This story was produced under The LA Local’s Youth Journalism Program. To learn more or to get involved, click here.
Fernando Isaí’s roots in a small pueblo in Oaxaca taught him that strong communities are built on individual accountability and, more importantly, collective support.
Those values stayed with him and followed Isaí to Los Angeles, where he interpreted English for his mother as a child.
Now at 38, Isaí interprets for his neighbors with the Koreatown chapter of the Los Angeles Tenants Union. The organizer was drawn to the neighborhood’s rich Oaxacan culture and now helps union members meet their basic needs.
“We’re accountable to the members that are putting in the work to make our communities better,” Isaí said. “At the end of the day, you’re responsible to the community.”
Isaí supports tenants directly through casework for eviction cases, filing harassment complaints, advocating for repairs, or planning rent strikes. His work also includes building trust through community movie nights and carne asada parties.
“It is just as important to organize to meet our basic needs and to meet crises that the tenants are in, as it is to organize for joy, to organize for a cultural community. It’s how you form trust. It’s how you build connection with people,” Isaí said.
The LA Local’s new cohort of youth journalists interviewed Isaí about his role with the LA Tenants Union. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The LA Local: What inspired you to become a community organizer in the first place? Was there a specific event that inspired you to get more involved in your community?
Fernando Isaí: The immediate way that I got involved with the Los Angeles Tenants Union was as an interpreter. I was working at a restaurant at the time, and a friend of mine was having issues. They were trying to evict him.
He got in touch with the tenants’ union, who wanted to help him organize his building, about any shared issues with the building, goals that they have for their units, for their building in general, and for their neighborhood.
Usually, the way that this starts out is by door knocking, getting everybody to come to a meeting, getting in a WhatsApp chat, and having a barbecue, having a carne asada. He invited me to that and I got in touch with some of the organizers and they said they could use more interpreters, so they put me in touch with a group chat that was doing interpretation training.
The LA Local: How is the LA Tenants Union organized?
Isaí: Generally, there are two formations: a tenants association, which is within a single building. The tenants have a group chat. They meet weekly or every other week or once a month, depending on their needs. That is a tenants’ association. And then the other formation is a neighborhood committee.
They also talk about and address things beyond an individual building. So we have found that a lot of our more successful formations come from having these connections already established – neighbors that have lived together for 5 or 10 years that have a shared language, have a shared culture, have a shared history, have a shared antagonist in their landlord, or their manager, or the city.
Another thing is that we don’t rely on outside sources for funds or our decision-making. Everything is member-based, so we’re a union in the sense that we advocate for each other collectively. Our strength also financially comes from the members themselves. We have member dues.
Those are the members that come to our meeting once a month, and every space does it differently. Our strength comes from them, but then also our responsibility is to them. We don’t have to answer to anybody besides our own members.
The LA Local: Can you speak a little about RUBS (Ratio Utility Billing System) and why it’s important to educate tenants about it?
Isaí: It’s a hot topic right now. The way it works is basically a tenant’s utilities are paid to the landlord, not through the Department of Water and Power. Usually in these buildings they have one single meter for the light, for the water, for the entire building.
Generally, these are older buildings. Sometimes in these buildings, the landlord just covers the utilities – it’s included in your rent. You don’t have to pay for your light. You don’t have to pay for your water. They don’t know how much each individual person uses in the building because they only have one meter. They don’t have individual meters per unit, and so what they do is they use some kind of algorithm which is kept a secret.
We don’t know exactly how much water, how much electricity we’re paying for. We’re just told to pay it, and some of these costs can be completely absurd, and they change substantially from month to month. A building with a unit with a single person might be paying the same thing as one with five people in a unit with like two or three bedrooms.
The LA Local: Since becoming an organizer, what has been your most memorable, or one of your most meaningful moments working with tenants?
Isaí: There have been some really clear big wins, [like] a rent strike, there’s a building right down the street on Western Olympic. They were on strike for a year and a half, which means that they didn’t pay their rent for about 18 months because their conditions were really terrible.
Eventually [the tenants] were taken to court – to eviction court – for not having paid rent. But the landlords were terrified of all this evidence being made public, and so they just kept postponing and sending offers through their lawyers.
Eventually [the tenants] did get an offer, and they only had to pay back 30% of their rent. What they did was every month, instead of paying rent, they would get a money order or get a check or whatever, and deposit that into a special account. So they ended up saving all of their rent money, and after 18 months, they only had to pay 30% of it, and they got to keep 70% of the rest of their money.
But honestly, some of the most memorable stuff are like just two, three weeks ago, we had a carne asada to share about a program where we buy food, vegetables and fruit directly from farmers. It was amazing, and it just turned into a party. There was dancing involved. We talked about the benefits of why we should buy from a farmer, the benefits of autonomy, which is something that we talk about in our own buildings, in our own neighborhoods.
The LA Local: I noticed there was a wide span of activities for the Tenants Union – like movie nights and English classes. Why are those important?
Isaí: A lot of organizing happens simply because we’re spending time with each other, and simply because we’re addressing the goal to meet people’s needs, not just at an individual basis, but also to systematically change the way that things are happening, so that nobody has to face this crisis again.
Some of this happens directly through casework, like supporting someone through an eviction case, supporting someone through getting repairs done in their building, supporting someone filing complaints for harassment in their building. That takes building trust, that takes people, that takes collaboration, and having these spaces where we are just spending time together.
Maybe you’re not ready to talk about it yet, or maybe you don’t know how to get involved, or you don’t even think you have capacity, but you want to be in the same space with someone who is trying to do something.
The LA Local: I know earlier you talked about how previously you worked with like every other tenancy outside of Koreatown. Is diversity the reason why you decided to do work in Koreatown?
Isaí: I started organizing Koreatown because I live in Koreatown. Generally, you organize where you live. I decided to live in Koreatown because there’s a big Oaxaca population here. I’m from Oaxaca, and that’s where I want to be. I love being able to walk around and literally see, bump into someone I know, bump into someone that might even be from my pueblo on a regular basis.
Koreatown has such a beautiful diversity. Like I’m so happy, I can get anything I want in Koreatown, like the Oaxacan ingredients, the Korean ingredients, the random ingredients from anywhere else in the world. And so it’s both a great organizing practice in giving and receiving, but it is also such a valuable thing in and of itself. Like it is wonderful to be proud of where we came from, and wonderful to be proud of our practices, our culture.
As a union, we are responsible to our members, the people who show up on a regular basis to our meetings, pay their dues, and support each other. Other tenants show up and are present with the tenant, and so we’re accountable to each other.
At the end of the day, like who you’re responsible to is the community, is a neighborhood, right? I would like to believe that that’s one of the goals of journalism, right? To make sure that you’re transparent, that you’re holding other people accountable to the community and to the neighborhood.
