Gloria Molina, pioneering Latina politician, dies at age 74
Gloria Molina, a trailblazing Chicana politician at the city, county and state level in California who was a fierce advocate for the communities she represented, even if it often meant defying entrenched political structures, died May 14 at her home in the Mount Washington neighborhood. from Los Angeles. She turned 74.
Her family announced her death from cancer her Facebook page.
Since announcing in March that she had terminal cancer, colleagues, voters and the California news media have praised her achievements in articles and on social media. The board of directors of the Los Angeles Metro voted in favor name a train station in East Los Angeles after her. Casa 0101, a performing arts organization in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles, has designated its main stage theater as the Gloria Molina Auditorium. Grand Park, in downtown Los Angeles, which she helped create in 2012, is now Gloria Molina Big Park.
“She has been advocating for years for better access to parks and green spaces,” the park’s oversight body said when announcing the new name, “as well as recreational opportunities that appeal to culture, support well-being and improve the quality of life for everyone in Los Angeles.” Angeles.”
The awards reflected her legacy as one of the country’s leading Latina politicians, with much of her career spanning more than three decades spanning a time when few Latinas held important positions.
In 1982, after working on other politicians’ campaigns, including that of Councilwoman Maxine Waters, who would go on to be elected to Congress, Ms. Molina became the first Latina elected to the California Assembly. She ran for that seat even though the political leadership of the Eastside area of Los Angeles County had already selected another candidate, Richard Polanco. She defeated him in the Democratic primary and easily defeated a Republican opponent in the general election.
Something similar happened in 1987 when she ran for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council, which had been created by redistribution. The political leadership had elected Larry Gonzalez to the post, but she defeated him and a third candidate to become the first Latina council member.
In 1991, she scored something of a political hat-trick, becoming the first woman elected to Los Angeles County’s powerful Board of Supervisors. (In 1979, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke became the first woman on the board when she was appointed to serve the term of a retiring member.) About 1,000 supporters attended her swearing-in.
“We have to look forward to a time when one’s ethnic background or gender is no longer a historical footnote,” Ms Molina said at the time. “And this election is another step on that positive path to the American promise.”
Ms. Molina, who served on the board until the end of her tenure in 2014, was right that her victory was no sign; today all five supervisors are women.
Roz Wyman, a trailblazer herself—in 1953, at age 22, she became the youngest person ever elected to the Los Angeles City Council—thought about Ms. Molina’s “firsts.”
“We had a saying at the time, ‘Can a woman break the glass ceiling?'” she said. “She didn’t just break it, she broke it every way you could possibly break a glass ceiling.”
Gloria Molina was born on May 31, 1948 in Montebello, a suburb of Los Angeles. Her father, Leonardo, was a construction worker who was born in Los Angeles but grew up in Casas Grandes, Mexico, and her mother, Concepción, was a housewife from Mexico. The couple emigrated in the 1940s and Gloria was the eldest of 10 children.
“She was almost like a second mother in the family,” Ms. Molina’s daughter, Valentina Martinez, said in a video made about her mother in 2020 for the Mexican-American Cultural Education Foundation. “She did everything. She told me she came home from school every day and would make tortillas for her siblings. She couldn’t have fun or go to after-school programs. She always did the hard work, making sure everyone was taken care of, changing diapers, cooking, all that. So she was a tough lady from the start.”
She was, Mrs. Molina said, “raised in a very traditional Chicano family.”
“The expectations were that you would get married and have kids,” she said an oral history recorded in 1990 for the California Online Archive. “You wouldn’t become anything but maybe what your mother was.”
But she told her mother that she didn’t want to get married young; she wanted to travel and work and get her own place.
“She thought I was a little crazy,” Ms. Molina said.
She studied fashion design at Rio Hondo College in Whittier, California, and took courses at East Los Angeles College and California State University, Los Angeles, though she did not earn a degree as she also worked full-time for most of that period. to support herself, including as a legal secretary for five years. She participated in the student activism of the 1960s and early 1970s, demonstrating against the Vietnam War and for Chicano rights.
One thing she realized, she said in the Cultural Education Foundation video, was that those activism movements were generally led by men and “really didn’t allow the women any role.” She and other Chicana women are trying to change that culture.
“We were Chicana feminists when there weren’t any,” she said.
She was drawn to politics, worked for several prominent figures and in 1982 decided to seek the seat of the assembly over the objections of the male political hierarchy. She and her Chicana supporters knew it was going to be a tough fight.
“We wanted to destroy everything they said I couldn’t do,” she recalled in Oral History. “Like I said, we always accepted that we had to work twice as hard; we actually physically went out and did that.
During her career in the State Assembly, she told The Los Angeles Times in 1987, she prided herself on being “a fighter, someone who doesn’t just go along with the program because that’s how the pressure is applied.” That was certainly true of her signature issue during her assembly years — her opposition to a proposal to build a prison in her Eastside precinct, a plan whose proponents included Governor George Deukmejian.
She won that battle, an important one.
“She stopped the 100-year pattern of dumping negative land-use developments on the East Side,” Fernando Guerra, the director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, said in a telephone interview.
In the process, she gained a reputation for being tough and uncompromising that stayed with her throughout her political career.
“Just listen to her speech,” Sergio Munoz, then editor-in-chief of the Spanish-language daily La Opinion, told The New York Times in 1991, shortly after Ms. Molina won election to the Board of Supervisors. “Listen to her answer to questions. You get a direct answer, whether it harms other interests or compromises someone else.”
After leaving the Board of Supervisors, Ms. Molina made another bid for political office, challenging incumbent José Huizar for his seat on the Los Angeles City Council in 2015. She lost. Mr. Huizar later pleaded guilty to corruption charges.
Although no longer in office, Ms. Molina continued to be active for a variety of causes. In 2018, she was among a group protesting outside an Academy Awards luncheon in Beverly Hills, denouncing the scarcity of Hispanic characters in films.
“The film industry should be ashamed of themselves,” she said at the time.
In addition to her daughter, Mrs. Molina is survived by her husband, Ron Martinez; her siblings, Gracie Molina, Irma Molina, Domingo Molina, Bertha Molina Mejia, Mario Molina, Sergio Molina, Danny Molina, Olga Molina Palacios, and Lisa Molina Banuelos; and a grandson.
Professor Guerra noted that in her several elections, Ms. Molina was tasked with persuading voters to choose her over another Latino candidate.
“What she had to show was that of the other Latinos who competed, she was the one who would represent them better,” he said. “Her secret sauce was that she came across as incredibly authentic, and she was a populist.”
“Her only interest, and it came across,” he added, “was community.”