LOS ANGELES — There were just two candidates on the ballot to represent Los Angeles' Council District 1 in the 2022 election.

Eunisses Hernandez captured slightly more than 54% of the vote, ousting incumbent Gil Cedillo. It was just the third time an outsider has beat someone already working inside city hall in 25 years.

For Hernandez, one of the first steps will be building a strong team to tackle homelessness and mental health issues in prisons. There are 41,000 homeless people in the city of LA, according to Hernandez.

It is the responsibility of elected officials, Hernandez noted, to transform the way services are delivered.

“A lot of offices aren’t built to really engage homelessness encampments, to provide services to our community members,” Hernandez said. “So building a team that can do that, preserving deeply affordable housing, protecting renters and producing deeply affordable housing are things that we want to tackle head on first thing.”

A self-described police and prison abolitionist, Hernandez is no stranger to local politics. She has worked to stop a $3.5 billion jail expansion in LA County, as well as help pass through Measure J in 2020, which funds community programs and alternatives to incarceration.

“What we have is a reactionary response to harm and violence, and crises and crime. The work that I’ve done for nearly a decade at the state level, on the county level, is to actually build the things that will prevent harm and violence,” Hernandez continued. “[To me, it] means not leaving people behind in our policy decisions, not building things we will have to destroy in the future… and not giving more money and more power to the systems at harm us.”

A daughter of Mexican migrants, Hernandez grew up in Highland Park and still lives there to this day. Being a firsthand witness to injustices, and seeing the impact systemic issues had on her community, Hernandez wants her work to have an effect in those areas.

“I, myself, am a survivor of harm and violence. And so seeing all these things, experiencing these things gave me a lens of not wanting to leave people behind,” Hernandez said. “[I wanted] to put our community at the forefront because, so many times, the harm that happened was because [we] didn’t have any power, or a voice to get the services that [we] needed.”

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