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Editor’s note: 2022 Candidate for Governor of California Luis J. Rodriguez, poet, cultural and justice movement organizer, was interviewed by members of the People’s Tribune and Tribuno del Pueblo editorial boards about his program to end poverty and imagining a new California of “shared well-being” that we build together. These are excerpts from that interview. Please visit www.luis4governor.org for more information on the campaign.
Photo/Peter Maiden, Fresno Community Alliance Newspaper.
Gloria Sandoval: Luis, we’re excited about your campaign for governor and the solutions you see. You had a run for governor in California in 2014, so why are you running for California governor again?
Luis J. Rodriguez: I would say for sure that things have gotten worse since 2014. The homelessness, it’s obscene. That was one of the issues I raised last time. I was running on a new “End Poverty in California” campaign, and poverty has gotten worse. We still have the highest poverty rate in the country, even though we’re the world’s fifth largest economy. California got worse even with — I would have to say — a popular governor and liberal Democrats at the helm. In other words, the problems are systemic. They’re not able to answer it because they’re not getting to the root of what’s causing all these things. And that’s why I’m running.
I have to add another thing: The Green Party endorsed me last time. I was a Green Party member (and I still am,) but this time around the Peace and Freedom Party and the Justice Party have united to support me. This I think is a historical first — they don’t usually endorse the same candidate. This got me thinking, let’s try it again. And, again, I’ll raise these issues. We got to bring the most impacted people to the leadership, the homeless themselves, the people who are being pushed out of the economy. We got to bring them right into the solution process.
Sarah Menefee: I heard you speak recently here in San Francisco, and it was very uplifting. I was impressed by what you said about Governor Newsom, who is doing this very slick and slimy thing with the homeless. So I wanted to ask you about that. You spoke eloquently about Governor Newsom’s plan to force homeless people into so-called treatment as a way to take their power, autonomy, and rights, basically a form of incarceration. Would you speak about that?
LJR: Yes, it’s called “Care Court,” where you have to get treatment or help. What if you don’t want services, like if you’re in an encampment, and people go there and say, “here’s some services, vouchers,” whatever. If you don’t go for it, they can put you in a conservancy, they can take over your rights as a human being. They can then put you in a shelter, force you into a mental institution, or whatever they think the care would be. To me, it’s one of the worst ways of “solving homelessness” we can imagine.
First of all, homelessness is not caused by mental illness. We know there’s a lot of mental illness among the people. The illness itself is also related to what’s going on to our economy, to the stress of the world we’re in. People get mentally ill because it’s just a terrible life. And it’s not just addicts who are homeless. There are families, there are kids, all kinds of people. And even though there are drugs in these encampments, I know most of them aren’t drug addicts. Many of them don’t even want the drugs. It doesn’t matter. It’s the way the system feeds into people’s pain.
The only answer that makes sense is to give people decent affordable homes. There is no other answer. Shelters are not going to do it. Mental healthcare outside of that is not going to do it. I don’t mind people getting healthcare. They need the treatment. If they’re on drugs, don’t criminalize them. Give them treatment. If they have mental illness, they should be given treatment for free. But I think the main thing is giving people decent, affordable homes they can have on a permanent basis. We want permanent housing for everybody in the state of California.
Kathy Powers: Luis, our city council here in Chicago says they’re not in the business of building of homes, but they control the policies. How do you propose to set aside more money for affordability or how would you enforce affordable housing?
LJR: There’s a couple of things you have to do. One is you have to put money in housing. And a lot of it. We have a big surplus of money in the state of California, billions of dollars that could be used. But the other thing is you’ve got to stop housing from being part of the market system. People are being pushed out because they can’t afford the rents. When it comes to necessities, it shouldn’t be left up to a market. We went through the 2008 mortgage crisis, the worst thing since the Great Depression, and we never got a chance to get through it because people were pushed out. So I think we have to consider necessities being removed from the market system. Meet people’s needs.
SM: I think that’s the bottom line. You’re up against a monster because we know Newsom was a machine candidate, controlled by the developers. I mean they run this city, so now he is governor and he is at their beck and call. Now even rentals are being financialized almost completely.
GS: We are also interested in knowing about the issues of voting rights and the fight for democracy. Across the country, and here in California it doesn’t show up as quickly, but we have heard about Shasta. You know, having their little militia take over up there.
Sandy Reid: About the fight for democracy: I’ve been hearing that in California there have been a lot of threats toward election officials from the right at the polls. And there’s some minimal legislation being introduced in California to protect voting officials, like not making their names or their addresses public, things like that. So could you could talk about the fight for democracy in California, particularly around the voting rights. I think attacking our voting rights is really the first step to destroying democracy as we’ve known it. How is the fight for democracy shaping up in California? What do you think needs to be done in California?
LJR: One thing is that we have a better system here for the state elections than in most states. The ballot does go to everybody’s home and everybody now can vote from home. You don’t have to declare any reasons for being “absentee.” That’s a really important step. But the biggest problem in the elections is corporate money, financing by big corporations. That’s what really undermines the elections.
What destroys the politics in California, like all over the country, is that corporations are controlling what’s going on, who gets on the ballot, and who doesn’t. I’ve done this twice and it’s gotten worse. You’ve got to pay more money to get on the ballot, so a regular working-class voice could not get on, unless they get a lot of people to sign and/or raise a lot of money. And compared to the millions and billions most major politicians have in their campaign coffers, I’m talking about a little bit of money. This is a lot for a poor working-class person, so we can’t have our voices in these elections.
And there’s now so much dark money popping up everywhere, you don’t even know where it comes from. They have so many ways to hide the money, and people aren’t aware of the intricacies of it because all we are getting is the ballot at home. We’re thinking, well, I got a voice in this state. But who’s on the ballot? How do they get on the ballot? Who paid to get on that ballot? Who’s going to get the media attention? The media says they won’t pay attention to anybody unless they get 15% of the polls. But the only way to get 15% is to put a lot of money in ads and get your name out there. So it’s again catering to the rich or the people that are supported by people with big money. That to me is one of the biggest issues I’d like to challenge.
GS: Right. I think one thing in California also is that 16-year-olds are allowed to register, but can’t vote until they turn 18. And I don’t see too much education offered to those 16-and-17-year-olds. In fact, sometimes people just say, why vote? Everything stays the same anyway.
LJR: First of all, people have got to vote. But the other side of this is that because of all this corporate money, people don’t feel invested, people think it’s not going anywhere. If you don’t really feel invested and think, “they’re all corrupt anyway,” which is partially true, people don’t even exercise their right to vote.
As radical, revolutionary, conscious people we need to occupy every space — don’t let the corporations have it. And that includes the electoral arena. We need to organize the grassroots. We got to be in there, our voices and our issues getting out there, making sure every arena speaks to these issues that nobody wants to talk about.
GS: Right. And you can’t really say that the Democratic Party is the poor person’s or the working person’s party.
LJR: I want to say, though, that there are a lot of good Democrats out there. Many of them are disaffected. They’re really tired of Newsom. They don’t know where to go. Only two parties control things and they’re controlled by the corporations. Where are people going to go? You have a big section of “non-party preference” voters, the independents. I would like to speak to them as well as to any discontented Democrats who feel the party is under corporate control. People need to know there’s another way to go when it comes to these issues. I don’t want to dismiss all Democrats. I’m dismissing that corporate instrument of power that’s called the Democratic Party, but not necessarily all of the many people who registered. They don’t know what else to do.
Photo / Peter Maiden, Fresno Community Alliance Newspaper.
GS: Do people need to reregister as Green to vote for you?
LJR: People have been asking me this and here’s something they don’t tell you, which is another part of the miscommunication. This is a new primary system. You have to register to vote, but you don’t have to say any party. So it’s nonpartisan — that’s what they call it. You don’t need to join the Green Party. You just have to vote, and vote for me on these issues.
Right now there are 26 candidates running for governor on the June 7 primary. I can’t tell you the exact number who are Republicans, who, as you know, are just going to speak to the craziest things. And it’s all by design. They’re not, as people say, crazy. They know what they’re doing. They’re consolidated. And they’re not going to win against Newsom. Newsom’s going to get the votes. He’s going to confront only one candidate who is going to really challenge him – and challenge him on these issues that I’m talking about. I get it that Newsom’s going to get the highest vote. But even if he got 90%, he would still have to go against the second highest vote getter. I want to get the second-highest votes so I can raise these issues all the way to the final election on November 8.
Ada Marys Lorenzana: I wanted to give you the space to say more about your stance on immigration and what specific goals you have.
LJR: Well, there’s a number of things. One for sure is to stop any deportations. The state can do that. I think they pretty much have stopped them now, but people still hear of things going on. Two, get rid of all the federal detention centers in the state. I think they’re working towards that. But they’re also trying to build new ones. They’re just concentration camps. And three, we should definitely provide a way for people to come to this country and be accepted into the country. People are trying to apply for asylum. They’re trying to apply legally and they’re still treated badly, so many are detained, many pushed back into Mexico.
I think that we as a state have to lead the whole country in showing how people should be treated. We work with a lot of Dreamers in my cultural space (Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore), a lot of young people who don’t have their papers, but have been raised here, trying to go to school.
AML: Yeah. Thank you. In relation to the detention centers closing, I know that’s kind of started already in California. A little in Illinois as well, too. So it’s really cool to see there’s a push for that. But one of my questions is what happens with the people who are sent away, because I know with the detention centers what ends up happening is that people get transported to Arizona or Nevada. So now their family members are still detained, but now they have to drive even more or literally can’t see them at all. I was wondering if you have any solution?
LJR: This is a national issue. You’re absolutely right. If we say no detention centers in California —these are federal detention centers — they just open them across the border in Arizona and Nevada, wherever they want. Once you close detention centers, you have to say, well, we’re not throwing the people out. We’re keeping them, we’re working with them.
States have their own laws in relation to this, but these are federal detention centers, so this is a national issue. I know there are people fighting for these things. We can combine these struggles so they don’t just limit it to the states, and make it a federal thing.
AML: Cool. Another question I had is in regards to more education. So, California is more welcoming towards undocumented students with the California Dream Act. I know that helps out a lot of people, but I still see a big gap, a huge need for more resources in funding schools for non-DACA students, which is a population that keeps growing. DACA students have always been, but especially now, an even smaller population since the program was dropped. So in addition to the California Dream Act, how would you better serve those students?
LJR: Well, again, because you’re talking about both state and national policies, I think we have to enact the humane ones here that the rest of the country can look at and say, ‘that’s what we should do everywhere.’ I think the state has taken some steps different than other places, but it’s not enough. Even the DACA students we’re working with now are telling me they’re still feeling the pressure. Anything could happen any day, like losing their status. And so we have to have a state model for the rest of the country, showing how people should be treated with dignity and be incorporated.
When I was growing up, people from Mexico, because it wasn’t Central Americans at the time, were pretty much in certain places. Now every state has Mexicans and Central Americans. Once I did a statewide tour in Delaware. I’m standing in the laundry washing my clothes and I hear these voices, and I know it’s not Spanish. They’re Mayan from Guatemala and I don’t know the language. But when I hear Mayan, I know it’s Mayan. So I went up and talked to them in Spanish. They could barely speak Spanish. They told me they were working in the fields. Every state I go to there are people from Mexico and Central America, working at all levels. So this is a national issue. There’s no place now where it doesn’t impact everyone. That’s why I think we have to have a national policy directed for the grassroots work we do.
Kathy Powers: Well, first, Luis, I have to tell you, I love what you said about poetry in a radio program I listened to. I write poetry myself. I call them the voices in my head . . . I’m in Chicago and we’re dealing with mental health crisis intervention. And we have a mayor who believes in a police state. And she thinks that every crisis calls for a cop. And we know how wonderful they are about de-escalating, anything, right? They just go in and escalate and take control. Is that happening in California about crisis intervention?
LJR: Well, to me, that’s an issue that goes to my heart. I grew up in a situation where four of my best friends, unarmed, were killed by police. I grew up in a very poor neighborhood, migrant Mexican community, people who came to work in the fields. But when I moved there, the fields were gone. We were surrounded by industry and/or white suburbs. Now I’m not talking about poor white people. All the poor whites lived with the Mexicans. So they were homies. We never saw them as white people. They were homies, you know, but there were these well-off white communities surrounding us. And the police, the sheriffs in particular, were their army against us. They used the sheriffs to suppress us, you know, knock us down. And they killed four of my friends. That was in the Sixties. So it means a lot to me. The young people have said it. We have to reset the whole system when it comes to mass incarceration, when it comes to policing. They are killing instead of providing treatment—they’re killing people who have mental issues. They’re not providing treatment on demand. I mean, when you need it, it should be there. It works in other places, in parts of Europe where drug treatment and mental health needs are met because most of them have universal healthcare.
We had an opportunity here in the state to have a single-payer, universal healthcare. We tried twice and both times it died. And Governor Newsom did not really go out and support it. We need a universal single-payer system for everything: physical care, but also mental care, including making drug issues a healthcare problem, not a criminal problem.
They bring the police in on the backend of a problem. You’ve got to do it on the front end — when the families need help, you’ve got to do it when the kids need help. You’ve got to do it in the schools. You’ve got to do it the housing arena. You’ve got to get the resources and the connections and the tools that people need on the front end. Deny and deprive people of all these needs, and then on the back end they’re either committing crimes and they’re on drugs or they’re mentally ill. The police are not the answer to crime. They’re not the answer to drugs.
As the young people say, ‘reimagine the whole thing,’ reset the whole system.
GS: There was a case here in Merced of an eight-year-old girl that was found dead in a house. And according to the report the little girl had been cared for by the grandmother in the Hayward area, but the mother’s boyfriend had her. He’s now on the run. I don’t know if they’ve caught up with him. But there had been a lot of reports to Child Protective Services (CPS) that there was abuse, but CPS never found anything. How can we prioritize the safety of children?
LJR: So this is why my campaign is Imagine a New California for Shared Well-being. Our economy and our politics are not based on that. Our politics are based on big corporate profits. They control what happens, what doesn’t happen. What they provide is what I call organized inadequacies. I think there are hardworking people in these agencies, but they’re overwhelmed. In our thinking and in our imagination, shared well-being is that everybody’s taken care of. It’s part of what the state has to do. I would make sure that shared well-being becomes what everybody carries out in every state government office and every agency.
GS: Right now everything has been affected by COVID. And we hear there might not be enough monies put into that. Even the schools are in a debate about the vaccinations and masking. What would you do to help people understand the science, and that public health is for everybody?
LJR: I think the reason why people don’t have that idea is because we don’t treat it that way. If we had universal, single-payer healthcare, people would get that public health is priority. Well, we don’t prioritize it, so now you’ve got a whole message of division. People don’t trust doctors because we set it up this way. There’s a lot of misinformation. I think if we took care of people, from the beginning really took care of them, we wouldn’t be in the pandemic mode. But this has got to be universal, the world. All these variants are coming from places where we didn’t give vaccinations, we didn’t help them. So we have unevenness in our care. And, of course, in our country people are being left behind. Shared well-being means everybody has to be given care.
GS: We see how easy too it was for Biden and Congress to give so many billions of dollars for war. Do you know how much dependency there is on the production of war?
LJR: California is the largest state for the defense industry. Every time there’s a war, California’s defense industries get cranked up. People make a lot of money. The same thing happened during the Pandemic, trillions of dollars in profit was made during the crisis while people were dying. So they find a way to benefit no matter what’s going on. Poor people are suffering from all ends, but we have an industry here that feeds off that and doesn’t care. We’re a war economy. We’re a militarized economy. Everything we do depends on keeping the military machine going one way or the other. So war hurts all, even in our country.
KP: I’m an organizer and I like your openness. I don’t hear a lot of specifics though. You’ve described what all of us want. I say everybody, but not the other people, the wealth keepers. So, Biden’s going to do whatever the hell he wants to do, Mitch McConnell, whatever he’s going to do. You know, they’re not doing it for me.
LJR: There’s a couple things. One is the specificity. I think it’s going to be in the hands of incorporating the impacted people. They really got answers. You want to stop homelessness, go to the homeless; want to stop the incarceration system, go to the prisoners themselves, go to the people who’ve been there. They’ll give you answers. You want to deal with mental illness, you can talk to them, they’ll tell you. You want to deal with crime, go to the people impacted by crime. Also the ones involved and ask, what could be done to end this violence and crime? Incorporate them into governance. The problem with our state and our country is they never go to the most impacted people. They’ve got people who make millions trying to resolve these things by organizing inadequacies. So what they do is try to manage the crisis, not get to the root of it.
Bob Lee: I wanted to ask you about the police and the criminal justice system. I mean obviously the relationship between the people and the police has become a major issue nationally, especially in the last few years. And clearly it’s been an issue in California for a long time, especially in terms of violence by the police against the people. You’ve got a lot of people being thrown into prison, basically for being poor or being mentally ill or whatever. And then you’ve got the problem of the conditions in the prisons, the overcrowding, the COVID, the violence and so on. And so what do you think can be done to really reform the criminal justice system?
LJR: I’ve been going into prisons for 40 years, to do poetry, talking circles, and to teach writing. I do it because they’re human beings who are lacking humane programs and help. They’re lacking rehabilitation, they’re lacking restorative justice practices, lacking ways to build themselves up. People should be given whatever they need to better their lives. If you don’t provide that, they do their time and they go back to the poor communities where they came from, with nothing. The prison system is very much based on punishment, and punishment is not the way to address crime. People are being punished for years and years for sometimes very minimal things. There’s got to be a way that we can transform the people as well as the communities.
I’m worried also about this prison in Susanville being closed down and the community being left holding the bag. You’ve got to address all these issues because otherwise we’re going to make things worse. I think prison reform is good. I’m an abolitionist, you know, the whole system has to change, but you’ve got to make sure that the shared well-being is in place.
GS: Well, you could remodel them to become colleges, universities. I visited one of the two women’s prisons down the road, before they filled up with people, and it could have easily been for classrooms. I think we have to have people really rethink punishment instead of limiting education right now.
LJR: Our budget is $13.5 billion for the California prison system. We now have housing in state prisons. The largest public, poor people housing is the state prison system. And so what we need is real housing, affordable for everyone.
SR: The ideas you’re saying Luis are so important to get out to the people. I think the more we can help arouse people through this campaign, the greater will be people’s participation in the overall fight for real solutions, real change in this country that you’re talking about. I really like the part you said about having those who are suffering themselves come up with the solutions, it’s really the next step. So, we want to say thank you for the campaign and we’re going to do whatever we can to help.
LJR: We need as many people, especially the poor, because they need to organize themselves on every level. They’re very disempowered. They’re very disorganized. We have to keep building, keep moving forward. We have to get that going because, as we’re seeing, there are some very dangerous people in this country, and we need our working class, our people, to get organized, to challenge it. It’s not going to be challenged if we keep fighting each other or we keep being cynical about everything. If we organize and build, that’s what this is about.
GS: Everything is political, helping to wake people up.
LJR: Awareness, study has to be part of this. Study the environment, study the real world to organize, but also to actually do things, make things happen. A lot of people feel cynical cause things don’t happen. It’s not enough to say, here’s the problem with this — what are we actually going to do? And that’s related to study and understanding the world so we can start doing and help our working class, help our poor push forward.
Sal Sandoval: I’m really glad to see you running. Coming out of two years of the Pandemic, people need hope, they’ve been so beaten up. I think running the kind of campaign you’re proposing is letting them see they don’t have to be locked into this system, that there’s an alternative choice. And I think the debate’s going to change drastically. If you get in there, it’s going to be between you and Newsom. He’s always been able to just say it’s between him and the far Right. You know, so it’s going to be a totally different debate. And we’ll relish seeing that.
LJR: That’s our strategy, that we can have those voices and those choices we need. Newsom is losing ground among young people and a lot of others, but they’re not going Republican. They don’t know where to go. It’s going to be a challenge. We’re making that challenge. We’re going to try to really win. It’s going to take a big effort, but it’s worth trying. And mobilizing the people who usually don’t get mobilized, that’s our goal. So thank you for that.
GS: where will you be speaking?
LJR: People should go to www.luis4governor.org, to the calendar. Get on social media, it’ll be there, and on the website. And then we’re going to move up and down the state. We’ve already gone to Sacramento, Santa Ana, Salinas, San Diego, all over L.A., Fresno, and the San Francisco Bay Area. We’re going to target key counties, especially the poorest ones in the Central Valley. That is our strategy. And, as we know, what happens in California has national implications. We appreciate people’s endorsement. I know it’s significant for the whole country to see what’s possible, and how we can move away from the binary of corporate politics in our electoral system. And to begin to organize our voices and our choices around these issues. So thank you for giving me this push forward.
Please visit www.luis4governor.org for more information, to donate and to join the campaign.
