On the Life & Labors of your Correspondent

Welcome to my little vanity project. I’m Chema Hernández Gil—foiled engineer, onetime media activist and journalist, and nowadays, a full-time union organizer stumping for the working class in San Francisco.

Why a San Franciscan?

I started this project in 2011, when I was surprised to find the domain above available. It felt meant to be. Even though I have only lived in San Francisco, California since 2010, my first memories were in a San Francisco—my family’s San Pancho in Guanajuato, where our roots stretch back to the 17th century, before Mexico was Mexico and when San Pancho was just one of many Indian Republics.

From the Bajío to the Bay

I’m North American through and through, raised in the Mexican Bajío, on the Canadian shore of Lake Ontario and in Middle Tennessee, all located neatly in the Northern American biogeographical realm.

I spent my early adulthood around the Léman, including too many years studying at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), programming environmental management software and doing media activism as an independent journalist with Indymedia.

These days I work as a labor organizer, walk Luna around the Embarcadero, camp up and down California when I can, and dive into geeky projects when I can’t. My tech teeth were cut on Pascal, K&R C, and VAX/VMS—pre-Eternal September. These days, I still code what I need like I make pancakes: from scratch, with a predilection for a nimble ANSI C stack using OSS libraries.

Organizing and Service

I had the good fortune of being raised vegetarian and became vegan in 2003. I co-founded Seed the Commons, a grassroots organization that works to create sustainable and just food systems that are independent of animal exploitation. You can donate to support our important work here.

I was a member of the San Francisco Redistricting Task Force, tasked with redrawing the district lines for 2022 to 2032. It was, as one City staffer put it, “the most intense deliberative body in California”. My exhaustive thoughts on that process and on the final redistricting map can be found in the official Final Report, under my Member Statement, starting on page 41.

For nearly a decade, I was also a member of the East Cut Community Benefit District board of directors (and voted for the name “East Cut”). I’m also a former elected board director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and a former elected member of the Sierra Club, San Francisco local group executive committee.

Communications & Correspondence

You can follow me in the fediverse. I also have a more active, more ephemeral presence at ctrvx.net/chema. This site and a few other things are on Github. You can verify most of these accounts and find my PGP key using Keyoxide.