In 2014, Eunisses Hernandez, a young Latina activist, watched as a Los Angeles politician was sworn in as the first Latino leader of California’s state senate in more than a century.
“I got chills the whole time,” Hernandez recalled on a recent Monday afternoon at a restaurant in Highland Park. The background of Kevin de León, the child of working-class immigrants who had now won serious political power in the state, reminded her of her own family, and of herself. She was confident that De León, a longtime activist for immigrants’ rights, was “going to help us pass better laws”.
Today, Hernandez, is about to take her own seat on Los Angeles’ city council, and is leading the calls for De León’s resignation, after leaked audio captured racist conversation between De León and other powerful Latino Democrats in the city.
The scandal has prompted a reckoning over anti-Black racism and colorism within Latino communities, as well as an ongoing political crisis in America’s second-largest city, where even Joe Biden has called for all of the local Democratic officials involved in the racist conversation to resign. Nury Martinez, the former president of the Los Angeles city council, has stepped down, but De León and Gil Cedillo, the incumbent Democrat Hernandez is set to replace after she defeated him in the June primary, have not.
For Los Angeles’ next generation of Latino politicians, including Hernandez, the crisis is forcing an even deeper reckoning with what it means to gain political power in a deeply unequal system.
“It’s a different place to be in when the people who have these values and views, anti-Blackness and racism and homophobia, are the ones in leadership that look like us,” Hernandez said.
De León described himself as a progressive and was a prominent voice in California’s environmental justice movement. Cedillo, the incumbent Hernandez defeated this June, had been endorsed by Bernie Sanders, and spent years fighting to allow the state to issue driver’s licenses to undocumented workers and provide financial aid to undocumented students.
The racism advanced by politicians like Donald Trump is “in your face”, Hernandez argued. “This type of racism and anti-Blackness and homophobia is covered by faces that have been adored and loved by community, and that people have looked up to.”
The leaked audio was recorded during a meeting between the three influential Latino city council members and Ron Herrera, a prominent Latino labor leader, last year. The substance of the conversation was how to redraw the political districts in the city to consolidate their own personal power, as well as what they perceived as Latino political power in the city.
The tape captured the lawmakers making disparaging remarks about Black people, members of the gay community and mocked the appearance of Indigenous people from Oaxaca, a community that has hundreds of thousands of people in Los Angeles. “I’m glad they’re wearing shoes,” Cedillo was recorded as saying. Cedillo and De León did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Emerging just weeks before she is set to take up her seat in the city council, the leaked recording prompted “a rollercoaster of emotions” for Hernandez, from anger to sadness to disappointment to anger again. “I felt that they took us back several decades,” she said of the lawmakers involved.
Before the audio leaked, she said, she had just heard Herrera, the labor leader, speak publicly about how to build Black and Latino solidarity in Los Angeles.
Hernandez, the 32-year-old daughter of Mexican immigrants, grew up in Highland Park, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in east Los Angeles that in recent years has seen intense gentrification, soaring housing prices and the displacement of longtime Latino residents.
Hernandez challenged Cedillo, the district’s longtime Democratic incumbent this spring, with a campaign focused on the issue of housing affordability. She accused Cedillo of supporting the interests of real estate developers over his constituents and pledged to put the needs of renters first.
She was targeted with attack ads over her support of police abolition, but won decisively in the primary anyway, making her Los Angeles’ first abolitionist city council member and a key example of a potential leftward swing in Los Angeles politics.
For someone who spent the past decade as a progressive organizer trying to “build bridges” between Black and Latino residents in order to change drug laws, close local jails and secure public funding for alternatives to incarceration, Hernandez said, the bigoted remarks from people seen as Latino champions is particularly frustrating.
Today, Latino residents make up nearly 50% of Los Angeles’ total population: non-Hispanic Black residents make up 9%. Interracial tensions have played out for decades as a result the lack of investment in both Black and Latino communities in Los Angeles, Hernandez said.
There has long been anti-Blackness in Latino communities, Hernandez said, and it’s something she’s encountered “in a lot of spaces that I come from”.
“We’ve always been put against each other. The bureaucracy runs on scarcity mode, ‘If we give it to them, we can’t give it to you,’” Hernandez said.
Much of the work for organizers on the ground “is about breaking that narrative”, she said, and showing how Black and Latino residents can combine power to achieve a shared goal, as Hernandez and Black state lawmaker Isaac Bryan did on their campaign for Measure J, in which voters approved spending 10% of the county’s unrestricted funds on social services, mental health programs, youth intervention programs, and other alternatives to incarceration.
The leaked audio had other lessons for young politicians, including open disparagement of the city council’s two most progressive members, and a suggestion that the district represented by Nithya Raman, a progressive on the council who had just unseated a Democratic incumbent in 2020, was “the one to put in the blender and chop up left and right” when district boundaries were redrawn. (California’s attorney general announced an investigation in Los Angeles’ redistricting in response to the audio leak.)
Raman’s district was dramatically changed by the redistricting process, forcing her to get to know an entirely new swath of constituents, an outcome Hernandez said she saw as “intentional” and designed, “to let other people know: ‘Better watch yourself, because this is what’s going to happen to you.’”
Hernandez said she believes one outcome to the scandal might be election victories for more leftwing city council candidates, and a chance to grow the council’s progressive bloc from two members to five. She hopes progressive candidates can have more of an impact in the city’s approach to public safety and housing.
Hernandez said she believed the revelations from the audio recording had political relevance far outside Los Angeles, particularly in other nominally liberal cities struggling with homelessness and massive spending on police and law enforcement.
Her home town is “one of the most beautifully diverse cities of any place in the world”, and one of the wealthiest, and it’s in a state with a Democratic supermajority. Yet Los Angeles is also suffering “one of the worst housing crises”, Hernandez said, and there are an estimated 41,000 people living on the streets. It was time for voters to be more cautious about who they trusted. “Look where we are,” she said.
