Gloria Molina, the daughter of working-class dad and mom and an unapologetic Chicana who remodeled the political panorama of Los Angeles, died Sunday night time after a three-year battle with most cancers.
Her loss of life at her residence in Mount Washington, surrounded by her household, was confirmed in a Fb submit on Molina’s official account. She was 74.
Molina’s political life had been a collection of firsts that impressed generations of ladies and Latinos to hunt public workplace — the primary Latina Meeting member in California, the primary Latina on the Los Angeles Metropolis Council, the primary Latina on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors.
By way of her rise, Molina strode via L.A.’s corridors of energy with an outsider’s skepticism and an insider’s know-how. A populist equally knowledgeable by the Chicano and feminist actions and the immigrant ethos of her dad and mom, Molina’s battlegrounds have been many.
In Sacramento, she confronted politicians who sought to dump prisons and polluters in her Eastside district. On the Metropolis Council, she spearheaded efforts to construct reasonably priced housing and have road sweepers clear neighborhoods uncared for for many years by native officers. As a supervisor, she efficiently pushed again towards public worker pension spikes and work perks, like a personal chef and private driver for the supervisors.
Fernando Guerra, director for Loyola Marymount’s Heart for the Examine of Los Angeles, described her as a “excellent convergence” of communities — ladies, Mexican Individuals, the Eastside — lengthy ignored by L.A.’s energy brokers, usually each white and male.
“Despite the fact that she was a part of the system,” he stated, “she by no means gave up on the truth that it is best to by no means take its phrase with no consideration.”
Molina relished any alternative to antagonize critics — and there have been many over a 32-year political profession.
Bigots wrote nasty letters that Molina insisted staffers tack onto pin boards in her workplace. Division heads and their workers snickered that scorching flashes provoked her pointed queries throughout board conferences. She constantly defied Eastside politicos who tapped into her organizing smarts for his or her earliest electoral victories however wouldn’t help Molina as soon as she determined to run for his or her seats.
“Sooner or later, the practice goes to cease and individuals are going to say, ‘Gloria, what have you ever achieved?’” considered one of them advised The Instances in 1993. “‘What’s the agenda? What are the options? What’s this system? Are we higher off because of you being in workplace?’”
Former Supervisor Mike Antonovich, a frequent goal of Molina’s sharp stares and sharper tongue, as soon as described her type as “governance by tantrum.” He was considered one of dozens of L.A. political and cultural heavyweights — previous colleagues, former foes, longtime admirers and lifelong mates — who reached out to Molina in individual, through telephone calls, or via passed-along messages to pay their respect after she introduced her most cancers prognosis in mid-March.
“It’s not like there was a purple carpet laid out for her,” stated Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who received to know Molina whereas she labored for Antonovich. “There was plenty of challenges. It appeared like each time there was a problem, it was a relentless struggle, however nobody did it higher than Gloria.”
“Typically she was fallacious, however more often than not she was proper,” stated Zev Yaroslavsky, who served alongside Molina on the Metropolis Council for 4 years within the Eighties and 20 years on the Board of Supervisors. He nonetheless bundles up in a quilt she knitted for him when the 2 have been termed out in 2014. “And the rationale why so many have been irritated by her was as a result of she held up a mirror to ourselves.”
That type made her a dwelling legend to the voters and volunteers who helped her win elections time and again.
As soon as, Yaroslavsky drove round his native Boyle Heights with a staffer and stopped at a former synagogue that had was a Latino evangelical church. The pastor approached the 2, and wasn’t impressed when Yaroslavsky launched himself as a supervisor. Then he talked about that considered one of his colleagues was Molina.
“And his face lit up,” Yaroslavsky stated. “County supervisor meant nothing to him, however Gloria Molina? That was the whole lot.”
Within the final weeks of her life, private and non-private entities that mirrored the breadth of her profession publicly honored the política.
Metro’s board of administrators voted to call a Gold Line station in East L.A. after Molina, who fought for years to make sure that the area’s light-rail system prolonged to the Eastside. The all-female Board of Supervisors — every sporting a clipped-on lock of purple hair in honor of the ladies’s predecessor’s signature trend aptitude — introduced they might rename downtown’s Grand Park to replicate Molina’s essential function in its creation. Casa 0101 in Boyle Heights christened its efficiency house the Gloria Molina Auditorium in honor of the frequent patron and donor to Latino arts throughout the Southland.
And the L.A. County Honest introduced that beginning this 12 months, the successful quilt in its annual Residence Arts contests would obtain the Gloria Molina Quilting Award, to commemorate a lifelong fanatic who utilized the craft’s abilities to her public service: a wise use of shade, a methodical strategy, an expansive outlook and a thick pores and skin capable of climate the pricks that got here with the job as a result of she might dole them out even higher.
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Gloria Molina was born in 1948 to Concepción and Leonardo Molina, a homemaker and development employee with roots within the city of Casa Grandes in Chihuahua, Mexico. The household lived in a small home behind a mercadito that her godmother owned in Barrio Simons, a neighborhood in what’s now Montebello that stood subsequent to one of many largest brickyards on the planet.
“Despite the fact that we have been poor, I used to be by no means at residence ever felt to be poor,” Molina stated in a 2017 interview for Cal State Fullerton’s Heart for Oral and Public Historical past. “And by no means advised I used to be poor. By no means advised that I used to be not going to have the ability to do what I wished to do.”
Because the oldest of 10 youngsters, Molina discovered herself negotiating from a younger age. She translated for her Spanish-speaking father, helped her mom elevate her siblings and argued on behalf of them to her dad and mom as soon as they got here of age. One incident particularly hinted on the individual Gloria would turn into.
Sooner or later, Concepción took her youngsters to a Lerner division retailer in downtown to purchase garments for the varsity 12 months. The household stood on the checkout counter for quarter-hour earlier than a pre-teen Gloria requested the shop supervisor why they weren’t being helped. The person made a crack about her Mexican mom having so many youngsters when he lastly attended to them. Concepción advised Gloria to not inform her father, however Gloria did. An enraged Leonardo went again to Lerner to sq. up the invoice, and the household by no means shopped there once more.
“The unfairness we noticed was in small methods,” stated Gracie Molina, Gloria’s sister, “however she would hold that in her thoughts and spine.”
The household moved to Pico Rivera when Gloria was in third grade, becoming a member of the hundreds of Mexican Individuals who left the Eastside for L.A.’s middle-class suburbs. However in 1967, Leonardo suffered a piece damage that put him on incapacity for 2 years. Molina successfully grew to become the household breadwinner, working as a authorized secretary for a downtown agency whereas finding out trend design at Rio Hondo School, then East L.A. School. On the latter faculty, she participated within the Chicano activism that was sweeping the American Southwest.
Molina volunteered on the close by Maravilla housing initiatives, the place the squalor that younger ladies and their youngsters lived in shocked her. She skipped a historical past remaining examination to point out solidarity with the hundreds of excessive schoolers throughout Eastside colleges who walked out for higher situations through the 1968 “blowouts.” She was additionally there on the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, a protest towards the Vietnam Conflict in East L.A. that ended with sheriff’s deputies brutally beating up attendees and the deaths of three folks, together with L.A. Instances columnist Ruben Salazar.
Bertha Molina, from left, Timmy Martinez, Gloria Molina, Crimson Martinez and Julie Martinez through the Chicano Moratorium in Salazar Park, previously Laguna Park, in 1970.
(Ralph Arreola / Los Angeles County Library)
However it was a film Molina noticed at East L.A. School that eternally modified her political outlook: “Salt of the Earth,” a 1954 movie a few real-life New Mexico zinc strike wherein Latinas changed their jailed husbands on the picket strains. Their bravery resonated with Molina, who was already chafing on the sexism in a Chicano motion that claimed to be progressive.
“The fellows would simply type of roll throughout us,” she stated in an interview with The Instances shortly earlier than her loss of life. “And as Chicanas, we didn’t suppose that was acceptable.”
Molina nonetheless assisted on the campaigns of Richard Alatorre and Artwork Torres, two Eastsiders who grew to become Meeting members in 1972 and 1973, respectively, and have become the architects of a political machine that dominated the area for many years. Torres employed her as his administrative assistant — the primary Latina to carry such a place within the California Legislature.
Shortly after, she grew to become the chair of the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional, a statewide grassroots community. It was in that function that Molina discovered herself sitting subsequent to a tearful Dolores Madrigal at a information convention in 1975 saying a class-action lawsuit alleging that L.A. County-USC Medical Heart had coerced Mexican American ladies into sterilizations.
Antonia Hernandez, who had simply graduated from UCLA’s legislation faculty, had requested Comisión Femenil simply weeks earlier than if it may very well be the lead plaintiff.
“I needed to clarify to them that if we misplaced the case, we may very well be liable to pay the defendant’s case. so the victims wouldn’t must incur any authorized prices in case they misplaced,” stated Hernandez, who lately introduced her retirement as president of the California Neighborhood Basis. “My first impression of [Molina], then and now, is only a gutsy individual, with an actual sense of group obligation, and she or he rallied these of us” to signal on.
Because the sterilization case went via the courts — a federal decide finally dominated towards the plaintiffs — Molina served as a marketing campaign supervisor or a fundraiser for Chicana candidates throughout California. In Los Angeles, Molina grew to become a bridge between the separated sisterhoods of the Westside, South L.A. and the Eastside.
“We thought of her the chief,” stated Rep. Maxine Waters, who met Molina when she was chief deputy to L.A. Councilmember David Cunningham Jr. and leaned on her help throughout Waters’ profitable 1976 Meeting race. “She was settled, she was cool. With out the lads, she organized the ladies.”
Gloria Molina, left, sits subsequent to Dolores Madrigal at a information convention in 1975 saying a class-action swimsuit towards Los Angeles County-USC Medical Heart that alleged docs sterilized Mexican American ladies with out their consent.
(Ben Olender / Los Angeles Instances)
Whereas Molina campaigned for Waters, she additionally headed Latino outreach in California for former President Carter. She joined his administration’s Workplace of Presidential Personnel, tasked with diversifying the ranks of hundreds of fee seats. However the lack of Latinos in Washington, D.C., made Molina yearn for residence, so she took a job with the Division of Well being and Human Providers’ workplace in San Francisco, then grew to become the L.A.-based deputy for Meeting Speaker Willie Brown.
In 1982, her former boss Torres instructed she take his Meeting district seat since he wished to run for the state Senate. She went to hunt the blessing of Alatorre, who advised her to face down: He and different Eastside leaders had determined that the seat ought to go to his childhood buddy Richard Polanco, whom Molina remembered as a teenage boxer hanging with the fallacious crowd again within the Maravilla housing initiatives.
Feeling betrayed, Molina nonetheless introduced her candidacy.
The primary-time candidate enlisted the community of ladies she had helped over time as “lickers and stickers” — volunteers who phone-banked, walked precincts, despatched out mailers and counted for an estimated 70% of the contributions she obtained, together with a $5,000 test by Waters that was Molina’s first massive donation.
She beat Polanco within the main by a 52%-48% margin, then simply gained the overall election towards a Republican opponent. Molina’s election night time get together was held at Stevens Steakhouse in Commerce, the restaurant the place the Eastside machine had met months earlier to decide on Polanco as their candidate.
“They have been accustomed to the function they performed: Large chingones [badasses], they’re in cost,” Molina advised The Instances in 1993. “They didn’t need some pipsqueak like me coming in.”
It was a template for victory she would repeat.
Gloria Molina, proven in 1982, throughout her profitable California Meeting marketing campaign.
(Los Angeles Instances)
In Sacramento, Molina instantly clashed with a macho world the place decorum and deal-making dominated. Throughout a finances debate between Waters and a Republican assemblywoman, Assemblymember Lou Papan cracked, “Mr. Speaker, might we hold the women from preventing on the ground?” Molina minimize in and demanded he apologize to all ladies. A recess was instantly referred to as, and colleagues advised Molina she ought to apologize to her senior colleague. She refused.
“He needed to take the results of what he stated,” Molina stated in her Cal State Fullerton oral historical past. “You don’t simply blurt out these statements with none accountability to them.”
Quickly, she would discover herself pitted towards state leaders on a far larger subject again residence.
The Legislature had handed a invoice that required the state to construct a jail in L.A. County earlier than another jail might open. Gov. George Deukmejian’s workplace selected a location throughout the L.A. River from Boyle Heights and secured the backing of Mayor Tom Bradley.
The Eastside exploded in opposition. Father John Moretta, pastor at Resurrection Church in Boyle Heights, first met her at a gathering on the jail’s proposed location.
“She was brief, however that didn’t cease her from being tall within the eyes of the folks,” stated Moretta. “She was like a commander of the troops down beneath, and the folks adopted her.”
Molina politicked in Sacramento and marched in Los Angeles. She and Torres labored to have the Meeting kill the plan on the finish of the legislative session in 1985. However Speaker Brown revived the plans a couple of months later after Molina defied him by supporting an Meeting candidate.
Quickly after, Deukmejian’s workplace referred to as her with a deal: Let the jail undergo, and the governor would signal Molina-authored payments that sought to forestall highschool dropouts. She declined, regardless of pleas from employees members that the good thing about these payments outweighed any hurt the jail would possibly create.
Deukmejian vetoed all of them. However the Eastside jail was by no means constructed.
Whereas the standoff continued, a U.S. Justice Division civil rights lawsuit pressured L.A. to redraw its council districts to make it simpler for an additional Latino candidate to win on the Eastside. Molina returned to Alatorre and Torres, and requested if she might be part of the previous on the Metropolis Council.
As soon as once more, Torres and Alatorre already had a candidate: L.A. Unified Faculty District trustee Larry Gonzalez.
As soon as once more, Molina went towards them.
She received married through the marketing campaign, took a two-day honeymoon, then received again to canvassing. Molina simply beat Gonzalez and two different candidates, changing into the primary Latina on L.A.’s Metropolis Council in 1987.
Gloria Molina dances together with her mom, Concepción, after her Metropolis Council victory in 1987. She grew to become the primary Latina council member.
(Patrick Downs / Los Angeles Instances)
Molina had served in her new function only a 12 months and a half earlier than the Mexican American Authorized Protection and Schooling Fund filed a lawsuit that alleged L.A. County supervisors had gerrymandered districts in 1981 to make sure a Latino couldn’t be part of their board. The lead lawyer was Hernandez, who befriended Molina for the reason that unsuccessful sterilization lawsuit they pursued collectively a decade earlier.
This time, they might win. The first Supervisorial District’s boundaries have been redrawn, and longtime Supervisor Peter F. Schabarum determined to not search reelection. Molina as soon as once more went to her Eastside elders. This time, she got here armed with the endorsements of Reps. Ed Roybal and Esteban Torres. However Alatorre and Torres as soon as once more refused to help her; Torres wished the seat as nicely.
The 2 positioned first and second within the main, then moved on to a bitter basic election. She grew to become the primary Latina on the board in 1991, and the primary Latino since Francisco Machado and Francisco Palomares served within the 1870s.
So many individuals attended her swearing-in ceremony that the gang spilled onto the sidewalk and heard through audio system Molina declare, “We should look ahead to a time when an individual’s ethnic background or gender is not a historic footnote.”
The brand new supervisor joined throughout a fiscal disaster. She rapidly earned a status as somebody who demanded solutions from all ranges of the county’s departments and didn’t take care of niceties.
Alma Martinez, Molina’s longtime chief of employees who met her future boss as a highschool volunteer for the Carter presidential marketing campaign, remembered how Molina had staffers shadow fancy vehicles that drove into the Westlake neighborhood to purchase medicine. Once they traced the license plates again to the dad and mom of USC college students, Molina despatched them a letter letting them know what their youngsters have been as much as. One other time, she printed out an inventory of probation officers who hadn’t labored shortly and referred to as every of them at residence, demanding they present up.
“We advised her, ‘You gotta cease doing that,’” Martinez stated. “She wouldn’t hear, particularly when she felt one thing was fallacious.”
Gloria Molina, foreground, speaks as fellow Supervisors Zev Yaroslavsky, Mike Antonovich, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Deane Dana look on throughout a 1995 information convention.
(Los Angeles Instances)
The Instances described her type of questioning at board conferences as “direct, abrasive, impolite and unrelenting.” She supplied stern phrases in a ringing voice as she glared at whoever was on the dais together with her glasses both on the bridge of her nostril or on her head. One division head fainted after a Molina interrogation. One other one started referring to her as “sir.”
Her acolytes — who referred to as themselves “Molinistas” — started to populate L.A. politics. Mike Hernandez gained a seat on the L.A. Metropolis Council in 1991. Xavier Becerra completed first within the 1992 race to exchange Roybal, the longtime Eastside consultant, in a marketing campaign that noticed Molina and Torres struggle one more proxy struggle. The next 12 months, Antonio Villaraigosa — Molina’s consultant on the Metro board and the very best man at her wedding ceremony — went to the Meeting.
“I used to be like her little brother,” stated Villaraigosa, who Molina shunned shortly after his win after she came upon he had cheated on his spouse however they patched issues up in time for his historic 2005 L.A. mayoral victory. “She beat me up like nobody else, however I knew it got here with the territory. She was robust on all of us, however all of us cherished her and have been loyal to her, and stayed together with her.”
Although Molina was an admitted taskmaster, staffers stayed together with her for years. She took lunch within the break room with them, and she or he invited her workforce to her home each Christmas for presents and selfmade pork tamales.
Hypothesis about increased positions — mayor, congresswoman, governor, even U.S. senator — swirled as Molina started to imagine a nationwide profile. She grew to become shut with Invoice and Hillary Clinton and served as one of many vice chairs for Democratic Nationwide Conventions from 1996 via 2004. However the Board of Supervisors proved Molina’s remaining cease on her political journey.
Even a Democrat-majority board couldn’t assist Molina obtain all of her targets. Repeated bids to extend the variety of supervisorial seats went nowhere. Her push for a rebuilt L.A. County-USC facility with 750 beds resulted in solely 600. The Gold Line enlargement to the Eastside went largely above floor regardless of her needs that or not it’s a subway, and she or he decried it as “substandard” as soon as it opened. A decision in 2008 to severely restrict road merchandising failed after a public outcry.
Victories have been extra widespread, on points massive and small.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina listens throughout a 2013 board assembly.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Instances)
Parks and group facilities opened from downtown to the San Gabriel Valley. She put aside tens of tens of millions of {dollars} in discretionary funds to assist create LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, arguing town wanted a museum that advised its Latino historical past. Then there was the time in 2002 when the Board of Supervisors handed an ordinance that pressured companies caught overcharging prospects to publicly submit notices of their violations. It got here after Molina went to Kmart to purchase discounted lipstick solely to get rung up on the register for the common worth.
“We have been educated to all the time take into consideration [issues] from the context of our dad and mom,” stated Miguel Santana, a longtime Molina aide and former chief administrative officer for the Metropolis of Los Angeles who’s now the president of the Weingart Basis. “If it doesn’t make sense to our dad and mom, we have to repair it. And the opposite mantra was the federal government ought to deal with our group in the way in which you need your dad and mom to really feel.”
When she was termed out in 2014, solely three different supervisors — Roger Jessup, Kenneth Hahn and Antonovich — had served longer.
“This seat was only a excellent match,” she advised The Instances in 2009. “I like what I do and I want I might keep right here eternally, nevertheless it’s simply as nicely that I transfer on and discover one thing else, hopefully not elective workplace.”
That’s precisely what she did simply months earlier than she was termed out in 2014, when Molina introduced she was going to problem Eastside Councilmember Jose Huizar the next 12 months.
Followers cherished the thought of Molina taking down one more Eastside politico. She lambasted his give attention to creating downtown on the expense of working-class neighborhoods, telling Huizar throughout a debate, “You’re so busy working with builders and speaking about density that you simply neglect in regards to the fundamental points.”
Her brawling type not drew the adulation of the previous. On election night time, Molina had a few dozen volunteers working the telephones at her marketing campaign workplace; Huizar had over 60. She pulled in solely 24% of the vote, whereas Huizar simply sailed to a 3rd time period.
She by no means ran for public workplace once more.
Labor activist Dolores Huerta, from left, Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina and supervisorial candidate Hilda Solis cheer throughout Solis’ 2014 election night time get together in El Monte.
(David McNew / For The Instances)
Molina spent her retirement easing into her function because the lioness of L.A. politics. She grew to become a daily on panels or in documentaries that retold a number of the struggles that she had participated in — the Chicano Moratorium, the L.A. County-USC sterilization scandal, the battle towards Proposition 187, even Fernando Valenzuela’s historic 1981 rookie 12 months — for a brand new era.
Her lifelong love of quilting led Molina to co-found the East Los Angeles Stitchers, a gaggle of Latinas who held month-to-month conferences and have vowed to finish the 100-plus quilts Molina couldn’t end.
She additionally went on extra outings and holidays with a gaggle of mates Molina referred to as “Las Ladies,” ladies who had weathered their very own skilled battles and located solace amongst each other for many years.
Monica Lozano, former writer of her household’s newspaper, La Opinión, first met Molina through the Comisión Mexicana Femenil Nacional days. “You stroll right into a room with these highly effective ladies speaking about points, and also you suppose, ‘I belong,’” stated the previous president of the School Futures Basis. “And that’s what Gloria created even then.”
Las Ladies got here from internationally to go to Molina close to the top of her life. “After we received collectively, Gloria stated, ‘¡Aquí vienen mis comadres!’ [Here come my girlfriends!],” Lozano stated. They checked out images of their lives collectively. “And Gloria smiled and checked out all of us and stated, ‘Have a look at these highly effective Chicanas.’”
Molina is survived by her husband, Ron Martinez; daughter, Valentina Martinez; grandson, Santiago; and siblings Gracie Molina, Irma Molina, Domingo Molina, Bertha Molina Mejia, Mario Molina, Sergio Molina, Danny Molina, Olga Molina Palacios, and Lisa Molina Banuelos. There shall be a public celebration of her life at LA Plaza at a forthcoming date.
Even after leaving elected workplace, Molina insisted that Latino politicians had a particular responsibility to the group that cast them.
“To dismiss it and suppose, ‘Oh, you realize, I’m simply right here, I’ve simply received elected and I can deal with it, go-along-to-get-along, and I don’t must be that champion.’ You’re fallacious!” she advised Cal State Fullerton in 2017. “It’s your job, it’s your responsibility, it’s your accountability.”
