Jesse Marquez, tireless advocate for La Porte communities, dies at 74

When Jesse Marquez walked into a Los Angeles Harbor Commission hearing room in 2013, he didn’t bring a consultant or a slideshow. He brought death certificates.

On each sheet of paper, he told commissioners, was written the name of a Wilmington resident suffering from respiratory illness. Sandwiched between two of the nation’s busiest ports, the neighborhood is lined with oil refineries, chemical plants, rail yards and freeways. It is one of several port communities known to some as the “Diesel Death Zone” where residents Most likely More people die from cancer in the LA basin than anywhere else. For decades, Marquez refused to let anyone forget him.

They knocked on doors, set up aerial surveillance, counted oil wells, formed coalitions, held demonstrations, fought legal battles and so on. Effective policy. He looked deeply into the documentation of the incredible environmental impact.

“Before Jess, there was no playbook.” Land Justice Attorney Adrian Martinez said in an interview. “What stood out from the beginning was that Jesse wasn’t afraid to write things down, to ask for things, to spend a lot of time looking for evidence.”

Marquez, founder of the Coalition for a Safe Environment, or CFASE, was surrounded by family on Nov. 3 at his Orange County home. His death was due to complications from being hit by a car while at a crosswalk in January. He was 74 years old.

“He was one of a kind,” Martinez said. “He had fierce independence and really believed in speaking up for himself and his community. “He played an important role at the center of Wilmington’s fight for environmental justice.”

In 2001, when the port was planning to expand operations and build a larger terminal, Trapac Inc. Driven by to extend further north to Wilmington, Marquez and neighborhood organizers pushed back, winning a $200 million green space buffer between residences and port operations.

When oil refiners avoided pollution caps imposed by regulators on Environmental Protection Agency policy, Marquez et al. The case Eliminated policy and successfully reduced pollution levels at California plants.

And when cargo ships were burning diesel fuel in California ports, Marquez and his allies pressured the state to adopt the nation’s first rule requiring ships to shut off their engines and plug into the electrical grid while docked.

Marquez was born on October 22, 1951, grew up in Wilmington and lived there most of his life. As a child, he had a view of the smokestacks of the Fletcher Oil Company from his backyard.

Years later, black pearls of petroleum rained down on oil refinery day in Wilmington.

Then 17-year-old Marquez heard the explosion and fell to the ground. Frantic, he helped his parents lift his six siblings over the fence of the yard as burning crude oil spilled across the street from their house. His grandmother was last over, with third degree burns all over the left side of her body.

“From that moment on, he always had Wilmington on his mind,” his son Alex Marquez, 44, said in an interview.

The memory shaped the battles he fought decades later. In college at UCLA, he crossed paths with young members of the Brown Berets, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán, and the Black Panther Party, later volunteering in protests led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.

“He started in that movement,” Alex Marquez said. “That was the reason he brought so many different communities into his work.”

After a career in space, he began organizing passionately in the 1990s, joining groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Coalition for Clean Air to oppose port expansion projects.

When his sons were old enough, he brought them to photograph and count oil wells, then put them on other projects.

He described his father as a conflicted man.

“When it was time to work, he was very serious, strict and had no patience,” Alex Marquez said. “But the minute the job was done, he changed completely. He was your best friend who brought a roast turkey and a six-pack of beer. He partied and relaxed better than anyone I’ve ever met.”

Marquez’s house was always full of dogs — he jokingly called his lawyers his “legal beagles,” Martinez recalled. He loved reggae music, dancing and was an avid archaeologist. He kept a collection of colonial maps showing the migration of the Aztec people, part of what his son calls his “love of Native American and Aztec culture.”

He founded CFASE with a group of Wilmington residents. After learning about the plans to develop the port, he hosted a formal meeting at his home. There, residents shared their experiences of industrial pollution in Wilmington.

They talked about the oil explosion 1969, 1984, 1986, 1991, 1992, 1995, 1996 and 2001.

“Then someone says, ‘Well, I have two kids and they have asthma,'” Jesse Marquez recalled in the media. interview In January “And then someone else says, ‘All three of my kids have asthma – my mom has asthma – I have asthma.’

The group will play a central role in developing the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach’s Clean Air Action Plan and Clean Truck Program, which will replace more than 16,000 diesel vessels with cleaner models.

It has pushed for zero-emission truck rallies, solar power installations, and won millions of dollars for communities for public health and air quality projects.

The coalition helped negotiate $60 million in the China Shipping Terminal case — securing local health grants, truck retrofit funds and the first port community advisory committee in the United States — and later helped create the Harbor Community Benefit Foundation, which funds air filtration, land use, and job training and the Sandro Training Initiative.

Marquez’s group also fought proposals for natural gas liquefaction terminals, oil tank farms and hydrogen power plants.

Since 2005, there have been diesel emissions in the Port of Los Angeles 90% reduced.

Now Alex Marquez finds himself suddenly in charge of the nonprofit his father created.

He learned to manage the group’s finances, set up surveillance equipment and reconnected with his network of allies.

“It’s really a crash course in how to run a nonprofit,” he said. “But we keep it alive.”

In Wilmington, residents point to visible symbols of Marquez’s work: a waterfront park, electrified port terminals and a health survey that documented decades of disease.

In a tribute to Marquez, Martínez wrote: “He left us too soon, but a movement that started decades ago has now blossomed into national and even international networks.”

Márquez knows his sons Alex Márquez, Danilo Márquez, Rado Elescu and many others who, he says, are writing the environmental justice movement.