Nativo Lopez, a long-time voice for the Mexican American community in Southern California and a champion of immigrant rights, died Sunday.
The former Santa Ana School Board member and head of the non-profit Hermandad Mexicana recently battled cancer. He was 68.
“Nativo Lopez will leave a legacy in fighting for civil rights, immigrant rights, educational access and community empowerment through civic engagement and citizenship,” said John Palacio, who served with Lopez on the Santa Ana School Board.
Lopez, an Anaheim resident, often sparked controversy. Some viewed him as a caring, committed fighter in the Mexican immigrant community, while others saw him as too confrontational and adversarial, caring more about his own political interests.
“He was as feisty as they come. But he always had his heart in the right place: immigrant rights,” said Rep. Lou Correa, D-Santa Ana, a long-time Orange County politician.
“How do you pay homage to a giant like Nativo?,” Correa said Monday. “This guy was controversial. He was a fighter. He was in your face. But he really changed the landscape in Orange County.
“Many people, many organizations, many candidates will talk about how they were the ones who came up with the formula to bust through the Orange curtain,” Correa added. “But at the end of the day it was Nativo Lopez’s magic in being able to organize volunteers, workers, people who have never been active in politics, that led to the beginning of Orange County turning blue.”
A key moment for Lopez and the immigrant community came in the 1996 House election to represent much of central Orange County. Long-time GOP Rep. Bob Dornan faced Democratic challenger Loretta Sanchez and, backed by citizenship and registration drives organized by Lopez’s organization, Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, Sanchez won by 984 votes.
But Dornan challenged the results, and a House Oversight Committee investigation found that 748 ballots were improperly cast. Of those, 624 were cast by immigrants, many of them Hermandad clients, who had passed the citizenship test but were waiting to be sworn in. The House voted to dismiss the challenge and no charges were filed.
On Sunday, Correa and Latino leader Zeke Hernandez were set to visit Lopez in the hospital and present him with a framed page in his honor from the U.S. House, where his accomplishments were recently read into the Congressional Record.
“He dedicated his life to the Mexican immigrant community,” said Hernandez, president of the Santa Ana chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens. “He did whatever he felt was best for the immigrant community, whether it was better housing, stopping excessive rents, and of course the fight against Prop. 187, and the renewed fight …in terms of comprehensive immigration reform. Unfortunately, his life was cut short.”
Lopez is remembered for his community work. In the 1980’s, he helped organize a renters’ strike among Santa Ana residents – many of them in the country illegally – and was involved in a successful national amnesty drive for unauthorized immigrants. He was influential in the creation of a 2013 California law that allows unauthorized immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses. And he was well known for many years for being able to regularly churn out hundreds of Latinos to Santa Ana City Hall and other locales, as needed, to push for their rights.
Born in Los Angeles, Nativo Vigil Lopez was a sixth-generation Mexican American who grew up in Norwalk. His first taste of political activism came at age 13, when he joined picket lines to protest funding cuts at a community center in East Los Angeles. By the time he was 16, he was protesting the Vietnam War and police abuse while becoming active in the Chicano movement
Lopez joined the Santa Ana School Board in 1997, but was recalled in 2003; he was accused of attempting to skirt state English-only instruction by promoting bilingual education. (In 2005, an appellate court ruled the recall improper because petitions were not translated into Spanish.) In 2011, he plead guilty to one count of voter-registration fraud after allegedly voting in Los Angeles County even though he lived in Orange County. He was sentenced to probation and community service time.
Those and other controversies, Palacio said, should not derail from what Lopez accomplished.
“His life story is empowering Latinos and working families and immigrants to become part of American society through civic engagement and becoming U.S. citizens,” Palacio said. “He left a legacy.”
In 2012, after leading Hermandad Mexicana for more than 30 years, Lopez announced he was stepping down from public life. But two years later Lopez created “Radio Hermandad,” (Radio Brotherhood,) a radio podcast aimed at migrant workers, families and youth – a project that lasted about a year. In recent years, he returned to Hermandad Mexicana as the executive director, said Sergio Trujillo, Hermandad’s Santa Ana office director.
“We have extremely big shoes to fill,” Trujillo said.
A memorial service is being planned. He is survived by his wife, Maria Rosa Lopez and his children, Aime Lopez, Taina Lopez, Xel’ha Lopez and Olmo Lopez.
