Recent content on Chema Hernández Gil, A San Franciscan
The Ohlone design on the ceiling of the Old San Francisco Mission today On this day 250 years ago, the first wave of colonists settled in what is now San Francisco. Most were the Sonoran families of the Novohispanic frontier garrison deployed to establish the Presidio.
The sol side of the 1829 tlaco, with the liberty Phrygian cap Helping my mom trace our family tree has taught me that this process is as much about the lives of individual people as it is about getting glimpses into their times. It is about finding vital records and trying to understand the historical context of the people they represent. This is why I got this little, battered copper coin.
I’ve previously written about my family’s San Francisco , in Guanajuato state. It’s a town called San Francisco del Rincón, founded in the early 17th century as a república de indios , an “Indian republic.” This is the San Pancho my dad was born in and grew up in, the one I remember as a kid, and where I spent a bit of time as an adult. My paternal grandparents, María…
This Christmas reminded me of being a kid, with a little tree and a few very nice gifts under it. Luna got a couple of toys and some treats. I got a nice task jacket and some snacks. After opening the gifts, we had panes de dulce from Forma Bakery and I went to Christmas mass. Later in the day, we had leftover lasagna, then walked around Crissy Field in between breaks from the rain. Evening…
“The internet is dead,” many are saying . The arguments are persuasive: search engine results aren’t very useful anymore, ads are constant, and corporate social networks seem to be mostly bots sharing AI slop . But the internet has died before. I spent my youth on Usenet groups, chatting on IRC channels and downloading games from FTP sites. Now those spaces are ghost towns—if…
Published in The San Franciscan, 1884. I’m sick of the bustle and strife, And the men and the women I meet— This moving, breathing chaos of life That surges along the street. Silent and jealous and proud— However much I may seek, There’s not a person in all the crowd To whom I may dare to speak.
Being raised as an ethical vegetarian in the West meant being in the minority. It rarely caused tension, but when it did, people would sometimes push on my dietary choices by turning to the scriptures. “But God put animals on Earth for us!” I was told more than once over the years. And so I grew up taking it for granted that my family’s choices were not just exotic, but alien to…
The Story SF Chronicle editor-in-chief accuses the racist labor mayoral candidate of adultery and his dad of sundry immoralities . Candidate fires back, “His mom ran a whorehouse.” Enraged editor shoots the candidate in the street, once in the chest, once as he ran away. Wounded candidate gets elected Mayor of SF. A few months later, the mayor’s son assassinates the editor in the…
A new site logo has dropped: it’s a sea lion, sittin’ on a rock in the Bay, channeling Mr. Redding, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. It’s a reclamation of heritage, both personal and municipal. To understand what I mean by that, I need to explain its origins in a racist 19th-century rag. Illustration of the Beale Street Wharf fire of July 25, 1877 Coöpting a…
Baldemar Velásquez, president and founder of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) , spoke to a small group of San Francisco labor activists about the challenges of organizing migrant farmworkers in the Midwest and South. In the hour-long conversation, Don 1 Baldemar recounted more than half a century of successful organizing campaigns that FLOC has led. Lessons from the Campbell’s Soup…
Content & Copyright Unless otherwise noted, all original writing, photographs, illustrations, graphics, and code on this site are by Chema Hernández Gil and are protected under copyright law. These works are not offered under Creative Commons or public domain terms. You may not copy, modify, republish, or redistribute any of the material without permission. To request use of content or images,…
I mentioned earlier this week that growing up, I was lucky to have access to the Internet before the web. This meant I was able to take full advantage when I figured out how to use my dad’s dial-up account at Vanderbilt University during Christmas break in early January 1995. Being a kid, one of my first instincts was to find a game to play online. With web search engines still rudimentary…
What happens when kids grow up with powerful technology they’re not allowed to understand? We risk creating a digital world with few true digital natives. How public terminals, old Macs, and a programming teacher shaped my political imagination and tech skills. I sometimes think back to the fact that few people my age or younger experienced the pre-web Internet or remember the transition to our…
On the Fragility of Automation, Big Data, and AI The insurance industry markets automation as a force for efficiency. But when said automation introduces an error, that error can propagate silently across systems, damaging consumers without warning, accountability, or remedy. This is my experience. In 2020, after a catalytic converter theft here in San Francisco, my insurer ( Metromile , now part…
Last night’s meeting of the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC) was a procedural train wreck—a proverbial circus that would be amusing if it didn’t undermine trust in how San Francisco’s Democratic Party operates. Rules of order were nowhere to be found. I was there to support a resolution I helped develop: The Resolution Calling for Accountability and Budget…
I don’t upgrade phones for better cameras, brighter screens, or to get access to the newest cell networks. I like using my phones until they physically stop working. And my Pixel 4a, bought in December 2020, was functioning fine until Google broke it. The first week of this year, I got an email about the Pixel 4a Battery Performance Program . Buried in the corporate speak was the real message:…
In Una lucha más / Another Struggle , I wrote about the weight of carrying history: how every day is part of a struggle that started long before us. This reflection picks up from there but now focuses on how we live while we fight. Over a century ago, two of Zapata’s manifestos were translated into Nahuatl, a Native Mexican language, and circulated among Indigenous villagers in Tlaxcala. The texts…
Birthright citizenship is under threat in the United States, and Europe’s restrictive laws offer a clear warning of what’s at stake. A 2004 Swiss People's Party poster opposing two referendums aimed at easing birthright citizenship restrictions for second- and third-generation immigrants. Swiss voters rejected both measures. In the U.S., all children born on American soil gain…
In this political moment, I’ve been finding great comfort in the fact that Mexican civil society found ways to survive and even thrive while existing under an authoritarian one-party regime for the better part of a century.
Cette lettre a été rédigée en mi-janvier 2025 en réponse à la récente polémique suscitée par le PDG de Proton, Andy Yen. Elle a été soumise à un journal genevois, qui a finalement choisi d’explorer la question dans un article . C’est pourquoi je la publie ici. Une polémique autour du parti pris pro-républicain d’Andy Yen, cofondateur et PDG de Proton, a envahi de nombreux forums en…
My voter ID card and ink-stained thumb after voting here in San Francisco. This June, I was one of only 184,326 people in the U.S. who participated in Mexico’s election—out of tens of millions eligible. The results of this past U.S. presidential election have led to many “hot takes” from so-called political experts attempting to explain Latino support for Trump, leading to a…
Poisoned at the Source by Art Young, The Masses, 1912 or 1913. † To great controversy, the ultra-rich and powerful owners of The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times directed staff at these two dailies not to endorse any candidate in the upcoming, highly contested presidential election, which is currently a dead heat.
Remains of an automobile that collided with a streetcar in front of City Hall, 1929. Yet another person was killed crossing the street this morning —once again by a professional driver behind the wheel of a large vehicle.
It is just a couple of weeks until Election Day. I remain (professionally) focused on the San Francisco ballot—no choice in the matter, it’s my bread and butter 1 . That said, I did take a moment this evening to glance at the forecasts for the presidential election.
An edited generated pixel image of an old-school computer with the words CTRVX of the green screen After much procrastination, I finally deployed a snac fediverse instance today. Snac (an acronym for social networks are crap ) is a lightweight fediverse server written in C, the only programming language I still use. It is fast, has few dependencies, was simple to install and works well with some…
Rarely seen together: The Golden Gate Bridge and the northern lights. Taken this evening from the Marina Green, San Francisco.
Emperor Norton in carriage of State 1869. So some dude is having feverish dreams of turning San Francisco into some sort of nightmarish, tech-controlled dystopia. Now, San Francisco has always been packed with people trying to mold the city into their very own personal fiefdom. This dude just happens to have money and influence, so he’s getting more attention than most. He will, of course,…
El nopal y el puente.
Evening walk in SF.
A Generated Image of a Kenyan Content Moderator Anyone who was around the early days of social media remembers the horrible content that circulated. Our feeds are better now, in no small part due to the millions of dollars spent by large corporate social media networks like Facebook and Twitter on content moderation. But who are the people, the actual individuals, moderating the content and…
Green Check Mark on a White Table It goes without saying that knowing that the person you’re talking to is actually the person you think you’re talking to is important. That is why Twitter created the infamous verified blue check mark: People wanted an assurance that the Twitter account of a particular government agency or their favorite celebrity was legit and not some dude in a…
A Generated Image of A Walled Garden in Ruins I’ve been online long enough to remember how the internet was before the Eternal September . I also remember being surprised when I first saw an ad online—a banner ad on Yahoo, around 1995 or 1996. Since that time, advertisement dollars became the engine of corporate social networks. Twitter alone made about $4.5 billion from ad services in 2021,…
Sweet Thangs
Red moonrise
In between highrises, we have this wooden chair, sitting underneath an olive tree. For weeks now.
San Francisco street dimensions often don’t make sense, at least in feet. Many streets in the South of Market, including Mission Street, are 82 feet, 6 inches wide. Other streets in the Western Addition and the Mission District are 68 feet, 9 inches. In a city where any small change to traffic can become a pitched battle, these seemingly-arbitrary street widths show up time and time again.…
Below is the public comment I gave at today’s hearing on municipal bikeshare held by the Government Audit and Oversight Committee meeting of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
After four years of no updates, I figured it was time to post a short something. On the content front, incomplete posts are piling up and many ideas for future content are rattling around my head, but other priorities will continue to take precedent for a while. I have been able to find time to keep the technical side up to date, which is encouraging; it means I haven’t given up on this…
A challenging year ended with a beautiful, sunny day in San Francisco.
Wild Earth Pet Food : this is Tiny Luna. She’s a sweet and friendly little puppy that loves life and her family. A Chihuahua/Poodle/Pomerenian/Pit Bull/French Bulldog/Collie mega mix, she was rescued from Tullare County by the SF SPCA and now living in San Francisco. She defeated parvo, pneumonia and valley fever before she was four months. Today she loves walks along the Waterfront, running…
After last September’s earthquake, I had Mexico City (CDMX) on my mind quite a bit. Not just the city and its residents, but also what it represents to people in Mexico, both the good and the bad. I ended up going down a historical rabbit hole trying to break down this complicated relationship, which led to the idea of ‘ Macehual Urbanism’, a type of Indigenous urbanity that…
The Disturbance of San Francisco del Rincón is considered an important precedent of the Mexican War of Independence that freed Mexico (and California) from Spanish rule. San Francisco del Rincón also happens to be my family’s town, so it is something I’ve research and thought about. Around March 17, 1755, the Indigenous people of my town rose up and liberated their town from Spanish…
Looking up at a blue January sky from San Francisco’s glass and metal canyons.
Last evening walk of the year. Mission Creek, San Francisco.
A bit of aged pu’er, an excellent way to spend December 31, 2017
Harvested about 4-5kg of jerusalem artichoke yesterday afternoon from Seed the Commons ’ community garden plot in San Francisco’s South of Market. All veganic, no manure or animal input. No pesticides either. Great native plant to eat, raw or baked.
Working hard and getting ready for the Seed the Commons 2017 People’s Harvest Forum forum. Get your tickets today!
Yes, food is medicine. Sí, la comida es medicina.
Ending Friday by handfeeding some rescue goats, courtesy of the East Cut. Well done team, great fundraiser for the folks up in the North Bay!
The Untokening brought out passion in SF folks, mostly about mobility equity and transportation justice.