to me. That life became important to me. And my friends I was meeting were part of that world, and it took me out of this political world. You know, when I went to the hospital, I did not own a pair of jeans. When you're talking about an elected official has an image and you standardize that and you don't change it, and so they always have the same haircut, same facial look, and everything else. When I got sober, everything started changing. I never grew facial hair. I started growing facial hair. I let my hair grow. I gained all this weight. I gained another body in weight. But I was spending most of my time talking to drunks and addicts in the rooms of sobriety. After that came my family, then came my work, whereas before, it was all my work.

NICOLAIDES:

Right, right.

HERNANDEZ:

But today I'm a registered lobbyist for the city. I act as consultant. I have four clients. I represent the Alliance Charter Schools (Alliance College-Ready Public Schools – LA Alliance). They have like twenty-seven charter schools, the largest charter school OO in the state. And I also work for Red Hook Development (Red Hook Capital Partners), and Red Hook develops charter schools for existing charter schools who basically are trying to get their facilities developed, so we do the capital projects for them. I have a parking lot operator, has seventy parking lots in the city, three hundred in the county, and I represent him. Then I also represent the Engineers & Architects Association for--

SESSION FIVE (September 21, 2018)

NICOLAIDES:

This is Becky Nicolaides interviewing Mike Hernandez on September 21st, 2018, at his home in Los Angeles. So the L.A. Times reported pretty extensively on your arrest in 1997, and I just wanted to get your own perspective on this, to kind of hear you narrate what happened, like from your own memory of that. So can you--maybe we can just start. Can you describe what happened in August 1997, if you can just walk me through those events?

HERNANDEZ:

Basically, I was arrested for cocaine possession, and at the time, it was at a low point. I always tell people in December of 1996, I had to make a decision to run for reelection, and at that time, my inclination was not to run for reelection because I knew I had a problem and I couldn't stop. My realities were, I thought I was going to become homeless or I was going to die, and I did not know how to get out of public office. There are very few people electeds can talk to about personal issues, and I don't think the public understands that politicians are human beings.

NICOLAIDES:

Is there anybody you were talking to at that time?

HERNANDEZ:

Nobody, nobody.

NICOLAIDES:

Did people on your staff or around you sort of know what was happening or--

HERNANDEZ:

I kind of led two lives. I had the public life that required time commitment and that I do things, and then as soon as I was over with that, you know, I would come home and I would drink or I would stay in my office and I would drink. The alcohol, I didn't understand alcoholism at the time, even though I chaired the committee that dealt with funding for purposes of agencies that do that kind of work, and I'm talking about the block grant to provide some funding for agencies that deal with addictions. I personally did not understand how to get off, so I was kind of stuck in that December. Everybody said, "You've got to run for reelection. You're going to win," dah, dah, dah. And the decision was made to run for reelection.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you just tell me, like, who "everybody" was?

HERNANDEZ:

My consultants, my staff. The work we were doing, as it became more and more important, the reality was I was the one who had to finish them. At the time, one of the big projects going on in the city was basically L.A. Staples, and I was chairing the committee, basically the ad hoc committee on Staples Center, and that was some work that had to be finished. I didn't know that they were following me. They created this task force called IMPACT (Los Angeles Interagency Metropolitan Police Apprehension Crime Task Force), and I had met with the task force prior to. I just didn't know I was the target. August 21st, 1997, I walked out of an apartment in Pacoima, and they'd been following me pretty much for about a month. I heard someone say, "Councilman, put your hands up." I put my hands up, and I had all these little red dots on my chest, so that told me that they were watching me. An officer came out of a car and handcuffed me from behind, checked my pockets, and pulled out what we called eight-ball cocaine. And out of nowhere, all these SUVs showed up and they were all representing different agencies, different police departments. I always tell people I had an intervention that was done by twenty-seven officers representing twenty-three agencies, and that's because they were arresting a councilmember. In the city-issued truck I was driving--I used to drive a Blazer--they basically found half a quart of tequila and I think two ounces of marijuana. I didn't have to buy cocaine that night, but I had come back from a funeral. I had an aunt who her husband had passed in Lodi, and so I had flown up there for the funeral and I flew back. Now, that happened about eight weeks after my mom--my mom died June 20th, and when she died, it was a very slow death and she was at St. Joseph's Hospital.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you tell me a little about--

HERNANDEZ:

She went in to have a toe amputated because of diabetes, which runs rampantly in the Espinoza family, and during that process, I think she had like seven strokes. So we, the family, my brother, my sister, and I had to make a decision to let her go. It was a difficult decision, but we made it. But I was just hanging out at a motel by the hospital and I would be drinking and using drugs and trying to bury that away, and I couldn't. But my mom died, and then you go through the process of preparing the funeral. My using had just gotten bad. I couldn't stop. When I was arrested, I was taken to a hospital that was recommended to me by the LAPD psychiatrist who was checking my pupils to make sure I was under the influence when they were arresting me, and I found out that that was one of the areas they would refer police officers to go through the process.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you talk a little bit about what was going through your mind like right at that moment in the arrest?

HERNANDEZ:

You know, I'm at the police station and I think I felt a sense of relief that it was over. My nightmare was over, and I was discovered. I no longer could be those two people. Now I was one. So there was a sense of relief. When the arresting supervisor, whoever was in charge of the task force, when he put the handcuffs on, he told me very clearly that I could beat this, and what he was talking about was my addiction. He wasn't talking about the arrest, but he was talking about my addiction. And he said, "What you've got to do is you've got to go into a hospital to deal with it now." That's the first time I heard some clear direction on how to deal with my addictions. So I'm sitting there, and my staff is freaking out because everybody's listening to it in the media. It was, like, the top story and it replaced O.J. Simpson's trial. There was a lot of media around. So the decision was made to move me to a hospital, and that was done primarily with my chief of staff and myself. So they drove me out of the police station that was 5th and Central. They sent two cars out first because the media was trying to find out where they were from, so they were following them, and I was in the third car, crouched down with a blanket over me, and they drove me to my chief of staff's home. We transferred cars, and from there I was taken to the hospital.

The hospital was operating with generators because they didn't want all the lights on because the helicopters were looking for where they were taking the councilmember. I was like the top news story. It was on CNN and everything else. So I go into the hospital and I actually, as part of the intake, reached in my wallet and I had another eight-ball. This is how bad my addictions were. Coming back from a funeral, I get in my car, I'm going to the city, filling it with gas, then I'm heading to score again, and I didn't need to score. It's just that when I didn't have drugs, the symptoms were such that I just couldn't function. So that night they take me to the hospital and then I throw out another eight-ball I had in my wallet, and the counselor's like, "What's this?" And he was in recovery, so he didn't want to have nothing to do with it. He goes, "What do you expect me to do with it?" And I said, "I don't know." So he pointed to the restroom, and I went to the restroom and I threw it away. Now, in addiction, that was a clear indication in my eye, I mean, that I was done, because most addicts would have hid it so that they could use it later in the hospital. I basically didn't want to have anything to do with it anymore, and that was very important for my recovery, because I had to hit bottom, and I basically was at bottom.

They gave me some kind of medication that allowed me to sleep for three days during the withdrawals. Meanwhile, they were checking me out physically. When I first met with my doctor, my doctor basically was asking me how I felt, and I told him, and he said did I know why I was in the hospital, and I told him because I was a cocaine addict. Again, I had no idea how I became a cocaine addict, but I knew I was an addict. And the doctor asked me, "What else?" And I said, "What do you mean, what else?" I had no idea what he was talking about. He goes, "Well, what else do you abuse?" I said, "I don't know what you're talking about." He said, "How about alcohol?" Now, when he mentioned alcohol, I had no concept that I was an alcoholic. I said, "What are you talking about?" He basically said, "How much do you drink?" And I told him, "About a quart." And he said, "A quart how often?" I said, "Every night." And he asked me, "A quart of what?" And I said, "Tequila." And he says, "And you don't think you have a problem?" And I didn't understand what he meant, and I said, "So what's that have to do with cocaine?" And he told me, "You need to understand that a drunk will do anything." And, see, when you drink so much and you need to function, someone introduced me to cocaine, and that let me function, and it kind of became--well, it became addictive and I became an addict and I couldn't stop.

NICOLAIDES:

How long had you been drinking that much tequila?

HERNANDEZ:

After I got elected. Prior to that, I would drink, but nothing compared to where I was at. I couldn't stop. It would get to the point where like on a Saturday at 10:00 o'clock in the morning I was going to the liquor store to buy alcohol.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you feel like something triggered that after the election that would have kind of--

HERNANDEZ:

I just think it was a combination of things. When I started drinking, I mean in this neighborhood, everybody was a brewer. They worked at the breweries, and we could get what they called the regulars for $3.50. So I started drinking as a high school student after games and stuff on Fridays, but I used to drink a lot. Then in college, when I was in the Upward Bound program, I was introduced to barbiturates, and I didn't know what addiction's progressive. So with the alcohol, it started with beer. When my wife and I first got married, we liked Bloody Marys and orange--I forget. So we were vodka drinkers. Then I became a scotch drinker, you know, I was a Cutty Sark drinker, but I knew my scotches. I could tell the difference in my scotch. Then I became a tequila drinker, and when I was drinking tequila, I didn't need to have it mixed, but I would go to--the Acapulco restaurant would have Margarita Mondays, and I would go to Margarita Mondays and ask for a pitcher of margaritas without the mix, and they would give me a glass full of tequila with ice. That's what I was drinking. So, clearly I was an alcoholic and I just didn't relate to that. I wouldn't drink in public, so even my wife couldn't understand, because I'd come home late at night and I'd just sit in the kitchen before I'd go to sleep. Now, in the hospital, they learned a lot about my health and they taught me a lot, so as I was going through the process of trying to understand why I became an alcoholic addict, because it was in high school, college, through my business life, I was drinking and that wasn't a problem, and you could stop. So the hospital was a whole process of me trying to understand, in the twenty-eight-day program, why I used, a lot of counseling and everything going on, and I was an eager student.

The first thing they told me was I had no power, I was powerless and I wasn't a councilman, because I'm sitting there trying to solve the staffing problems at the hospital, I'm trying to see why they're not union, and I'm doing all these political things that my mind basically just does, and they took me aside and they said "No, you can't do that. That's part of your addiction." So I had to change that. In the program, we always talk about you've got to change only one thing, and that's everything. So I had to learn that I wasn't a councilmember (unclear). The other thing was we had to deal with a lot of counseling sessions, and we had a counseling session where they were talking about the impact on the family addiction has, and the reality (unclear), I realized that my mom and dad had their issues, but I also realized that the environment I grew up with had something to do with it. There was one particular session where we were talking about family and I just broke down crying, and that's what broke me. And what it was was this vision of me holding my baby sister, and I had forgotten all about it. I didn't realize that I had a baby sister. Her name was Faith. She had died. And it came out of nowhere.

NICOLAIDES:

I remember you mentioned that earlier, that it came out of conversations with your dad later, but was that coming out during these sessions?

HERNANDEZ:

That came out during the session, the memory of this baby, me holding this baby and she was dead, and not knowing why. And her name was Faith, and that was my baby sister. And when I asked my sister about it, who's four years younger, she knew about Faith because she named her daughter Faith, my godchild. So that reality hit. So that reality was something that was important for me to understand.

I started dealing with issues of abandonment and also the realization that I didn't grow up in a household like everybody else. I took a lot of pride in knowing that my mom worked three jobs to raise three kids. I never recognized the fact that she wasn't there for us, and I grew up in a household where we were latchkey kids. I didn't have a mom taking care of us. And my father, the second time he left us, basically asked me to decide whether I wanted to go with him or not, and I'm, like, this ten-year-old, going to be eleven. I made the decision to stay with my mom and then watched him take off and my mom trying to stop him from leaving, and her holding onto the car handle while he's driving away and almost dragging her down the street. I vowed I would never be that kind of a man, but I saw that at the age of ten. So, anyway, at the hospital all this stuff started coming out, and it was being defined that I had issues of abandonment and I didn't understand what that was about, and that's when they started talking about filling the void. Dr. (Drew) Pinsky, who had studied me physically, basically knew I had a drinking problem because of my pancreas and then my liver and what they found, and that's why he had to bring that out. Then they started finding out that I didn't sleep. Now, I thought it was normal for people to sleep two to four hours a night, and the hospital told me that wasn't normal, that I had acute sleep apnea and I don't sleep at night. It's because they're monitoring me and they're finding out that I didn't sleep, and after several nights, they couldn't figure it out. So they knew I had a sleep apnea problem, and I went to go see a doctor about that and he gave me some medication, because he found I also had a form of--what do you call it? I don't have control of my nerves, a form of Parkinson's. So I'm always twitching, I'm always moving my knees, I'm always moving, but it's because I have this. So they gave me some medication that kind of controlled that at night to allow me to sleep, and they put me on a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine. That was one doctor.

Then they sent me to a heart doctor. I had a cardiologist check out my heart because my heart muscle had expanded such, because of the constant cocaine use, that it wasn't pumping the way it was supposed to, so they gave me medication for that. Then they find that I had acute asthma, and it's because while I was working so hard, I didn't want to expose my health issues because of my addiction. I just wasn't going to a doctor. Now I'm in a hospital, they're checking everything out and they're identifying all these problems.

NICOLAIDES:

What's going through your mind during all this?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, I'm just--you know, when you go from a position where you want to die or you think you're going to die, to a position where you're living and you have some hope and some belief, then you start looking at things a little bit differently. But I decided I was going to take care of my health issues. So then they found out not only that I have acute asthma and sleep apnea and this form of Parkinson's, but the doctor started telling me, "You learned to self-medicate yourself." And that I did not understand. And he said, "The alcohol you were drinking to put you to sleep, you were drinking like you wanted to knock yourself out." And that's what I would do every night. "And we've replaced that with medication so you don't need to drink anymore." Then he said, "And believe it or not, the stimulants that are in cocaine deal with your Parkinson's, and you started using cocaine and you liked it because it was dealing with all this other stuff." So Dr. Pinsky's kind of like telling me I learned to self-medicate, and I'm telling him I'm an addict, alcoholic because all the other stuff had been coming out. So I was destined to become an addict, alcoholic. I don't think I was destined to become a city councilmember, and I share that with people. I fell into the position of being able to run for office by mistake, because my friend who I was grooming and working hard to see him become the elected official chose not to run, and then I became the candidate.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you ever reach a point, though, through your service on council where you felt like it wasn't a mistake? Like, I know you've said that before. Did you ever kind of come to some sort of peace with that?

HERNANDEZ:

No. When I was sitting on council, it was like I understood I was meant to be there. It was at a time when the Latino community was emerging in the city of Los Angeles, and nobody really understands the history of L.A. in terms of how they treated the Latino community. I came aboard with some of that history, and I was just fighting it. I mean, I'm going to college in the first program identified by the War on Poverty, Upward Bound, and then I'm going to a good college, but they wanted to increase their minority enrollment, so I happened to be there at that time. Two years earlier, that wasn't going to happen. So I was given that opportunity to go to a good college. Going to a good college with a good reputation gave me an opportunity to be exposed to corporate America. That would have never happened to a (unclear) here in the streets, so working for corporate America exposed me to management people, gave me role models I'd never had before, and that was my experience with the phone company, which was, I believe, a very positive experience. Then going to help my mom with her business, she was doing the best she could the only way she knew how to try and survive, and had no education, no background, but just worked hard. So that was my role model, and I knew how to work hard. I always worked hard. I thought I could outwork anybody, and that's always been my style. Doesn't matter what the problem was, if you put in the work, you can solve it.

Very blessed to grow up in a neighborhood where there were some older kids who chose to protect me, but first they chose to bully me, and I became part of the crowd. But again, when they were all deciding to go to the service, to go to Vietnam, I decided to go to college. I didn't know I had the opportunity to go to college, because they still tried to draft me several times, and my reality is that college helped me stay in school and I was able to graduate there. I always talk about Professor Ron Lopez. He was the only Latino professor they brought in to teach a Chicano Studies course at Oxy (Occidental College). My junior year, I was ready to drop out of school, not because my grades were--I was in the best position for my grades and everything else to improve, but my mom had gotten into a car accident, my sister was pregnant with her, I think, second child, not her third, and still wasn't married, and my brother was in jail, arrested for using heroin. And I'm in college, so I thought it was time for me to drop out. I'd gone to visit my mom at the hospital when she got in a car accident, and here I am going to a school where I've got free meals and I've got a room to sleep in and I'm getting an education. So I thought I had to drop out of school, and if I would have dropped out, I wouldn't have been a city councilman. So what ends up happening is Ron Lopez sits me down with that? A bottle of Spanada wine, and we sit down and we start talking, and he explains to me he was married seven times before he got his degree. Now, this is a Ph.D. He was in junior college for seven years, and he told me what it took for him to get his degrees and how blessed I was and how I was sitting in a fortunate position, and that I was not going to be able to change what's going on in my mom's life, but if I get an education, I would be in a position to change it. So I stayed the last two years at Oxy, and they were my best years. I wasn't this kid who had to count how many minutes he spent in the bathroom because he had to write a paper. Now I understood how to write a paper and what I had to do with the assignments, and I was advising younger students on what to do. So Oxy was a good experience for me, because you can't drop out of Oxy. The professors (unclear). I was very fortunate to go to Occidental College and graduate. There I met Dr. Raul Cardoza, Dr. Daniel Castro. These were all friends who became lifetime friends of mine. But I had that positive experience, and, again, I was the only kid in the neighborhood who went to college. All the rest of them went to Vietnam. Post-college, I'm dealing with my post-college career, going to work for corporate America, I'm finding my friends dealing with their post-traumatic stress from coming back from Vietnam.

So I was always leading these two lives. I think that my life in corporate America gave me the tools to allow my business to grow, and it was my mom's business. I came in to help her stabilize it, and I basically built it. She took advantage of that, and it allowed her to see the world and travel and spoil her grandchildren. My mom became kind of like the patriarch of the family. I didn't see my dad. I met my dad about ten years ago, again, and it was because during my sobriety I made the decision to stay on the City Council, so I'm still city councilman, and I'm going to do my work, but I no longer needed to do the politics, because I could care less. I wasn't going to run for reelection. I just needed to do my work, so I was focused on my work and I had my staff focused on their work. I had a good staff, and we were committed to fulfilling our role of representing our constituents and putting in place the kinds of things that were protected in the future, that the district would be protected in the future. And I was going to AA meetings, AA meetings, three, four times a week at night.

NICOLAIDES:

So, after the arrest and then you were in the hospital, how long was it before you kind of came back to work?

HERNANDEZ:

I stayed in the hospital for forty-two days.

NICOLAIDES:

Forty-two days.

HERNANDEZ:

It's a twenty-eight-day program, but they allowed me to stay in what they called the casitas, and it was because there was this media out there. See, nobody was betting on me to survive, and it's because the media was out there. I mean, I'd be walking at City Hall and I had eight, nine reporters following me, and I'd be going down the stairs, trying to just get away from them, and they would just all be following me, waiting for me to fall, waiting for me to trip.

NICOLAIDES:

How was that feeling inside, like having that spotlight on you?

HERNANDEZ:

(chuckles) I had a lot of anxiety, I had a lot of stress, and I dealt with it through the meetings, the brotherhood of sobriety. I clearly defined my priorities, and it was my family, my sobriety, and my work. That meant that if I had a community meeting or sobriety meeting, I went to an actually meeting. If I had an engagement with my wife, I had an actually meeting, my wife was my priority. This woman who I love so much went with me to all the meetings. She would go to meetings with me, all the meetings. She was just there for me. So I was very blessed with my wife. And there were issues. John Ferraro sat me down and he said, "Look. In order for you to come back, you're going to have to meet with every one of your colleagues. You're going to have to give up the Pro Tem." I was the Pro Tem of the City Council. "You're going to have to give that up." And I said, "Okay. I don't have a problem with that." And I met with them on it. I met with each one of my colleagues.

NICOLAIDES:

Just one-on-one?

HERNANDEZ:

One-on-one.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you tell me about that at all?

HERNANDEZ:

They were all good meetings. Some of them basically told me they were going to ask me to resign. Two did not tell me--Laura Chick and Mike (Michael N.) Feuer--but I knew that that was their character. They would come after me. Hal (Harold M.) Bernson and Richard Alarcon actually sat down with me in my office and said, "Tomorrow I'm going to announce that you should resign." They were all lining up.

NICOLAIDES:

How did you respond to that?

HERNANDEZ:

I told them they had to do what they had to do. Jackie Goldberg was very supportive of me. Zev Yaraslovsky was very supportive of me. He said, "Keep climbing the mountain." Marvin Broude was supportive of me. Hal Bernson even told me he was going to ask me to resign and he didn't think I should, but he was going to ask me. Politically he had to. That's the way he put it.

NICOLAIDES:

Was he getting pressure from his--

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, from his constituents. And the newspaper, I think the L.A. Times asked me to resign seven times in editorials. And I just wanted to finish my job. I wasn't going to run for reelection. They just did not feel I should be in office. Richard Riordan, I had a sit-down with him, a one-on-one, and he understood my problem. He had a brother who had a problem. He relayed to me some personal stuff that he thought he should deal with, and we had a good meeting. Then I walk out of his office, and there's the media, and he's asking me to resign, but he never mentioned it in the meeting. When the media asked me what I thought of the mayor for asking me to resign, I called him "a gutless wonder," and that was picked up, and that showed some resentment on my part, and it was the first time I'd actually shown some resentment. I felt sorry for saying that. I shouldn't have said it, but I said it because he didn't stand up to me as a man when we were talking in the meeting. I was kind of like taking it in. I was the punching bag, and I didn't have no choice, and I just thought he blindsided me and that wasn't called for. I had enough troubles as it was.

The CLA (chief legislative analyst), Ron (Ronald F.) Deaton, was very supportive of me. People would come talk to me at the hospital, they were telling me what was going on and asking, because there was still business to be conducted and they wanted to make sure it was done right.

NICOLAIDES:

So when you were having these meetings, was this happening after you were back, like, out of the hospital?

HERNANDEZ:

Primarily after the twenty-eight-day program, between the twenty-eight and the forty-two days.

NICOLAIDES:

Oh, that you were having these meetings.

HERNANDEZ:

Then when I came back after the L.A. Times was asking me to resign and I wasn't going to resign, the council chambers were full of people, and the L.A. Times basically thought there was a--they blamed the community. People didn't understand the community basically was supporting me because they understood alcoholism and addiction, and wanted to give me a second chance, but the L.A. Times had no concept. Again, that's that mentality that comes from that community versus our community. The chambers were full of people there that were supporting me, and that gave me a lot of hope. I keep on saying my constituents encouraged me to stay in office. The establishment did not. And I think that happened because we were serving them. We were basically focused on taking care of their business. There was the people out there who still thought I should resign and they started a recall, and the mayor was helping funding it, all this activity going on.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you remember any specifics of your constituents, some of what they were telling you at that time? Does anything stand out in your memory about that?

HERNANDEZ:

The number of them that came out and told me they were sober, the number of people who were working in--it was kind of like the realization that we don't understand addiction, and now I was someone who did and I was in that position.

NICOLAIDES:

How were they, like, communicating this to you?

HERNANDEZ:

Who?

NICOLAIDES:

Your constituents that were, like, supporting you.

HERNANDEZ:

They were coming by my office. They were doing whatever--I remember Raul Martinez, who owns King Taco, came to my office, in Spanish, and he gave me this father lecture, you know, "Be a man. Don't quit. Do what you've got to do." But he was a constituent, and his business started in Cypress Park, and I appreciated him coming to tell me to be a man. (laughs) But they were defending me. So as part of the Ferraro program, I tested at the city health facility twice a week. I would test on Mondays and I would test on Thursdays. Either that or it was Tuesdays and Fridays. But they would put my test results on the bulletin board in front of City Hall so that the media could go check and make sure that I was sober, and that was part of my commitment to Ferraro as part of coming back to the City Council. Today I have 7,002 days sober, and people ask me how I count my days, and I say, "One at a time. Each day I count as a gift." And back in those days, I was just starting.

NICOLAIDES:

How was that for you when they put that up on the bulletin board?

HERNANDEZ:

You couldn't humiliate me any more than I was already. It was part of the process, and it was a blessing, because at the hospital, one test they said I tested dirty, and I didn't understand where that came from. And there's a lot of things that can trigger a dirty test result, but in this case, the hospital had made a mistake. They mixed up the containers, and in doing that, they basically--someone else was using, but they were blaming me. They said I was the user. What saved me was the fact that I was also testing at the city, and so the test results at the city were showing me clean, the test results at the hospital were showing me dirty. I go back to the hospital and show them the city test results. They go back, they start figuring out the chain of command, and they figured out that they blew it.

NICOLAIDES:

How long was the city testing you?

HERNANDEZ:

Almost two years.

NICOLAIDES:

Two years?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm. Two years. I had to do an aftercare program at the hospital, and basically it was a--I think it was a twenty-one-week program. I did twenty-seven weeks. As part of my court case, I had to go to a--not a diversion program, but an alcohol class and attend thirty meetings. Now, I did thirty meetings in ten days because I was going to three meetings a day.

NICOLAIDES:

Wow.

HERNANDEZ:

And I went through rehab, and when I realized that all those people going to the school were all using, the school was nothing. All we did was show up and talk about that, but the counselors weren't real counselors, and that's what the courts use to get people off. It wasn't a real program, but I figured that part out. So I had my own program I was interested in implementing. Again, my wife was my number-one supporter, must have attended at least a thousand meetings with me. And then I became a speaker at actually (Alcoholics Anonymous) meetings and sharing my experience, faith, and hope with people. But my sobriety became a good part of my life and allowed me for the last four years of my City Council work to be completed sober. And I have this little saying I always tell people, "Nobody was complaining about my work when I was using drugs. Now let me do my work sober and then we'll determine." And again, there was a renewed focus on my work, just trying to get it done.

That experience is probably what gave me the experience to do my post-City Council role at the city as assistant chief of staff for members, and it allowed me to work projects and to give more direction, and now I was a teacher. I was no longer a councilmember. I share with people that some of the tools of sobriety, one of them is learning to let go, and acceptance is a wonderful gift. So I had to let go of my role as a city councilmember and accept the fact that I was no longer a councilmember, and I was able to do that without any real problem. Most people have an issue doing that.

NICOLAIDES:

So you're suggesting that having gone through that sobriety program helped you.

HERNANDEZ:

Helped me, helped me through that process, and to serve councilmembers. And, you know, when you get into the roles of sobriety, you have to be of service. It's a concept. And of service, I did all the roles at meetings. So when I was the cake person, which means you bring a cake every meeting, I had to be the best cake person, so every meeting I was trying to identify something different to take in terms of a cake, but something the members would enjoy, and I'd take oatmeal cookies and all this other stuff, because I wanted to be the best cake person. When I was the secretary, I would arrive at a meeting a half-hour early, make sure the chairs were set up and everything was working the way it was supposed to. I was asked to be the treasurer of the women's meeting, and it was because they were going bankrupt, and I became the treasurer and they became very successful, but that became a (unclear) meeting because I was the treasurer.

So I played all the roles, I went to all the meetings, and nobody thought I would do that because I was a councilmember, I was a powerful person. Why would I stoop to that level? No. I needed to recover. I needed to deal with my addictions, and I was able to do that in the process. Working for Bernard Parks, he was a manager's manager. He was Chief of Police, so he ran the department in the city. He didn't need a lot of coaching on policy. What he needed was the information. So working with the councilman, he was someone I learned to respect a lot. I watched his process of decision making, and it was a very comprehensive process. I watched his leadership skills, and I have a lot of respect for Councilman Parks. It was a blessing for me to be able to work for him. Then working for Councilman Perry was like the opposite experience, and she had a whole different style. So now I coach councilmembers, I work for people all the time, but I learn it's not me, it's them, and how do you use their style to make them successful, and what are the areas they want to go to, and I would help them through those processes primarily with their staff. I think I trained over two hundred staffers when I worked as assistant chief of staff. I had my own space in between two offices, so I worked by myself. My main focus was fixing problems. At the same time, I'm training people, fixing problems, establishing policy, and I became--some people used to call me the councilmember of District 17. It was a combination of District 9 and District 8. I think (unclear) put it on my door, Councilmember, District 17. But I knew how two votes were going to go, and I could work with both of them. They didn't have the same agendas. They had completely different agendas, but rarely were they on opposite sides, rarely were they on opposite sides. And I learned from Ron Deaton, who was the CLA, that he used to have to juggle fifteen members in trying to help them develop their agendas.

By the way, that all happened during the era of term limits, so when I left council, I was termed out, but there was a whole bunch of new members coming in, more so than ever before, and Ron Deaton worked on a program to try and give those members some experience, give them opportunity. He did a tour of the city so that we could see each other's major projects. He assigned me to basically go, and I used to have a presentation on how to develop a capital project, because there was a five-year term, and how to get projects done, so I used to go in and train councilmembers with their staffs on how the capital projects work. Sometimes I did sessions on the council floor so they could under Robert's Rules of Order, but more legislative staff could understand how council works. I studied the floor. I always say we dance on the council floor. That's where policy is made and that's where the debates all happen. I was very focused on the activity that happened on the council floor, studying all the members and how they were voting, and counting the votes. I could figure out where a member was going to lie on an issue before that, so that we could start counting it. And when I trained staff, I would have two staffers on the floor from an office, and people would ask why two, and it's because I want one on each side of the floor so they can hear the activity going on. So that was a big pleasure of mine. You see, there's nothing out there training councilmembers, and there's nothing out there training staff. You learn on the job. There's no orientation program, and that's very difficult. So when new members come in, they stumble for the first two years because they hire their political staff, they know nothing about how the city works or how the legislative process works, and then after two years, they start replacing that staff with more seasoned people who kind of understand stuff, and then they start getting ready for their reelection and they want to have some things on the books to do that.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, is that part of the job of CLA to be helping them through that process?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm, yes.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you think that that was adequate to that? It sounds like there was a lot more room for--

HERNANDEZ:

After Ron Deaton left, because he went to work for the Department of Water and Power, he did that and then he had his strokes and now he's in hospice, but Ron had that intention. I don't think his replacement was able to continue that program. When they decided to get three terms, I was supportive of them because I kind of realized that in ten years it's difficult to get projects done. It's a five-year process to get a project done, and ten years, you know, you spend four of them learning your first term. So I was supportive of three terms. But term limits has created this need to orientate, train, and everything else, and nobody does that. So when I was at City Hall, that was kind of my role, working, and I didn't work necessarily with other staff members, but I was always conscious that my role was to kind of teach, and I think I got a lot of respect from a lot of staffers.

NICOLAIDES:

Was anybody else doing this?

HERNANDEZ:

You know, there's a lot of egos at City Hall, and people don't want to be told, or they're not in a mode to learn, and everybody's always watching their back. It's not a good working environment. And that leadership comes from the council president. There's no question in my mind that we haven't had a president like John Ferraro, who basically was an oak, and John had a lot of experience. I always remember John saying, "Yeah, Washington's listening to your speech right now, Mike." And the reality is, they weren't, right? (laughs) But he was trying to let me know that I was getting carried away over nothing. But that was John's style.

So after John left, Ruth Galanter came in, and because of redistricting, they put her out in the Valley but she lasted one year. Then Alex Padilla, and I worked a lot with Alex, helping him. I always have a story with Alex Padilla. He wanted to move the Children's Museum out to the Valley, and the chairman of the board, Doug Ring, wanted to move it out to the Valley. Meanwhile, it was in downtown L.A. across the street from City Hall, and that was in Rita Walters' district. I was the author of Prop K. They wanted some funding to build and finish their museum, and they needed my approval, and I told Alex, "I'm going to fight them tooth and nail." I couldn't support them. But I said, "But if you win, I'll be proud of you." And he's the council president trying to get this thing done and I'm fighting him. And he won and he got the Children's Museum, and I told him I was proud of him. I kept my word to him. He tells that story all the time, that I challenged him.

NICOLAIDES:

Can I ask you, what stands out in your mind in thinking about John Ferraro and what set him apart from other presidents of the council?

HERNANDEZ:

He loved the city. He loved the city, and he'd been there for so many years, he was an institution.

NICOLAIDES:

What did he do that was different from, like, his successors?

HERNANDEZ:

Nobody had his power. Nobody's had his power. John could stand up to the mayor, no questions about it. He wanted to be mayor, but he wasn't elected, and he was gracious about it. But he was a good host. I mean, he cared about me. When I got arrested, I'm at my low point. Now I'm in recovery, I'm trying to make it, and my house is being foreclosed on. I'm losing my house. When my mom died, there was all these tax implications. All this stuff was going on, and I'm dealing with all this other stuff. So I broke down and I said, "I've got to ask John for a loan." That's how much I trusted him, that I went to him and I said, "John, I'm sorry, but I'm hurting. I need a loan to make this month's house payment so I don't lose it." And he said, "How much do you need?" I said, "About 2,500." And he said, "I can't give it to you. You're a councilmember. That would look wrong."

I said, "Okay." He said, "But why don't you go down to apply for a loan at the credit union." He introduced me to Rosalind Wyman, who used to work for CLA, but she was a board member of the credit union. "Why don't you go apply." I went to apply for the loan. They gave me the loan that day. I was able to save the house that morning, that afternoon. But John would figure out how to do it right. That's kind of my point. He knew I needed it, but he wasn't going to do it, but he would always figure out a way to do it right.

NICOLAIDES:

Right, right.

HERNANDEZ:

And that's what he kind of taught me. But that was John.

NICOLAIDES:

Can I ask you, around the time when the arrest and everything was breaking out, how do you think city officials handled that? I mean, at the time, did you wish they were doing things differently, or what was your thought about that?

HERNANDEZ:

I thought they did what they were supposed to do. I didn't take it personally. It hurt me when Laura Chick would call me at the hospital and we'd have all these deep discussions, and then I showed up at council and she's asking me to resign. But it hurt me because I thought we were communicating and she was understanding what I was going through. She gave me a cake. I'm not sure if it was my second-year or my third-year cake, but Laura Chick gave me a cake at a meeting. Nate (Nathaniel N.) Holden gave me a cake at a meeting. Bernard Parks gave me a cake at a meeting. (laughs) Jan Perry gave me a cake at a meeting. But I included them in my sobriety because I wanted them to see what it was about.

NICOLAIDES:

Would they come to the meeting with you then?

HERNANDEZ:

They would go to the meeting to give me a cake. But Laura Chick was someone I had this resentment about, so I invited her to come and give me a cake, and she showed up at that meeting and heard everybody's stories and started crying.

NICOLAIDES:

Did she come around eventually?

HERNANDEZ:

I consider Laura Chick a friend. I consider her a friend, and I think she came around. It's just that her reaction--you know, my friend Nate Holden decided to defend me one meeting, and he showed up and he called Laura Chick and Mike Feuer "Ku Klux Klanners." Now, Nate used to do stuff like that.

NICOLAIDES:

What was the--

HERNANDEZ:

Because he saw them as henchmen coming to hang me, so he thought he'd make that reference.

NICOLAIDES:

What was their response to that?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, everybody responded to Nate, so Nate became the focus because he actually said that. But I actually think there was some truth in his statement. People were determined to get me out of office, and I think part of that was because I was Mexican and they weren't. I don't think this city can solve its racist problems until people recognize that we are racist, and I don't think Laura Chick and Mike Feuer grew up in their communities to really understand, have the compassion or the empathy to understand what it's like to be a kid growing up in this community. I always believed we have two cities, and we had two cities before. I could take a child from this part of the town and put him in this part of town, and his life changes instantly. It's not this child's fault that everything is inclined for him to go to prison. I mean, the environment, everything is directed to that, and those are the things we've got to change.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you have a sense of that at the time? I mean, were you kind of thinking about it that way?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah, because, to me, I always had compassion for the homeless. I don't know if I shared (unclear), but when we first arrived in L.A., we arrived at the Greyhound Bus Depot--

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah.

HERNANDEZ:

--in the middle of Skid Row, and that was my first vision of Los Angeles, and I thought that shouldn't be the vision of Los Angeles.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, I guess I should have phrased that differently. Like, was your sense of, like, the response of Laura Chick and Mike Feuer over what was going on, did you feel like it was a kind of anti-Mexican feeling that was undergirding their reactions?

HERNANDEZ:

I think they might have approached it differently if I was someone else.

NICOLAIDES:

Mm-hmm.

HERNANDEZ:

And it's no different than how Jackie (Goldberg) defended me or Richard Alatorre defended me. They were my colleagues, but we served in the same districts, the same area, same constituencies. They were very understanding of what was going on with me and trying to help me through the process, and the others weren't. And there are these subtleties people don't see in politics, but when a member says, "If you need something, let me know. If you need me to introduce a motion for you while you're at the hospital, I'll do that," that's trying to help you, as opposed to the member coming in saying, "When are you going to resign?" and not asking what can you do to help the constituency. So I saw the difference, I saw the two sides, and I understood why Mike Feuer growing up in his side of town would have a problem with an elected official like me. I understood why a Laura Chick growing up on her side of town would have a problem with an elected official like me. It doesn't mean it was right.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you talk me through, then, what happened? I know there were calls, you know, for your resignation and all the talk about the recall, and then how did that all--I mean, how did it all resolve?

HERNANDEZ:

It wasn't real. It wasn't real. They never got the signatures they needed to put it on the ballot, and the recall proponents found out they were the minority. People weren't willing to sign the petition. My constituents were defending me, and the L.A. Times thought that that was ridiculous. I mean, they wrote it, as opposed to recognizing the fact that the constituents who had voted for me wanted me to continue doing my job, which I think is what was going on for the four years that we did it. And like I said, those were my best four years. I'd walk into a meeting, people would complain, we'd identify the problem, we'd form a partnership, and we'd solve the problem, and we had a calendar to tell us how many days we had left to do that in.

NICOLAIDES:

When you say those were your best four years, I mean, do you think the sobriety was part of that as well?

HERNANDEZ:

No, I think the focus. There was just this focus, intense focus on--I don't know what my staff would tell you. Another role I got to play post-city councilmember was when Nate Holden was no longer in office, I had the role of trying to place his staff, to keep them working at City Hall. I was working different departments, trying to find positions, how we could get people to do that. I had to do the same thing when Parks left and when Jan left, and because I understood the budget and I worked with all the department heads, I could play that role, but nobody really plays that role. City Council staff are exempt employees. They're not civil service employees. So the goal is to get them to take the civil service test, get one of the appointments so they could get civil service tests and have some job protection. Many of them don't.

NICOLAIDES:

Why?

HERNANDEZ:

Because they're not civil service employees, so they don't have that protection. So they're exempt. They work for the city under an exempt status.

NICOLAIDES:

Okay.

HERNANDEZ:

And there's only so many of those positions available.

NICOLAIDES:

Ah.

HERNANDEZ:

Because it's civil service. So basically I got to play that role with staffers and stuff. Now, today, I've been retired five years from the city. I left the city October 2013, and one of the reasons I left the city is my back was just giving me too many problems. I'm in pain pretty much 24/7. In 2012, I fell down those stairs. 2010, I had a back problem and just had to do with sitting too long. Parks used to conduct these budget hearings, and we would start at 10:00 in the morning and finish at 10:30 at night, and I would just be sitting there next to him, and all of a sudden, I couldn't get up. I couldn't stand up. So I remember I go to a chiropractor and they dealt with my back, heat treatment and all this other stuff, and I kind of healed after a while. Then two years later, fell down these stairs and I went from the top stair all the way down to the bottom. All of a sudden, I couldn't sleep, right? The pain and stuff.

So I decided to retire. Now I can't get out of bed, so we go do the CAT scans and everything else, and I have a fractured vertebrae on two spots and two protruding disks. And because of the previous back injury, they did the same thing, but none of that existed then, and so they were asking me, "Well, what's happened since?" Because I thought it was the original back injury coming back. And then we remembered the fall down the stairs, but the fall down the stairs is what busted my back. So I have two protruding disks, I have a fractured disk, and I'm in pain 24/7, and that's impacted my life tremendously. It's impacted my life tremendously, so my wife and I spend a lot of time going to doctors dealing with our health issues. Over the last two years, I've lost 100 pounds, so that was something I have to do and I continue to do. But my priority in retirement has been my wife, my best friend, the person I've been married to for forty-four years, and she's shared this journey with me, and I'm blessed. So my focus has been her. She had a list of things for me to do. We remodeled the kitchen, we redid this dining room, I redid the whole yard (unclear) my dogs, and that's part of our life.

I'm a registered lobbyist for the city. I have four clients. I'm doing a lot of charter schools. I actually build facilities for charter schools as one of my jobs, and I serve as consultant to the other clients. I'm on retainer. I try to work about thirty hours a month, and sometimes I'll work as many as forty hours a month. I'm surrounded by people in sobriety. I'm finding myself mentoring a lot of young people. I don't know why, but I can't say no when they call, and we talk, and it's something I want to do. I don't think there's enough people out there doing it. I chose to sit on this board of ChapCare because thirty hours wasn't--I want to work about forty hours. My wife and I love each other, but we don't love each other that much that we can be with each other all the time, so we create times when we can do things apart.

NICOLAIDES:

Sure. So in 1998, the Rampart scandal broke out, which was that station in your district too.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm.

NICOLAIDES:

Can you talk a little bit about how you approached that issue when that was happening?

HERNANDEZ:

Rampart, I already discussed how it was boundaries, divisions, and Rampart was one of the divisions in my district. That's how I met Chief Parks. He was the chief in charge of Central Division, and Rampart was part of that assignment. My issues with Rampart at the time is we kept on changing commanders. There was a lot of change, so we had the impression that Rampart was like a stepchild of the police department. They had asked if they could move, because of space limitations, their detective division to another building in our district, and we approved that. So the gang unit was operating out of a separate location. So here you have this constant leadership changing at Rampart. Then they moved the gang unit to operate out of a separate location. My staff had been picking up issues of Rampart police, and they were relaying to me that they would pick up these issues that Rampart was committing crimes, extortion, and abuse and stuff. In a district that basically crime was rampant, no place else in the city had the crime stats that Rampart had, so we were kind of at the mercy of the police department and the crime. So, again, us trying to work in Rampart, first of all, that Pico-Union/Westlake area, the census data told us we had more density than Manhattan. The fire department had told us that they're so busy responding to 911 calls for paramedics, they can't do inspections of buildings and their response times in fires is slower. There was no other part of the city that was like Rampart, and so I spent a lot of time there, a lot of focus there, trying to deal with the issues there, and our philosophy was that if we could deal with Rampart, we could deal with the rest of the district a lot easier, so Rampart was where we focused a lot of our energy, and my organizers were working on the ground.

So you had this (unclear) culture where you need the police to play their role to protect the citizenry, and you need the citizenry to have a relationship with the police, and that wasn't happening, and it was because the citizens were telling us the problem was the police. I would reflect that at meetings in our discussions, and the way LAPD would respond is they opened an investigation and they want me to testify and tell them who I'm talking about and give them names and do all this other stuff. Tom (Thomas E.) Hayden had a theory that the reason they put this task force together to arrest me was because of my inquiring of what was going on in Rampart. I don't think it had anything to do with that. There was a closed session where basically I asked Willie Williams if he knew about the Rampart Reapers and if he knew about the tattoos and if he knew about this gang that existed within this department, and at that time, he didn't know anything about them. But I was the one who asked.

NICOLAIDES:

And then what came of that?

HERNANDEZ:

Well, post-Rampart, a lot of exposure.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, even before that. So, like, when was that meeting with Willie Williams? Do you remember or--

HERNANDEZ:

No, but it's documented in the L.A. Times article someplace.

NICOLAIDES:

Okay.

HERNANDEZ:

But I don't remember exactly what meeting that was, but I do know it was a closed session, and closed session is not supposed to be a public record, and all of a sudden, the L.A. Times is writing about it. Something I didn't mention to you about my arrest. You go to a doctor and you deal with your health history because you expect it to be kept secret. You talk to your probation officer and you relate all the problems that are going on because you expect there to be some confidentiality. The probation report is issued and it's a public record and they talk about all that stuff, all my credit issues. So the whole world, all my neighbors are knowing that my houses are in foreclosure and I'm dealing with all these problems. But there was no anonymity in this process for me. All my health issues were exposed, my finances were exposed, and that was bothersome to me, but none of that--I don't know why the police department chose to come after me, but I do tell people they saved my life.

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah.

HERNANDEZ:

And the reason I'm (unclear) is because a lot of people think that my inquiring about Rampart had something to do with my arrest.

NICOLAIDES:

Right.

HERNANDEZ:

I don't believe that's true.

NICOLAIDES:

Did your office push in any other ways on this Rampart--the activities that were happening there?

HERNANDEZ:

No, and it's because we didn't have anything direct. Anything direct, we would automatically report, but we didn't have that kind of--it was innuendo, someone said this to my staff or my staff would bring it to my attention, and that was basically it. I didn't have any facts.

NICOLAIDES:

Okay. And then after that broke and became public, what was your approach to that at that point? I mean, were you engaged around that issue and what was happening there, or--

HERNANDEZ:

No. I kind of stayed away from the police. This big old task force was put together. They would make it a point to come and visit me and let me know that they were watching me.

NICOLAIDES:

So this was the task force--

HERNANDEZ:

After the arrest.

NICOLAIDES:

The task force on you, basically?

HERNANDEZ:

Yeah. There was two LAPD officers. One was named Bob and the other one was named Bill. In anonymity, actually, Bill W. and Dr. Bob are two prominent names, but they had these two cops coming to talk to me and they were Bill and Bob, and I don't think that was their names, but that's the name they gave me when they came to talk to me, and they would talk to me about some of the issues going on in the department and some of the issues going on with me. I knew they were watching me after I got arrested. It wasn't a coincidence.

NICOLAIDES:

So it sounds like you were in a tricky position.

HERNANDEZ:

I think so, but didn't stop me from saying what was on my mind. I think that's one of the things that distinguished me, that I wasn't this press-savvy politician. I always said what was on my mind.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you remember some of what that was or like how you were responding? Can you tell me a little bit about how that unfolded?

HERNANDEZ:

I can't really.

NICOLAIDES:

Okay.

HERNANDEZ:

When I came out of the hospital, the most pressing thing we had going was L.A. Live at Staples, and then our reality is we were entering a recession. I think that when I left office in 2001, it took like three months from 9/11 to hit. That changed the whole focus of the country. Again, we were just beginning this recession for real that basically changed the whole economy, and the city went through a process. Again, Parks was the Chair of the Budget and Finance Committee. We went through a process where we went from like 29,000 city employees to 23(000). We had to lay off 6,000 city employees, something that had never really happened in the city before, and we had to control our budget. Our pension costs were basically designed to--we had more people retired and on pension than we had working, and that's our reality of the city. So laying off people didn't solve the problem, but it allowed us to have the savings necessary to take back control of the budget.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you want to talk to me at all about L.A. Live and your involvement with that, the development of Staples Center?

HERNANDEZ:

I don't know how much of it I've talked about.

NICOLAIDES:

We haven't talked much about it. You can talk me through your involvement with that.

HERNANDEZ:

Well, what happened to L.A. Live--and it's more complicated than that--initially I get a phone call from the mayor's office, and I'm pretty sure it was the mayor--might have been Steve Soboroff--asking me what I thought about putting a football field up at Dodger Stadium, up at the bluff. And because of Chavez Ravine, the history there, I was reluctant to say I could be supportive of that. Although Solano Canyon was my district and I understood the importance of that whole process where they built Dodger Stadium and what it did to that community, I was reluctant to be supportive.

And that night, it just so happened we had scheduled a fundraiser in Peter O'Malley's booth, and Peter O'Malley was there. So I'm sitting there talking to the owner of the Dodgers, and I asked him upfront would he be supportive of a football stadium up at the bluff, and from his booth you could see it, right? And I'm pointing to it. And he's like, "Who would want to put a football stadium there?" And he disclosed something I didn't understand at the time. He said, "We're under-parked now. There's no way they can put a football stadium there." And when he said "under-parked," I thought he was talking about they didn't have enough parking to deal with the people at Dodge Stadium. What he was talking about is they basically got an exemption from the city when they built Dodger Stadium to only build 17,000 parking spaces, when they should have built 29,000 parking spaces for a stadium that holds 52,000 people. So Dodger Stadium was under-parked 12,000 spaces. So anything that would bring that up, they could lose that condition, and if they lost that condition, Dodger Stadium is not operating. So it was kind of a difficult situation for them. So Peter O'Malley told me upfront he didn't see a football stadium up there. So my reaction to him was, "So you don't mind if I fight it?" And at that moment, he did not. Next day, I'm talking to Jackie Goldberg because we shared Elysian Park. I had part of it; she had part of it. And Jackie's going to fight the football stadium. So I started the wheels going to stop this thing. Then Peter O'Malley finds out he's potentially one of the owners, and now he wants a football stadium. So you read his book, he blames me for the reason why he didn't get a football stadium. So we're holding these community hearings on the football stadiums, and the Friends of Elysian Park and everybody's coming to fight it, and that's going on.

Meanwhile, we're trying to save the Coliseum as a city, and Mark Ridley-Thomas is trying to do whatever he could go keep the Coliseum open. So Morrie Goldman, who was my chief of staff, and I decided to go have a meeting with the NFL, and we ended up going to Phoenix, some nice hotel restaurant up on a cliff. I don't even remember the name. And we met with the assistant to the commissioner, and that person's name was Roger Goodell. Now, Roger Goodell today is the NFL commissioner. But we met with Roger Goodell and we're talking about football in Los Angeles, why doesn't a football team want to come to the Coliseum. So Goodell suggested that we hire a firm that does feasibility studies on stadiums to look at locations in Los Angeles and tell us where would be the best place to place a football stadium, and the city had never done this kind of a study. We come back, introduce a motion, get some funding, and hire the firm and they do the study. The study came back and told us the best place to put a football stadium is where the Convention Center is now, because they had thirty-four access points, freeway interconnections, and everything else, and that was like a shock. It was the first time I heard the term "access point." Then second-best place to put a football stadium in the entire city of Los Angeles is where the Coliseum is, because they had thirty-two access points. Now, they had looked at Dodger Stadium as a site because it was a potential site, and they classified that as the worst place to put a football stadium because there's only three access points to Dodger Stadium. And that was the case when they built Dodger Stadium in the first place, but we, the city, didn't understand that at the time.

So I get this study, and meanwhile, I was fighting with Phil (Philip) Anschutz, a pipeline that he wanted to bring down from Taylor Yard, and we had a talking relationship and I'm fighting his pipeline. He hired this Majestic Realty, Ed Roski and John Semcken, to kind of come in and deal with the entitlements for a basketball stadium. So I'm showing Anschutz this study and asking him to look at it. He gets it to Roski and Semcken, and they start jumping on it, and they decide that the Convention Center's where they want to put their stadium for basketball. So a football stadium at Dodger Stadium, Anschutz was talking about putting a basketball stadium in the Cornfields, which is now a state park. So we started pushing for L.A. Live at the Convention Center, and an agreement was reached through a fifty-year lease, that they would develop the stadium at their cost.

NICOLAIDES:

So that decision was based on this report about the access points and all this.

HERNANDEZ:

Exactly. Mm-hmm. And Rita Walters was going to fight it tooth and nail, so John Ferrero, in his wisdom, made me the chair because I was the Economic Development (Committee) chair.

NICOLAIDES:

Why was she going to fight it?

HERNANDEZ:

Because she didn't want a basketball stadium, I mean more activity like that. Rita wasn't an economic development per se councilmember, whereas I was. So John put me as the chair, knowing that Rita would be resistant. We had Hal Bernson on there because he chaired the PLUM (Planning and Land Use Management) Committee. We had Alatorre on there because he chaired the Budget and Finance Committee. John Ferrero was there as the president of the council, and then myself and Rita. And we went through the entire entitlement process, and I set the boundaries for labor. I met Tim Leiweke. We were basically developing the stadium.

Part of the agreement was they were willing to develop the stadium with clear understanding that developing this stadium was going to create all this wealth around it, and so Anschutz wanted to be able to use CRA to acquire a lot of the property that surrounded the stadium for purposes of parking. So he paid for it and CRA used its power, and we acquired all that land through eminent domain. So I'm there at the groundbreaking when Shaq (Shaquille O'Neill) shows up driving a big old shovel, a tractor with a shovel, and they're announcing Kobe Bryant's going to be on the team. So it was like a big day for Los Angeles, and L.A. Live became a reality. Now, I always claim L.A. Live is one of my projects. John got the credit because he was council president and he kind of coordinated. John gave me the authority to set the boundaries, but everybody knew I had that authority from John Ferraro. And when we set the boundaries, I would talk to, like, Maria Elena Durazo. She wanted more, and I'd have to say, "No, we can't do more for labor because we're requiring them to pay this much and we're requiring them to have this kind of an agreement. You need to work that out." And I would basically get them to work it out and we'd move on to the next step. They waited for me to get out of the hospital to finish that work, and it was finished, and L.A. Live started acquiring all the property around it to build that. Then when Parks--I started working for Parks and now I'm termed out, and they decided to develop L.A. Live, so I worked with Parks, for Parks at the time, in developing all the entitlements for L.A. Live and the financing package that came with it, because tax increment financing, that was part of it. So I tend to take credit for L.A. Live. I tell people I played a role there.

NICOLAIDES:

How did you respond to, like, Rita Walters' critique of it?

HERNANDEZ:

I didn't. It was the group conscience. I wasn't there to fight with Rita or to fight with anybody. It was more of she had certain issues, we discussed them, we'd take them up, and Rita had no votes. She would lose most of the votes.

NICOLAIDES:

So, I mean, this is a common critique, I think, of a lot of these stadium projects, the criticism of using public funds to fund these really massive-scale projects that ultimately are for profit.

HERNANDEZ:

And when we talk about tax increment financing, here basically you have a project that's being proposed, and I used that same financing technique, for example, for the Home Depot here by the Santa Monica Conservancy River Park. What happened is we had the Lawry's California Center that the community wanted to keep, and we had a Home Depot and a whole shopping center that was coming in, and what's competing there is the potential of all these jobs and all this tax revenue coming into this community versus not having that. Lawry's California Center was a great restaurant and these great lands, so the community wanted to keep that and, at the same time, develop (unclear) Home Depot. We ended up working with the county and the state to basically allow the Santa Monica Mountains to buy the Lawry's California Center, but we used bond financing for them to buy it, and the bonds are being paid by the tax increments that are generated by the Home Depot. Now, that Home Depot generates so much in tax, and at the time, I was allowed to use up to 50 percent of the taxes generated, and this is real estate taxes, utility taxes, as well as a sales tax. You could use up to 50 percent. So let's assume they generate $1 million of taxes a year, sales, utilities, and we could use up to 500,000 of that annually because of the financed bonds that were used to buy the Lawry's California Center. The county was supposed to put the Department of Agriculture there to offset the cost, and that didn't happen. The state allowed us some financing mechanisms that allowed us to use the bonding, and the Santa Monica Mountains moved in. So the community got the River Center, which has been the lead planning agency for the development of the L.A. River, the whole concept of developing the L.A. River, and it is used for meetings and it's a community activity center. And the Home Depot is one of the bestselling Home Depots in the country. So instead of needing 50 percent of the tax increments, I only needed 19 percent.

So you take that concept. The same thing applies to L.A. Live. So when people talk about they want no public financing, they envision us putting millions of dollars that we could use to clean streets into this project and not clean the streets. No, but what we're doing is the developer is creating a district where we're allowing the taxes that are generated by the project itself to be used to offset the cost of the financing for the project, and that's what people object to in terms of a public subsidy. We decided to do it anyway, but the taxes we're generating out of L.A. Live are paying now for all the services in the surrounding area. Even though we allowed them up to 50 percent, the other 50 percent is paying for police services, paying for all the other services the city provides, and we're generating more money than we anticipated and created more jobs than anybody anticipated. That's what tax increment financing is about.

NICOLAIDES:

Did you see an effect in your district from that?

HERNANDEZ:

A lot of people got hired from my district.

NICOLAIDES:

From the surrounding areas?

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I'm one of these guys who walks into a Home Depot and asks people where they live.

NICOLAIDES:

Is that true of L.A. Live?

HERNANDEZ:

community, yeah. My wife and I go to L.A. Live a lot, and we have a lot of friends that we see there. We know them as friends because they were from my district. You've got to remember, a lot of people from Pico-Union/Westlake work at L.A. Live. They're the janitors, they're the cleaning crews and everything else. Well, that was my district.

NICOLAIDES:

Right. Okay. Before we kind of move into the retrospective questions, I mean, are there any other issues that you wanted to talk about?

HERNANDEZ:

I talked about (unclear).

NICOLAIDES:

We did, yes.

HERNANDEZ:

And that was an important project for the infrastructure of this district. The L.A. River has become an important project for the city.

NICOLAIDES:

Sure.

HERNANDEZ:

I think the biggest efforts in terms of my work is the impact it's had on all the surrounding communities in downtown L.A. Now people talk about Echo Park, Highland Park, Glassell Park, Cypress Park, Mount Washington, Montecito Heights as communities that are growing. This block now has a million-dollar house that sold. I keep on claiming that it's because of our closeness to the Civil Center, to downtown, the fact that you have 250,000 people moving into downtown L.A. The reality is, we are the original suburbs of the city. This is where you go if you want to own a piece of land. You can't do that downtown. So it's made these communities much more--people want them more, as opposed to before.

NICOLAIDES:

Do you think gentrification has been--

HERNANDEZ:

I think gentrification's real.

NICOLAIDES:

In this area, in your district here?

HERNANDEZ:

In this area, it is real.

NICOLAIDES:

Your old district.

HERNANDEZ:

It is real. That competition's real. But our problem is we don't have enough affordable housing, and the reality is, our property is becoming more valuable because of that. I ran for office to improve this community, the community I lived in all my life, and the fact that that's happened, people want to blame it on gentrification. I don't see that. What I see is Asian families moving in, more professional families moving in, but they're the sons and daughters who basically grew up in these neighborhoods, got an education, and they're coming back. I don't see it moving us out. Now, when my neighbors chose to sell their house because that became their retirement and now they want to go someplace else where it's cheaper to live, I don't blame them.

NICOLAIDES:

To cash out.

HERNANDEZ:

Mm-hmm. That's their decision. And the people who move in tend to be young families and professionals trying to find someplace with a nearby school, with an infrastructure.

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I wanted to just kind of close it out by asking a couple of sort of retrospective questions. So one is, I mean, what lessons do you think you learned in serving in office?

HERNANDEZ:

I don't know. I don't think constituents understand their responsibility to be engaged and solving their own problems. It's like we want government to solve all our problems. It's not unusual that people come to my house and ask me if I can help them with a problem, and they think I can help them because I was a city councilperson. But their problem has nothing to do with the city. And I think that people need to understand that government can only do so much, and they could do a lot more with the people's support. So we have to participate in it if we want to make a difference. When people choose not to support is when things go bad.

Our neighborhoods are becoming more active in fighting for land use decisions. Right now the city's Planning Land Use Management Committee, when you look at their agenda, 90 percent of their work is out in the Valley and out in the Westside, very little stuff going on in the inner city, and that's because all those land use decisions are being fought. Here you don't have as much of that going on. Part of it was putting a community plan in place that is updated and reflective of the community, and then making sure that people are following that community plan. But that community plan has eliminated a lot of conflict and uses that existed before. So it doesn't make sense to put six liquor stores in a two-block radius. Now that doesn't happen because the community plan won't allow that to happen. So we worked hard at putting the infrastructure in, and it made a difference during Ed (Eduardo P.) Reyes' term and it's making a difference in Gil (Gilbert A.) Cedillo's term, but Gil Cedillo recognizes that it was my administration that did that work, and he appreciates the fact that we're doing it, that we did it. So, again, that was part of the legacy we left. I'm curious, because every time I talk to someone who wants to run for office, I feel my first task is to talk them out of it, and lately I've been talking to a lot of women who want to run for office, and I ask the same questions of them I ask men. "How old are your children?" And they'll tell me eight, nine, ten. And I tell them about a wall I have upstairs, I have all my kids' pictures. And something happened when I ran for office. And they say, "What?" I stopped taking their picture. I wasn't there anymore. And that's a sacrifice you make. So if you don't have a problem with not being there for your kids in their teenage years, then maybe it makes sense to run for office, but if you run for office, understand you're not going to be there for your kids. And every elected official says, "Oh, I'm going to be different. I'm going to be there with the kids. I'm going to build space for them to be with me at City Hall." It doesn't happen. It doesn't happen. So I need people to understand the impact this has on their children.

I don't feel I have the relationship with my children that my wife has, and rightfully so, but she was here dealing with their issues, and I wasn't. I was just busy trying to save the world. So that's something I take very seriously. So I think that individual sacrifice so much personally to run for office, it's not worth it. Now, that's opposite of what I said earlier about people having to be engaged, but there's a different engagement at the neighborhood level and just trying to get people involved in issues than there is at the City Council level. I also know enough about how the city now works that I have the confidence I can make a difference on projects, I know how to impact them, so I'll always be a city councilman to my neighbors, and understanding how the city works, I think, makes a big difference. I've created a post-city employment as a consultant just helping people with their issues.

NICOLAIDES:

I mean, I guess I don't know if you can put the family issue aside, but let's say that was resolved somehow. I mean, is there other advice you would give to people that--

HERNANDEZ:

Well, financially it has an impact.

NICOLAIDES:

Okay.

HERNANDEZ:

The reality is, you're naked. Everybody sees you. You don't have any secrets. People are out there trying to find ways to trip you. It's a difficult life.

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah.

HERNANDEZ:

And you're a public servant, and people need to understand that. The public can be merciless. They don't understand you're a person. I mean, people talk about burning the flag. I don't think they'd hesitate to burn a politician. But the public doesn't understand--this is just my perspective--they don't really understand the sacrifice that elected officials make, and it's not that we're all saints. It's just that there is a sacrifice that you have to make to serve the public, and don't expect to be thanked for it.

NICOLAIDES:

Yeah. Can I ask you one last question, which is what political accomplishment are you most proud of?

HERNANDEZ:

The one I haven't seen yet. I think I've impacted a lot of people's lives, but it amazes me the number of people who come up to me and acknowledge that I spoke at their graduation or they remember me for some action I took and that that made a difference in their lives. It happens every day, people talking to me about that. I know I made a difference in people's lives. When I got elected to office, I got sworn in at the elementary school and I had an ice cream social for the kids. A lot of those kids remember that, and they know they can be city council people. A lot of people are running for office but they were inspired by the fact that I ran and I got elected. So, to me, I wasn't able to serve as a role model. My arrest tarnished that, and that's why I don't believe I deserved to be in office after that. I honestly believe I didn't deserve to be in office after my arrest, but I honestly believe I didn't have anything to do with--people think you can control your addictions, and they don't understand how you get there. I had no idea how I got there, but it happened. But I'm not the only person it happened to. It happens to a lot of people, and it's a combination of reasons why it happens. Understanding the reasons allows you to try and change it, and if I can stop someone else from being a drunk, that's what I'm going to do. When I was on council, I actually had a concept of a sobriety district, and everybody would say, "What's that?" That's where you put rehab centers; that's where you don't allow billboards that advertise beer; that's where you don't allow liquor stores; that's where you allow social workers. In other words, you create an environment that is positive for sobriety, and I don't see why we don't have those kinds of districts. We allow for liquor licenses and we allow for entertainment districts, but we don't have a concept of a sobriety district.