The Brief

Artist Román O’Cadiz crouches down, dips his brush into freshly poured black paint, and adds the finishing strokes to the raised letters that spell out his grandfather's name.

He takes a step back and gazes at the finished mural, the painted words “Sergio O’Cadiz” gleaming in the sunlight.

The concrete relief mural in the entry plaza of Fremont Elementary School in Santa Ana was originally created by his grandfather, J. Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma.

In the last month, it has undergone a much-needed restoration led by the Santa Ana Community Artist(a) Coalition, a grassroots collaborative that works to promote and preserve public art through community-driven mural arts projects. The family of the late artist, who died in 2002, was also involved.

“It's cathartic,” said Román O’Cadiz. “It alleviates some of this frustration that my family has felt, and how his work hasn't been represented or appreciated in the way that we always felt it should.”

Decades ago, J. Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma was a prominent artist in Orange County, where he settled in the early 1960s after moving to the U.S. from Mexico City. O’Cadiz was instrumental in creating art for several of the county’s public buildings, including Cypress College, where an imposing brutalist concrete relief mural he made for the school’s library building still stands.

He created the Fremont Elementary mural in 1973, with the assistance of community members. The concrete mural spans two walls, set back from the street in Santa Ana’s Artesia Pilar Barrio, a historically Mexican American neighborhood just a few miles west from downtown.

The mural incorporates images like the sun, pyramids, and galleons, symbols that connote Mexico’s rich history. Over the years, neglect has taken its toll — there has been natural wear and tear, like UV damage and environmental degradation, and school district staff at one point changed the original color scheme of the stained concrete design. Still, O’Cadiz’s piece remained a timeless, powerful emblem of Santa Ana’s Mexican American community.

Peeling back the layers

Maria del Pilar O'Cadiz recalled the shock and dismay she felt upon seeking the extent of the damage to her father’s mural.

“It was tragic,” she told LAist. “These murals need to be conserved for our historical cultural patrimony, and it's a crime against the humanity of this community to destroy them. So this restoration is a realization of one of my lifelong dreams, and I'm full of joy for it — but it's unfortunate that we have to do it.”

Maria del Pilar O'Cadiz, the artist's daughter, visits the Fremont Elementary mural restoration site on June 9, 2023.

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The process of removing layers of saturated acrylic paint that were applied to the mural had to be done with care. It entails applying a special solution created by MuralColors, an L.A.-based business that produces art and architectural materials. In what is known as “delamination,” the solution was gradually applied to the piece in segments. Then a pressure washer was used to remove the paint without destroying the original art.

It’s a fraught but rewarding process, said Alicia Rojas, restoration project director and a founding member of the Santa Ana Community Artist(a) Coalition.

“This restoration carries a great responsibility and it’s important to us that we honor Sergio’s brush and vision," Rojas said. "It's a process that goes beyond the individual artists and parties involved — it's about our collective work, to uplift and amplify his art.”

Now, O’Cadiz’ intrinsic deep-relief patterns — rhythmic linear arabesques, abstract geometric designs, and Mondrian-like pops of primary colors — appear as ebullient as when the mural debuted 50 years ago.

The Fremont mural is one of two O’Cadiz pieces being restored at Santa Ana schools. An O’Cadiz mural at Monroe Elementary School is earmarked for restoration next. Santa Ana Unified School District officials say they recognize the district’s lapse in stewarding the murals over the years.

“Unfortunately, we have not always kept murals that had historical significance because we didn't understand,” said Robyn MacNair, art administrator for the school district. “We want to prevent that from happening again.”

A rich artistic legacy

Not all of J. Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma’s works have survived over the years, but he looms large in Orange County arts history.

“His work makes OC stare uncomfortably at what it never dreamed of when it came to its Mexicans: unapologetic. Proud. Talented. Successful,” wrote Los Angeles Times columnist and author Gustavo Arellano in an essay for a retrospective exhibit of the artist’s work and legacy at Cypress College in 2019. He quoted O’Cadiz from a Times article dating to the 1970s: ‘My idea of America,” the artist told the newspaper then, “is the right to be as Mexican as I want.’”

Roman O'Cadiz, the artist's grandson, sits among the products used to wash and revitalize the 1973 mural at Fremont Elementary in Santa Ana.

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O’Cadiz’s family shared recollections of the artist and his accomplishments with LAist.

Born in Mexico City in 1934, O’Cadiz attended the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) to study architecture, and along the way studied with legendary painter Diego Rivera.

He first established himself as an architectural designer, lending his talents to some of Mexico's landmark modernist construction projects and public works. According to his family these include the Museo Nacional de Antropología (Museum of Anthropology) in Chapultepec Park, on which he worked as part of the design team.

In 1961, O’Cadiz came to Orange County to work with renowned architect William Blurock, who is credited with designing hundreds of schools and colleges in California and around the world, along with other notable buildings. O’Cadiz joined Blurock’s firm as an architectural conceptual draftsman, his family said.

Orange County buildings that O’Cadiz contributed to include the Cypress College Library, home to one of his more famous concrete murals from 1967; the Santa Ana City Hall, home to a 1972 concrete relief mural; and Century High School in Santa Ana.

Though trained as a modernist, O’Cadiz introduced his expressive forms and diverse surfaces into the brutalist architecture of the era. His diverse body of work included paintings, drawings, graphic designs, sculptures and public murals.

Whitewashing history

But over the years, many of O’Cadiz’s works have been destroyed, most recently a well-known painted mural on Raitt Street in Santa Ana that had been deteriorating; after a solo artist tried to begin restoring it without permission, the property owner had it painted over in 2019.

In 2000, part of O’Cadiz’s Santa Ana City Hall relief mural was removed for a building renovation, his family said; sculptural fountains created for Fountain Valley's Civic Center in 1962 were eliminated and replaced with a prefab fountain.

A signature reading "Sergio O'Cadiz 73" is still visible on the mural at Fremont Elementary in Santa Ana.

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Another well-known loss was a 625-foot-long painted mural in Fountain Valley’s Colonia Juarez neighborhood, which O’Cadiz painted between 1974 and 1976. With the help of community members, the artist depicted the story of Colonia Juarez’s heritage and cultural history — images that ranged from the arrival of Mexican peasants in California at the time of the Mexican Revolution to a scene of police in riot gear dragging a Chicano youth to a patrol car.

That last scene, according to the family, cost him city financial support for the mural. O’Cadiz finished the mural with his own money, but couldn’t raise enough to seal it properly. It deteriorated over time, and the city destroyed and replaced the wall in 2001.

Rediscovering art that's 'like jazz'

Cypress College held its 2019 retrospective exhibition after completing a restoration of O’Cadiz’s monolithic Library Mural, outside what is now the Cypress College Complex building.

And as his Santa Ana school campus murals are being restored, local students have been learning about the artist.

In the weeks leading up to the restoration, the Santa Ana school district’s arts program and the artist coalition invited 20 SAUSD visual and performing arts high school students to learn about O’Cadiz.

Students attended a series of workshops, including a lecture from the artist’s daughter, Maria del Pilar O'Cadiz, who works as an associate program director in UCLA's engineering school. The students created their own art at Cal State Fullerton’s Grand Central Art Center, and took in a walking tour of remaining O’Cadiz murals in Santa Ana, along with other community murals.

Local Santa Ana artists work on restoring the O'Cadiz mural at Fremont Elementary.

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The restored Fremont Elementary mural will be officially unveiled Friday afternoon.

Meanwhile, the Santa Ana Community Artist(a) Coalition is getting ready for its next O’Cadiz project — the mural at Monroe Elementary, on which work starts next year. One of those working on the restoration will be multidisciplinary artist and coalition founding member Roger Eyes R. — a former Monroe student.

Eyes recalled the first time he saw O’Cadiz’s art as a child.

“I just remember walking up to the school and going, ‘What is that?'" he said. “I had never seen art like that, it just blew my mind. It was like jazz.”

A criminal justice watchdog is calling into question whether Latinos in the L.A. County Superior Court get a fair shot at bail.

The new report from the nonprofit La Defensa, which advocates for reform in the legal system, analyzes a sample of pretrial decisions from 2025 which had been documented by community court-watching volunteers.

One of the key findings was that defendants who were perceived to be Latino had an average bail amount of $157,700 — more than 15 times higher than white defendants and nearly three times higher than Black defendants.

Studies show that inability to pay bail can affect defendants’ livelihoods and their ability to defend themselves, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.

“ Most families — no matter what they did, no matter what they sold — cannot actually purchase that person’s freedom to give them the fighting chance to go against the state,” Titilayọ Rasaki, La Defensa’s state policy and legal affairs director.

The L.A. County Superior Court says it’s following the law on bail requirements and that the findings are missing context because observation is limited.

How court-watching works

La Defensa’s Court Watch LA program is a community-led effort to document and hold the courts accountable. They train volunteers to go in and observe cases.

The volunteers take notes on the charges, the judge’s conduct and the person’s criminal history, if it comes up. That then gets analyzed against publicly available case information and state law. Programs like this exist in several other cities around the country.

For the latest report, La Defensa volunteers observed 140 felony and misdemeanor criminal cases, chosen at random, between January to November 2025.

Judicial accountability lead Bryanna Siguenza explained how she decided where to send the volunteers.

“ I choose a department, specifically ones that are pretty busy, have high case loads, and are arraignment and pretrial,” she said.

What watchers saw

Racial disparities in pretrial settings have been researched at local, state and national levels, but La Defensa’s findings are based entirely on human observation, Siguenza said.

The volunteers are trained to listen for important details that come up in proceedings, but they may not always get the full story behind the charges, like a defendant’s criminal history.

L.A. County Superior Court spokesperson Rob Oftring said the report needs more context.

“Many of the report’s findings, for example, do not appear to account for charge severity or criminal history, both of which are legally significant factors in any release decision…” he wrote in a statement.

La Defensa did not include in its report what charges had been filed in the cases observed. However, according to the report, comparable charges still had disproportionate bail outcomes that “couldn’t be explained by charge severity alone.”

The severity of charges legally informs bail decisions. The Superior Court is required to have standard bail amounts based on the crime, which judges have discretion to adjust.

State law also requires judges to weigh issues like public safety in bail decisions, as well as the defendant’s ability to post bail. According to the volunteers’ observations, the judges considered the latter in just a quarter of cases when setting bail.

Oftring said the court has taken steps to reduce money bail’s usage as allowed by law.

“Bail at arraignment is set only after both the defense and prosecution have been heard and the judge has weighed the specific facts of the case,” his statement read.

The limits of the findings

Oftring said the court values the role organizations like Court Watch LA play in keeping the justice system accountable, but that the sample size of the researchers used in their report is too small to draw any definitive conclusions.

Roughly 272,000 criminal cases took place during that time period, according to Oftring.

Representatives from La Defensa said they know the report is only a snapshot of the system, and that human observation has its limits.

That’s why in November, they requested 10 years of de-identified data to analyze whether bail outcomes differ across judges, courthouses and demographic groups. Rasaki said they haven’t received it.

“  We would say release the data … by all means, we want to partner. We want to analyze,” she said.

Oftring told LAist they are working on several projects that “provide data-informed scrutiny of how the court operates.”

Southern Californians are in for yet another scorching weekend.

The National Weather Service has issued a heat advisory for much of the region through Monday, with temperatures expected to hit their peak on Sunday.

Highs in the San Fernando Valley, San Gabriel Valley and other inland areas of L.A. County are expected to range from the mid-90s to about 105 degrees. Downtown Los Angeles and much of Orange, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties will get up to the lower 90s. Beaches will also be hot — in the lower 80s.

Moving farther east, things get really toasty. Forecasters have issued a more severe extreme heat warning for parts of the Inland Empire, where temperatures could get up to 108 degrees, and for the Coachella Valley, where they could hit 120.

Humidity will likely also continue to add to the discomfort, but will be concentrated in areas closer to the coast, where it will keep nighttime temperatures relatively warm and make it more difficult to cool down. Inland areas will feel drier.

Those who are most at-risk from the heat are people who work or spend time outside, people without access to air conditioning and those who are either over 65 or young children.

Forecasters are also warning of dangerous rip currents and swells along the coast this weekend.

If you’re headed to the beach to beat the heat, as many Southern Californians likely are, they recommend staying out of the water or, if you do go swimming, stay in front of lifeguards. It’s also a good idea to avoid jetties and tidal rocks.

Wildfire risk

This weekend will also come with a high risk of wildfires.

Forecasters warn that fire danger will be elevated through at least Monday, driven by heat, dry vegetation and low humidity levels away from the coast.

Despite some extra moisture in the air over the last several weeks, there hasn’t been enough to actually produce rain. Without precipitation, and under consistently high temperatures, plants will continue to dry out and become fuel.

“We have humidity, but it's not reaching the saturation point. Therefore, we won't have a cloud. We won't have precipitation,” said Rong Fu, an atmospheric scientist at UCLA who specializes in weather patterns and wildfires.

Fu said a system of high atmospheric pressure sitting over the Western U.S. is pushing warm, dry air across the Sierra Nevada from inland deserts and into Southern California.

That can generate what’s known as downslope wind. Those winds plus the already dry conditions align to create some especially dangerous fire weather.

One spark can easily turn into a large blaze, and humans are the most common cause of wildfires in Southern California, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

People can accidentally start wildfires in a range of ways, including throwing a lit cigarette into dry brush or dragging a chain behind a vehicle, creating sparks. One of the most common human causes is improperly extinguished camp fires.

Lightning can also start wildfires but is unlikely under current weather conditions. Southern California has seen minimal thunderstorms this summer.

The new normal?

Heatwaves in the summer and fall are obviously not new for Southern California, but they are getting worse.

Much of the heat currently blanketing the region is being driven by the high-pressure system, which traps warm air and compresses it against the ground, heating it even further. Forecasters say it’s likely to stay that way through the end of July.

But high-pressure systems like this one usually don’t stick around this long.

“For this pattern to linger almost two weeks — yeah, I would say, from a climatological point of view — that's pretty unusual,” Fu said.

One major driver of the change, Fu said, is climate change: As the climate warms, this kind of “anomalous” high pressure system will become stronger and more frequent.

And one consequence of hotter and longer heatwaves, is extended elevated periods of risky fire weather.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Los Angeles will be under a heat wave advisory until Monday evening as temperatures show no signs of letting up over the weekend.

Temperatures will linger in the high 80s and low 90s in downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods, including Koreatown, Pico Union and Westlake.

The National Weather Service projects temperatures will peak on Sunday afternoon. Meteorologist Bryan Lewis with the National Weather Service said residents can expect more humidity than usual. 

While dense, urban centers have more concrete and see more vehicle traffic, downtown and the surrounding areas will not be the hottest locations during this heatwave in the Southland, as the Antelope Valley will be under an extreme heat advisory over the weekend.

During hot weather, the beach is an immediate go-to for folks that want to stay cool, but Lewis warns against this as the surf will be extra choppy.

The Pacific Coast will see large swells “coming up from tropical systems off the coast of Mexico,” Lewis said. “We are issuing a beach hazard statement that’ll be in effect through at least the weekend [which] may be extended.” 

While the weather is expected to cool down on Monday, forecasts show that another heatwave could develop by the end of next week.

Pools nearby

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Pico Union Branch Library

Felipe de Neve Branch Library (Westlake)

Pio Pico – Koreatown Branch Library

Councilmember Heather Hutt’s office recommends residents to rest in shade or a building with air conditioning and to stay hydrated with plenty of water.

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