Hispanic Heritage Month 2026: Ana Hernández of Centro Cultural de la Raza

On The Finest Podcast, we cover the people, art, and movements redefining culture in San Diego, from Blink-182 to scrappy local bands. We also have Colts, a lost composer, a world record traveler, and champion birders. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome in San Diego. It's Jade Hindman. On this episode of KPBS Midday Edition, social justice advocate and community builder Ana Hernandez talks about her life's work. This is KPBS Midday Edition, connecting our communities through conversation. For nearly 60 years, San Diego's Centro Cultural de la Raza has served as a hub for Chicano, Mexican, Latino, and Indigenous art and culture. Ana Hernandez stepped into that role of executive director back in 2024, but her commitment to social justice and community building goes back much further. Ana has long been an advocate for workers' rights and immigrants' rights, and survivors of gender-based violence. She joins me now as part of our series highlighting local leaders this Hispanic Heritage Month. Ana Hernandez, welcome to Midday Edition. Thank you so much, Jade. It is such a pleasure to have been invited. So glad to have you here. Now, listen, you took on this role two years ago, but community advocacy work is not new for you. How has social justice work been a through line in your career?

Thank you for the question. And I think actually what you speak to is how I ended up at Centro Cultura de la Raza. So, I spent decades working, as you mentioned earlier, on issues of gender justice, gender-based violence. I have a couple decades of experience working on issues of sexual and domestic violence and then violence against and within LGBTQ communities. That work and my background and my own curiosities and certain gaps in the work led me to focus a lot on the experiences and the needs specific to immigrant populations, working class populations, low wage workers. folks who had been trafficked, you know, just a number of folks who were marginalized under any kind of framework that you might choose to think about, including within, you know, the work to advocate for survivors of violence. So based on that, you know, my interests and my work and my experience led me to From that work, when I was in Chicago, I was the director for a worker center, and our constituencies, our community, was primarily undocumented working class and low-wage workers in Eastside Chicago. And I owe so very much to community and organizers that I've met through that work, you know, just in terms of what they taught me about organizing, about, you know, the issues intersecting between, because in the U.S., you can't do really immigrant rights work without doing also worker work. Worker rights, labor rights work. And so teaching me those interconnections and those intersections and how to navigate and make positive change and build community even within those kinds of strictures, if you will. So when I moved to San Diego years later for personal reasons and was looking for jobs, Just to settle in and make community and also work while I was here, I came across Centro Cultura de la Raza. And it is that experience, right, in terms of that understanding and that experience of