To Understand Nury Martinez’s Downfall, We Take A Look Into Her Rise To Power

Before her political career ended in disgrace, former L.A. city council president Nury Martinez was known as a tough-talking champion for the working poor and immigrant families. But after audio recordings were leaked in October 2022 that included her and other Latino leaders making racist and disparaging remarks, she became the poster child for anti-Blackness and colorism in some Latino communities.

About Episode 2 — The Rise and Fall

Episode 2 of the LAist Studios podcast Imperfect Paradise: Nury & the Secret Tapes explores Martinez’s background and her political career, and delves into the tensions roiling the L.A. city council in the months leading up to the secretly-recorded meeting.

In this episode, LAist Studios host Antonia Cereijido details how Martinez’s upbringing shaped her politics and leadership style.

Why you should listen

The tapes exposed problems that have long plagued L.A. politics. A year after the scandal, issues persist over anti-Black racism and colorism within the Latino/Latinx community, Democratic Party divisions, and the struggle to define Latino political power.

Growing up

Martinez grew up in the northeast San Fernando Valley, the child of immigrant parents from Zacatecas, Mexico. Her mother was a seamstress and her father was a dishwasher. When she was 5, her family purchased a home in Pacoima from one of the last white families on the block — by the late 1970s, the area was becoming a landing pad for Mexican immigrants. Martinez’s parents were undocumented, and her father was deported several times.

A flower shop on Van Nuys Blvd in Pacoima, the neighorhood of L.A. where Nury Martinez grew up.

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While other Latino politicians of her era were galvanized by the 1994 passage of Proposition 187 — which would deny a broad range of social services to undocumented immigrants — and the subsequent vilification of migrants from Latin America by then-Governor Pete Wilson, that was not Martinez’s experience. Her political ambitions weren’t sparked on the streets, but rather at home.

Martinez’s interest in politics began in the fifth grade, when her class was doing a mock presidential election. She asked her father to explain the difference between the Republican and Democratic parties. According to Martinez, he responded, “The best way I can describe it to you is that Republicans tend to be rich, and Democrats tend to be poor. And I said, 'so Dad, I declare that we're gonna be Democrats'.”

After many years of being a seamstress, Martinez’s mother had finally gotten a job on an assembly line at the Price Pfister plant in Pacoima, manufacturing shower heads and faucets. It was a union job with good wages and benefits. After the passage of NAFTA in 1992, the company announced it was outsourcing.

“I remember walking into my mom and dad's bedroom, and my mom was sitting at the edge of her bed crying. I am like, ‘What happened? Mom?’ And she couldn't even get the words out of her mouth,” Martinez recalled. “The company had said that they were gonna shut down and they were gonna move to Mexico.”

At this point, Martinez’s mother, and other employees of Price Pfister, began to organize to keep the company in Pacoima. Martinez said she began to notice how few of the elected officials they contacted were Latino and how even fewer were women. This, she later said, was her political awakening. Her interest in politics sprang from a desire to help working class people like her parents.

"My politics come from a lived experience. That's it," Martinez said. "I know what it feels like to be poor."

Running for office and developing her style

Martinez first ran for public office in 2003, when she campaigned to be on the San Fernando City Council. Then, she served on the L.A. Unified School District board. Finally, in 2013, she ran for a seat on the L.A. City Council and won. She was the second-ever elected Latina city councilmember in Los Angeles, the first in 20 years. When Martinez was sworn in, she wasn't just the only woman on the council. The mayor, the city attorney and the controller were all men.

Former L.A. city council president Nury Martinez with belongings from her council office, now stored in boxes in the living room of her home.

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Martinez quickly developed a reputation for being a blunt, brash communicator. In 2018, when dockless scooters were first introduced to L.A., she flatly reminded her fellow council members that her largely working-class constituents did not care about them.

“I don't have any dockless bicycles or scooters or any of that fancy stuff you guys got in your districts,” Martinez told the transportation committee. “We're just simply trying to cross the street without getting killed, just to put it all in perspective.”

Mike Trujillo, a veteran Democratic strategist who grew up in Martinez’s part of the San Fernando Valley, said voters felt she reflected them.

“She spoke like she was raised in Pacoima,” he said. “A little bit Valley, a little bit street. I think she's proud of that, and she should be. She got elected.”

Martinez used her brashness to her advantage on the city council, helping her whip votes behind the scenes for then-council President Herb Wesson. But it became a liability once she became council president in January 2020.

Nithya Raman, one of the more progressive council members who often found herself at odds with Martinez, thought Martinez was using her power as gatekeeper of the city council’s agenda to punish people she disagreed with.

“Things that I thought would be a no-brainer would take weeks, even months to get put on the agenda,” Raman said. “We had so many examples where even the most basic things would take a long time to get put through the council. And we couldn't always find any reason for why those delays would happen.”

Martinez’s bid for the council presidency had also put her at odds with former allies Marqueece Harris-Dawson and Mike Bonin — divisions that would deepen during the pandemic.

Divisions emerge during the pandemic

We interviewed multiple current and former L.A. city council members for this podcast, and they all agreed that being on the council during the COVID-19 pandemic was incredibly difficult. Instead of debating about housekeeping issues like paving streets and picking up trash, council members were debating how to help keep people from contracting a deadly virus and losing their homes. Deep divisions began to emerge between the progressive and moderate wings of the body about issues like whether to cancel rent, and protesters took to the streets.

Many Los Angeles city council meetings were held remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this Dec. 15, 2020 meeting, new city councilmembers from even-numbered districts took the oath of office. Top row, L-R: John Lee, Nithya Raman, Mark Ridley-Thomas; middle, L-R: Paul Krekorian, Kevin De León, Gil Cedillo; bottom, L-R: Nury Martinez

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“They descended on my home at six o'clock in the morning,” Martinez recalled. “And they were relentless. My cell phone number was posted on Twitter. So I had thousands and thousands of voicemail messages calling me every name in the book, threatening me, because I wouldn't cancel rent.”

The growing homelessness crisis in L.A. was another point of tension. In the fall of 2021, Martinez and the other moderates on the council voted in favor of maintaining a ban on homeless encampments near schools, parks, daycares and libraries.

The way she saw it, her district and other poor districts (mostly made up of Latino immigrant families) were bearing the brunt of the homelessness crisis. But for the more progressive council members, the ban on homeless encampments effectively criminalized homelessness, and it was another example of the city cracking down on the most vulnerable.

"I had conversations with Nury and I said, 'You know, if we do this [encampment ban] a bunch of Black people are gonna get arrested. We all know that. Even LAPD will tell you that that's what's gonna happen. We just went through that with the war on drugs. Why would we do it again?'" Harris-Dawson recalled.

But for Martinez, the safety and quality of life of her working class constituents was most important.

"The homeowners in my district would work really hard to have that little home," she says in the episode. "People in Sun Valley are housekeepers, hotel workers, janitors, construction workers, they're the people who we rely on for the city to move forward. They don't deserve clean streets or a clean neighborhood? Are we being serious?"

Deteriorating relationships

Over the next two years, relations on the council deteriorated, and Martinez found herself more and more frustrated and isolated.

Being council president, Martinez said, “made me a harder person because I had to defend myself. I developed a wall because no matter how you looked at things, um, no matter the politics of the council, somebody always wanted my job.”

Then, in the summer of 2021, two people walked onto Martinez’s property, spray painted her driveway and vandalized her car, dumping what looked like acid onto it. The political disagreements on the council suddenly felt very personal to Martinez.

“Can you imagine if that thing would've blown up?” Martinez said. “But I heard very little outcry when that happened to me. It almost felt that the two-and-a-half years of being council president and all these protests and all this criticism just became normal. I just needed to take it. Nobody cared. It didn't matter.”

By the fall of 2021, the tension on the L.A. city council reached a boiling point — just as the council launched into the once-in-a-decade process of redistricting, or drawing new council district boundaries based on new census data. For incumbents like Martinez, this process is live or die. You can lose huge numbers of voters who support you, or you can gain them.

Redistricting is the reason Martinez, council members Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo, and labor leader Ron Herrera were meeting that day in October 2021 when they were secretly recorded. They didn’t like the maps that were proposed for Cedillo’s district, voicing concerns that his constituency would be diluted and he would lose his seat.

Protestors demonstrate outside L.A. City Hall calling for the resignations of councilmembers Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo and Council President Nury Martinez in the wake of a leaked audio recording on October 12, 2022 in Los Angeles.

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And the months of tensions, of deepening divisions and growing distrust, the stress of people throwing acid on her car and protesting outside her house — Martinez says she brought all of that into the room, that it set the stage for their conversation.

“I've thought about that particular day, God, a thousand times, if not more,” Martinez said. “I was so frustrated. It's so angry and so alone and so abandoned by everyone, particularly other members.”

But there is a difference between being frustrated, and saying insensitive, racist things.

In the next episode of Imperfect Paradise: Nury & The Secret Tapes, which will be released on Wednesday, Oct. 11, we press Martinez to respond to the worst things she said on the secretly recorded tapes.

Listen to the latest episode

It's now available from LAist Studios. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts! Or listen to the episode here:

Listen • 45:41

Transcript

Listen • 45:41

Nury & The Secret Tapes: Part 2

Before the L.A. City Council tape scandal, Nury Martinez, the former council president, was known as a champion of working class immigrants. After, she became the poster child of anti-Blackness and colorism in the Latino community. Host Antonia Cereijido examines how Martinez's upbringing influenced her politics and the divisions that emerged within the council under her leadership, leading up to the secretly-recorded conversation.

Transcript