The Making of a Real-Life Hero: Activist Jesse N. Marquez Battles for Justice — And Now, Recovery

By Terelle Jerricks, Managing Editor

Superman is dead, Batman is lost and the Joker is president of the United States. Only one of these is true in real life.

On Jan. 13, 2025, between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m., Jesse was struck by a car in the crosswalk at the intersection of Wilmington and Lomita Boulevard. He has been in the hospital ever since fighting for his life.

Jesse is a community superhero, but his superpowers don’t include invincibility like the Incredible Hulk or the durability of Superman. Random Lengths interviewed Jesse about a week before Christmas when he stopped by our offices to give the environmental justice news update. We used the opportunity to interview him in-depth about how he came to environmental justice activism. Our readers got to read a part of that interview on Jan. 9. 

Every superhero has an origin story, and Jesse is no different. 

Most know Jesse for his environmental justice activism, but few remember that he was a civil rights activist first, who came of age when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and the Los Angeles Police Department became militarized in reaction to the emergence of the Black Panther Party and the Brown Berets. 

As a teenager, Jesse was a standout athlete and scholar, and he was already a community activist. He and his family lived across the street from the Fletcher Oil refinery on the border of Wilmington and what was to become the incorporated City of Carson on Lomita Boulevard.

In March 1969, there was a chain reaction of refinery explosions at the family-owned refinery which resulted in one dead and 50 injured. The blast occurred after a tanker truck blew up, igniting two small storage tanks. Those tanks caused eight more tanks to explode. The cover of one 600-barrel tank was hurled more than 300 yards when the tank exploded.

“The Fletcher Oil refinery, which is not there anymore, exploded in front of our house,” Jesse recounted. “It was about 5 p.m. … dinner time. Us kids … [we] were in the back room, coming down the hallway to get to the kitchen table. … Then boom, the explosion goes off. Knocks everybody down.”

Jesse noted that when you live across the street from an oil refinery, chemical factory, or explosive manufacturer, your sense of danger is different. 

His parents sprung into action by hurrying their three kids into the family station wagon after collecting Grandma, who lived next door. Jesse’s mom was pregnant with his youngest sibling. The family’s evacuation plan was to go to Jesse’s aunt’s house several blocks away.

The following is Jesse’s recollection of that night’s events:

While we’re all jumping into the station wagon, a second container explodes. So we all go running back into the house. So now on Lomita Boulevard, it’s after 5 p.m., there’s traffic, and [Wilmington] Middle School is over there practicing sports … there’s a real shopping center and then there’s a little industrial park over there and so cars are crashing into each other. There were two workers at the refinery, one of the bodies went over the fence and ended up in the back bed of the truck in front of our house. One of the big round lids ended up in the middle of the intersection so you couldn’t go over it. So then Mom and Dad said ‘Okay, what we’re going to do is we’re going to hold hands and we’re all going to run as fast as we can down to the corner and keep on going.’ Then a third explosion went off … a tank explosion larger than the other two. This one looked like it was blocks wide coming over our heads. So my dad says, ‘Okay, we can’t go that way.’ We can only go back. But then we got to the fence behind our house. 

Jesse, at this time, was a track athlete who specialized in cross-country running at Banning High School. He was on a Coach Pete Zamperini team that was able to compete with the powerhouse schools in track and field at that time in the city. Jesse said he still has a record that remains unbroken because the 160-meter race became the 200-meter race. 

As a preface of the next part of his story, Jesse explained that if you’re Mexican, all Jesses and Jesuses are nicked-named, “Chuy.” 

“So my dad says, ‘Chuy! Help your brothers and sisters over the fence.’ Then I went to help Grandma over the fence. Then my mom, who was seven months pregnant,” Jesse said. 

The plan was to meet on the other side of the fence and go from there to Jesse’s aunt’s house.

“As I was just getting ready to do that hundred miles per hour dash out of there, I heard a woman’s voice. ‘Boy… please turn around.’ I turned around and there was a blonde woman in her thirties holding a baby in a baby blanket. The baby’s face was burned. The blankets were burned and the woman says, ‘Please save my baby.’ She threw the baby over the wall like a football and I caught the baby. And she says, ‘Just run as fast as you can and save my baby’s life. Don’t turn around, don’t wait for me.’ That was my first experience, Jesse said.” 

Wilmington does not have a hospital. So Jesse took the baby to a clinic. He didn’t know if the baby survived. 

“They never contacted me and I never knew the name of the baby or the mother after that,” Jesse said.

Teen Post Years
Jesse doesn’t recall ever being shy about speaking up in the face of injustice, whether for himself or others. Jesse recalled working at Teen Post 108 in Wilmington in the late 1960s and working at the summer job program for youth. 

“There were about 30 or 40 Wilmington youth who went there every day for a job,” Jesse explained. “In those days, you didn’t get a nice job. All the boys did was clean up street corners and sweep weeds and trash in empty lots, and stuff like that. And that’s what we did.”

When the boys got their first paycheck, Jesse saw something. 

“‘Wait a minute,’” Jesse recalled saying. “‘There’s something wrong. We worked 40 hours but I only have 32 hours.’ And other people are looking on. And then my supervisor comes out. ‘What’s wrong?’ I say, ‘Well look at this,’ me showing him my pay stub. And then he says, ‘Okay. Let me go talk to the director or job coordinator.’ He goes away and comes back. ‘The job coordinator wants to see you.’”

Long story short, the job coordinator explained to Jesse that he did not get the other eight hours on his paycheck because he wanted to hire one or two more people. 

“‘We can’t have troublemakers like you getting all the other kids upset about their check,’” Jesse recalled the job coordinator saying. “I didn’t do anything. We opened our checks at the exact same time.”

Jesse wasn’t eager to explain to his mother why he was fired after only one pay period. He intended to turn over to her half his earnings to help with clothes and other household needs. 

Instead, he heard: “What do you mean you got fired?” she said. “All you’re doing is picking up trash? Go sit in there and wait for your dad.” 

When he explained to his father what happened, his dad told him not to worry. “It’s not your fault.” 

A few days later, however, Jesse got a call from the Teen Post director, John Mendez, the namesake of the John Mendez Memorial Youth Center in Wilmington. He says, “Hey, I’m sorry about what happened to you, but you know, so and so is in charge. I can’t interfere with what he’s doing. But I think I have something you might like … UCLA.” 

Jesse explained that Teen Post Incorporated had a special student leadership program at UCLA. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds from throughout the city were encouraged to apply. They lived in the dormitories and went home on the weekends.

The students ate for free in the dorm cafeterias and received a $200-a-month stipend. It only required a parent’s signature for consent and a ride to campus. 

“So my dad signs it and drops me off over there. I sign in and here we are sitting there in the classroom,” Jesse explained. “There are about 40 other guys there. It was all guys. There were no women in this thing and the guy gets up there and starts talking. It was a special student leadership that’s never been done before and it was put together to assist and work with youth that have special needs or different kinds of problems, i.e. drugs, gangs, violence.”

The instructors were all young, in their 30s, Jesse explained. And they introduced themselves. 

“‘My name is so-and-so and I belong to the Black Panthers. My name is so-and-so, I belong to SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinated Committee). My name is so-and-so, I belong to the Brown Berets, my name is so-and-so and I belong to Mecha; my name is so-and-so, the American Indian Movement.’” 

Jesse was classmates with the likes of Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party, Carlos Montes of the Brown Berets, David Sanchez of MeChA, LaNada Means (War Jack) of the American Indian Movement, and others.

Needless to say, classes in the High Potential project were left of center. 

“Our reading material was the “Declaration of Independence”; “The Teachings of Chairman Mao”; “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”; La Raza magazine… That was part of our reading material, plus interviews, movies, and other kinds of stuff,” Jesse explained. “So I’m in high school ’68, ’69 and ’70. Martin Luther King is marching, the Vietnam War is going on, and Cesar Chavez is organizing. And I was into that.”

At 18 years of age, high school seniors were and still are required to sign up for the Selective Service Act, but back then, due to the Vietnam War, students were required to go for the physical.

“I was No. 79,” Jesse said. “If you don’t know what that means in time of war, that means the top 100 goes right out of high school. I would have been gone, but I had a medical thing. So I got out of that. 

Jesse the Alien
As Jesse “The Activist,” Jesse often was the lone person holding the “Get us out of Vietnam” sign. 

He explained that that was the way it was during Cesar Chavez’s grape boycott. 

“There was nobody else like me or close to me [in Wilmington],” Jesse said. 

Everything was happening over there in East LA. So Jesse went to East LA to attend meetings and learn how to do things over there. 

“I was an activist all my life. But civil rights, that was my type of thing,” he said. 

It wasn’t until 2000, when he saw what the Port of Los Angeles had planned for Wilmington at Will Hall gym, that his rebirth as an environmental justice activist occurred. Click the link to learn how Jesse won the war against the port to address air pollution in the Los Angeles Harbor. 

In his more than 50 years of activism, Jesse’s brain and courage to speak truth to power was his superpower. 

Jesse is being treated for his injuries at Harbor UCLA Hospital. Amongst his peers in the environmental justice community, he has been a leader, especially in the Los Angeles Harbor Area. He has been a ubiquitous presence at every South Coast Air Quality Management District meeting, rally and town hall speaking up for a cleaner and safer future. Please consider donating to GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-jesse-marquezs-recovery-journey