During a Journey to Change the World, He Changes Direction to Find Himself

Two years ago, Miguel Hernandez abandoned his budding career as a civil engineer for a job that paid little and demanded much. He took a $10,000 pay cut and took on his new task: changing the world.

Miguel became a full-time community organizer, hired by a nonprofit group that works through churches to mobilize people and motivate them to transform their own lives. He was soon assigned to his hometown of Santa Ana, a place that could use a little transforming.

Miguel’s choice was just the start of a long, winding road of self-discovery. Today, after stumbling over doubts and setbacks, the former high school wrestler has again retreated from his work and is about to embark on a new journey that will lead he knows not where.

As a community organizer, Miguel’s schedule was grueling. Forty home visits per week. Forty introductions to 40 strangers by the reserved young man who was so shy as a teenager that he hated meeting new people after Mass on Sundays.

Now it was his job to bring other people out. No more hiding his head in math books and planning maps. This work was one-on-one. Miguel had to get people to trust him so they would share their concerns and dreams.

Then came the hard part. He had to convince them to confront their own problems and pursue their own solutions.

His organization judged him by how well he moved the masses: How many community meetings did he organize? How many people came? How many new leaders did he develop? How much difference did it all make to these immigrant neighborhoods with the highest poverty rates in Orange County?

To Miguel, success as an organizer became a measure of his self-worth, a test of his identity.

Last spring, he helped organize a mass meeting, or “action,” to press politicians to finish a long-delayed community center in Delhi, an old, underserved barrio. He expected 500 people from the six congregations in his area. Fewer than 300 showed up.

He was so dazed by his disappointment that night that he was unable to deliver the routine report to his co-workers from the Orange County Congregation Community Organization, or OCCCO. Miguel, who once enrolled in Toastmasters to overcome his fear of public speaking, was speechless.

He couldn’t stop wondering what he had done wrong.

“I mean, it’s a hard hit to take,” he said recently. “You put yourself on the line, and if people don’t show up, you feel crushed. It’s like trying to throw a birthday party for yourself and find out you’ve got no friends.”

Miguel, 28, felt so crushed by this and other perceived failures that he eventually quit.

“That’s part of the pressure Miguel puts on himself,” said Corey Timpson, OCCCO’s director. “Of course, we can always get bigger and better, but 300 people is still significant turnout for a church.”

Even so, Miguel decided to leave his community organizing job by the end of the year. But he’s not going back to being an engineer. He plans to leave for Mexico soon, to visit relatives in Zacatecas and travel to Mexico’s many places of pilgrimage.

Organizers need to draw on a strong sense of personal identity, he said. They need self-confidence to lead. They must be sure of who they are so they can reach out to others who may be different.

“Organizing is more of an art,” says Miguel, a U.S.-born graduate of Cal Poly Pomona. “You can’t just follow a procedure. You have to know yourself and put yourself out there in a powerful way.”

Miguel is looking to his roots for that inner strength, turning to his ancestral motherland for clues about hidden sides of himself.

“The first battle is internal,” he said.

Well, not exactly. Before departing, Miguel had to first battle the DMV. When he recently tried to renew his license, he found that some scoundrel had stolen his official identity. He was wanted for drunk driving in Fontana, for back taxes by the IRS, and for $6,000 in bad debt by angry creditors.

The real Miguel Angel Hernandez had to hire a lawyer to convince skeptical judges and bureaucrats they had the wrong man.

“I’m confused now about who I am,” joked Miguel, almost done clearing his name. “This all must be part of my journey.”

Miguel is the middle of five siblings, “supposedly the neglected one.” In childhood photos, his freckly face and sweet smile say he was a good kid. You can still see some of that innocent boy in his kind eyes.

His parents, Feliciano and Maria Luisa, are down-to-earth folks, a laborer and a housewife who take daily walks through the blue-collar Santa Ana neighborhood, their home for more than 20 years. Just up the street is Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, where their shy boy grew up to be a leader.

He was working for Caltrans in a safe, anonymous job when he saw an ad in a church newsletter asking for OCCCO volunteers. The call seemed to echo that nagging little voice he’d been hearing in his head: Somebody’s got to make a difference. Why don’t you?

Miguel volunteered for two years before joining the staff. He had early victories: leading a drive for a neighborhood park in Costa Mesa, helping Santa Ana implement community policing in his old neighborhood.

Miguel was less successful as a leader outside his comfortable home base. He was never able to connect with more middle-class, non-Latino, non-Catholic congregations.

He felt stymied at one small Lutheran church of mostly white, elderly worshipers who fretted about the demographic changes that had engulfed their parish.

The ladies in the church reading program weren’t up for transforming this dense neighborhood plagued by street drug sales, Miguel said. He shied away and “floated back to what I knew.”

But even on home turf, Miguel found frustrations.

Last fall, he helped organize an election forum for City Council candidates, held at Delhi’s Guadalupe Church. The public sat in pews facing the candidates, who had their backs to the altar.

A few residents raised holy hell. A church was no place for politics, they fumed. During the Oct. 27 forum, some people met nearby to pray for Miguel and the misguided souls defiling the sanctuary.

Months later, Miguel was still arguing with his dogmatic critics.

“I don’t understand how people can be involved in their church and not in social change,” he said with frustration cracking his low-key exterior. “Why should they feel we can’t speak freely in church? What we’re talking about is also sacred. We’re talking about our kids and their future.”

Miguel came to see the culture as culprit. The conservatism of Mexican Catholics, he said, is undermining the drive for earthly progress.

“Unfortunately, it’s preventing our strong faith from giving power to our politics,” he said.

Msgr. Jaime Soto, who’s lived in the Delhi parish since 1986, said the election forum was the first town-hall meeting held there in his memory. But as Latino vicar for the Diocese of Orange, Soto has participated in similar OCCCO meetings with invited politicians at other parishes.

Organizers should be judicious when using sacred public spaces for politics, Soto warned. But the church rejects the notion that religion should have nothing to do with political affairs.

“We have a moral voice to bring to the public square,” Soto said.

For Miguel, the Delhi debate again rocked his faith in himself.

“People started questioning me, and it shook me,” he said. “Am I wrong? Am I way off base?”

In his room at home, his private haven, Miguel keeps a Bible next to his bed. When I visited, he had it open to Psalm 139.

“Probe me, God, know my heart; try me, know my concerns. See if my way is crooked. Then lead me in the ancient paths.”

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.