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Miguel Hernández was a conciliator with CRS from 1971-1977 and then again from 1988-1995.
There are 3 parts of this interview and a summary: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 and The Summary This is Part 1.
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Bill Froehlich (00:00:00): Let's just go before we get into the substance, Miguel, let's go over some of the details. Can you just spell your name for the record?
Miguel Hernández (00:00:08): Okay. Miguel, Miguel middle initial J last name Hernandez or Hernández Hernandez.
Bill Froehlich (00:00:23): Wonderful. And can you really quickly describe when you worked with CRS and in what positions?
Miguel Hernández (00:00:32): Yes. I worked with CRS starting in about mid 1971, and then I left the agency. I think it was 1976 or 78. I'll have to check my notes. And then I came back in 1980 and stayed there until 1990. No, I came back in 1986, I'm sorry, 1986 and then I stayed there until 1998 when I was RIF'd reduced in force laid off, as they say in plain English. And I was fortunate enough because I had a lot of federal seniority that landed job with DEA, which is the direct opposite of CRS. And I stayed there until September 14th, 1998 when I retired.
Bill Froehlich (00:01:38): Very good. Thank you. Can you tell us a little bit about your career trajectory before you went to CRS the first time and what brought you back to CRS the second time?
Miguel Hernández (00:01:49): Okay, all right. I was first employed by the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity, otherwise known as OEO, the anti-poverty agency, and I was in the New York regional office. And basically I was a grants officer slash field representative assigned to work with various community action program agencies CAPs as they were called ... reviewing initially reviewing and approving their grants for a whole series of anti-poverty programs, ranging from head start to housing to on the job training, anti-hunger programs, you know, feeding programs, legal services and on the job training program. So it was a variety of programs that came before me and I got the applications each year and went over them, make sure the all the right boxes were checked and analyzed and the math was right and all that kind of stuff.
Miguel Hernández (00:03:09): And then I sent it on up the line to, to be reviewed by ... people who are of higher grade and supposedly higher intelligence than me. So ... President Johnson, like CRS basically started this program off the ground and he felt it would be a more effective program that had been in place before, because they required that each program have maximum feasible participation by the poor people, meaning that they would be on the boards, they'd be in the decision making process, they some of them would be employed on these agencies and so forth. But these agencies were riddled with a lot of problems and, and a lot of them stem from complaints that they were not effective, you know, that they wasted the money and you know, so forth.
Miguel Hernández (00:04:19): And so I had to go out there. And many of these complaints came from conservative elements in the community ... and local politicians as well. So ... but in addition to improving these programs, the bulk of my time was actually spent in ... settling differences between the, these conservative elements and the opponents elements and the community action agencies of their boards, their executive directors and so on. But, I never saw it as mediation. In fact, I didn't even know what mediation meant, you know, so I really saw myself as I fancied myself, I should say, as ... some kind of a diplomat, you know, that would go back and forth, you know ... on the most domestic level, you know what I mean? So ... I've back and forth and these war parties and try to kind of calm the waters, so to speak. And, and, um, so that took up a lot of my took up my time, but in addition to, you know, reviewing the grants and all that stuff. So I was constantly not in the office. I was out there in the field, so to speak most of the time and a lot of them involved, like, you know, late night meetings and ... meetings in all sorts of weird places and, you know, and so forth. So it wasn't an ordinary job.
Bill Froehlich (00:05:50): I'll just note that I appreciate that how you were resolving conflict with the political hue to it from the outset in this position. Yeah. And I'm certain we'll get to more of that later.
Miguel Hernández (00:06:00): Okay. Yes. Anyway ... I basically got involved with the CRS during the Newark riots of 1967, New Jersey blew up in 1967. We had riots in Newark, Plainfield, New Jersey, where I spent a lot of my time ... and Patterson, New Jersey. And there I met Victor Risso of CRS regional office in ... New York and a guy named Joe Ford, who was, who ran the satellite office of CRS ... in Newark, New Jersey. And we were constantly during those tense moments in those communities, I would run into them. And we became familiar, we became friends and we then decided to kind of, you know, merge our efforts or, you know, what do you call it, add to our efforts each other's efforts. And so we worked on things like setting up with the CAPs, having them, employees of the CAPs, go out into the communities and go door to door into the neighborhoods where there were, the problems were happening and asking people to not be on the streets and, you know, stay off the streets.
Miguel Hernández (00:07:32): You know, particularly in the evenings when, when a lot of stuff was happening and you know, some people did and some people didn't, you know, but that's what we did. So in other words, we made the CAP kind of peacemakers, you know, calming situation down that kind of stuff, and networked. And we also got them involved in what I call rumor verification centers. And I don't call them rumor control because I felt you can't control rumors, you know, you really can't. And so, we were there when, you know, reports come in and said, you know, this is happening in this park and this and that, blah, blah, blah. We would send somebody out there. Okay. And they would call back and they say, no, you know, 600 people are not marching on the police headquarters or whatever, you know, whatever it was.
Miguel Hernández (00:08:27): Oh, yes, they are. And, you know, blah, blah, blah. So, this, then the word got out into the community as to basically was happening. So people in the community more or less knew what was happening, not just what was you know, on the news and things that they heard and so forth and so on, they could call in and verify that ... whether it was true or not. So that worked fairly well. And there was a guy in the Washington DC office in the headquarters, his name was Art... oh gosh, I can't remember his name at the this minute. But anyway, Art was a media guy had come to CRS from the media and he ... helped us in designing these rumor verification centers and ... you know, giving us advice what to do, what not to do and so forth and so on.
Miguel Hernández (00:09:20): So it was very, it was a good collaboration between, myself as ... at OEO. And also there were other people on my OEO team as well, you know, it wasn't just me. So OEO had a, I had a presence in the community in addition to two guys from CRS. So anyway, so we worked together and ... you know, everything worked out fairly well. But you know, the CAPs, you know, no matter what the CAPs were accused, particularly Newark of fermenting the riots. And ... one day I got a visit from, I was told to come back to the back to headquarters in Manhattan and there were two investigators there. I think they were from the FBI, but, or they were from some senator's office, you know, and they were doing a report that was gonna go to Congress and they were asking me what was going on.
Miguel Hernández (00:10:26): So I told 'em what was happening. And then I invited, I said, why don't you come out and see for yourself? You know, what's going on. You know, don't take my word for it, you know, see what's happening. So anyway they did that. And, so far I never heard more about this, but, on some level it made years later it made its way into the ... into the Turner report, you know, as to what was going on and so forth. I mean, I wasn't mentioned and so forth, but, you know, the general idea that the CAPs were not, you know, the instigators of these situations. So anyway, in 1970, I left OEO and I went to become executive deputy executive director of the East Holland Tenant Council because I, you know, the money was not that good. You know, I was really a low level OEO employee.
Miguel Hernández (00:11:30): I was like a, you know, GS-7 or GS-9 or something like that. And, they offered me a nice salary and everything, and I went there, but, no surprise I did find the job kind of boring. It was basically an administrative job, you know, keeping people's time cards and stuff like that, you know? So .. Victor and Wally Warfield rescued me from that. And they offered me, they wanted me to come work with CRS because they knew my work and they felt it was similar to what they were doing and you know, that I would be a good fit for it. So I went back, I went to, I joined the CRS at that in sometime in 1970. I forget exactly when 70, 70, and then it took a whole other year almost for the clearances, you know, you had to go before the FBI and submit all tons of paper.
Miguel Hernández (00:12:33): So you would get top secret clearance, why you had to do that I really don't know to this day. But, you know, they went around and they talked to my neighbors and, you know, some of them said, oh yeah, we know Hernandez, he's a drunk, he beats his wife, you know, I mean, they were kidding, but, you know, but that had that had to be clarified anyway. So it took about a year. And then I think sometime in 71, I think it was, I finally, got in the door. But at that time, Ben Holman, who was the national director of CRS, he had been a media guy in Chicago and he, he learned his ... trade there, I guess. And I forget which paper it was, but anyway, he had a different idea about what CRS should be and ... rightly so, he thought that instead of going out and, and responding to these riots and demonstrations and whatever was going on, it would be better to be a ... have a programmatic effort for CRS, meaning that what he did, because he felt there was that differences in ... the way people, minority people, particularly, but white people as all poor people, as a whole were not getting access to all of the programs and the benefits of various programs and, you know, and HUD, and, you know, all of the other agencies ... federal agencies that had federal programs of various kinds of benefits.
Miguel Hernández (00:14:11): So ... he hired people from various fields who were subject matter experts, not, not generalists like myself, but subject matter experts in housing, education, economic development, media, he was big on media and administration of justice. So some were police officers, some were correctional officers, some were lawyers, you know, some people had worked in the criminal justice system at one time and he felt that they could have, they could be kind of a, they would bring the expertise that was needed so that these communities could get, get into the programs and get the services. And everybody carried around the Bible, which was the ... a huge book of federal assistance programs, you know, had, was like a catalog of them, you know, and said, who was eligible, what they did, blah, blah, blah, and so forth. And then he also required each federal office, each CRS office to be part of the federal regional council, which was all the agencies met together once a month or whatever it was.
Miguel Hernández (00:15:29): And, you know, they went around the table, discussed what was going on in the community. And so that if CRS needed their resources and funds and all that stuff, that this could be brought up at a meeting with ... all these people in attendance and, you know, then the agencies, you know, they were, they didn't have to do it, but they could, you know, then they got word, you know, and so forth. So it was a nice effort, you know, but I was relegated to be one of the firefighters, you know, he still needed, they still needed people to go out, you know, when things were, were happening. And so that's basically what I did.
Bill Froehlich (00:16:17): You were a conciliator, is that right?
Miguel Hernández (00:16:18): Yes, a conciliator, but I never, I hated that title. I never used it. I see it as a concession.
Bill Froehlich (00:16:24): What did you call yourself?
Miguel Hernández (00:16:25): It wasn't macho enough for me. Okay. You know, I like to be out in the, and mix it up and, you know, with the people, so to speak, and be out there. So ... that's basically what I did. And then ... I responded to all the hotspots and I was so, and, um, let me see if I can remember here. I got, made myself some notes here. But, that's basically what I did.
Bill Froehlich (00:17:02): And so just so I have a clear understanding of the timeline, I'll dig in a little bit more. Yeah. You were at CRS for a number of years, when did you leave?
Miguel Hernández (00:17:13): I left in, I think 1978. Yeah. 78. Yeah.
Bill Froehlich (00:17:21): So you're there for about seven ...
Miguel Hernández (00:17:21): I have to double check, but I believe that was the time that I left.
Bill Froehlich (00:17:25): And you said you came back in about 86, is that right?
Miguel Hernández (00:17:28): Yeah, I came back 86, but when I left, you know, I said ... well, no, what happened was, oh, okay. Why the why I left? I think it's important. I had been at that, around that time, there was a huge dispute in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, between the Hasidim, the Hasidic sect, which is ultra-conservative. They belonged to something called the Satmar sets because they came originally from St. Mary's in Russia, which sounds Catholic, but, you know, but anyway, they came from Satmar and they fled, you know, at sometime after World War II and they settled in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg, an area that I knew a lot about because that's where I grew up. And ... at some point the ... New York City housing authority was planning to build another housing development in Brooklyn in Williamsburg.
Miguel Hernández (00:18:49): I forget the name of it now, but ... anyway, the Satmar wanted apartments there for several reasons. One was that many of these apartments had terraces and the terraces could be used to build sukkah huts. A sukkah is a, a temporary structure for the built for the festival of Sukkot. Okay. Which represented the ... wilderness huts that the Israelites built after they left Egypt, and I forget how many days the festival is anyway. So these terraces were available and they could put them out there before they put 'em on their fire escapes in the tenement houses in Brooklyn, but the terraces a little bit bigger, better, you know, so they wanted those and the Puerto Ricans wanted them too. You know, we want a terrace, you know, the, a lot of these apartments also had larger kitchens because they were for larger families, the Hasidim had larger families.
Miguel Hernández (00:20:05): And so do the Puerto Ricans. So they clashed over that as to who would get the larger apartments. The kitchens were particularly important for the Hasidim because of their religious practices, which required dietary issues, you know, where they would prepare food and so forth, you know, couldn't mix, you know, dairy and meat and that kind of stuff like that. And ... the Puerto Ricans, they wanted the larger kitchens too, you know, so, and then the other one was the elevators. The Hasidim wanted the elevators to stop on each floor on the Sabbath. Okay. Because pushing the elevator buttons to stop at your floor was considered to be work and they could not work on the Sabbath. So there was a lot of things. So that was the ... center of the dispute. So I got assigned to it. I went out there to see what was going on and I wasn't getting anywhere.
Miguel Hernández (00:21:04): But anyway, I called in our housing guy. Okay, hey, come on down. And you know, this is a housing issue. Right. You know? Okay. But he couldn't get, you couldn't get the first ... either with them, with anybody, you know, nobody was, you know, people were ... I'm from the government, I'm here to help you, you know, that kind of stuff. So they, it wasn't working. So then I said, you know what? I used to live in neighborhood, I used to know a lot of people in this neighborhood. So, when I was a kid, a youngster, you know, like 8, 9, 10, 12, like that, I was what they call a Shabbos goy, a Shabbos goy is a person who is non-Jewish but does things like turning the lights on, in the synagogue, on, you know, on the Sabbath, turning on the heat, you know, doing certain things that the religious Jews, not, you know, not the secular Jews, but the religious Jews weren't allowed to do.
Miguel Hernández (00:22:08): And, you know, my parents said, it's okay. You know, it's a good thing. You'll do it, everything. And they told me, don't accept any money from, okay, don't accept any money. Okay. This is just something you have to do or something like that. I don't know exactly how to put it, but they told me don't take any money now. I was kind of disappointed, frankly, I could use the money, but so, but I made friends, you know what I mean? It's in an normal thing that, you know, they would call me and there was a problem. And ... sometimes they would, you know, you couldn't use your key if you were Jewish to open your apartment. So I would open their apartment for them. I had, they gave me keys, they trusted me, they gave me keys.
Miguel Hernández (00:22:49): I, you know, if they, whatever I, and stuff like that. So, so I made friends bottom line, what was it? So I went back to the synagogue, which was not the Satmar synagogue was another one, you know, but you know, more traditional kind of a synagogue. And if I can call it that, but anyway, so they said, look, I'm having this problem. And I'm trying, I can't get the first base and blah, blah, blah. And could you help me? So it in other words, I got paid back you know, and they, they went over and they ... talked to this kid, you know, I was a kid then, you know, talked to this guy and ... he is a good person and we know him and blah, blah, blah. So I got introduced into the Hasidim community.
Miguel Hernández (00:23:39): And then I remembered, okay, who do I know in the Hispanic community? Well, Puerto Rican community, basically at that time with, Puerto Ricans now different Hispanic groups in Williamsburg. But, you know, I talked to some, I belonged to a group, a quote-on-quote, when I was a teenager, a quote-on-quote gang. But, you know, it was a, wasn't really a gang gang. You know, what a criminal gang or a violent gang. We never fought anybody, but we called ourselves the Ellery Street Bops Ellery street is a, you know, a neighborhood, a street in Williamsburg, you know, and we called ourselves the Ellery Street Bops. And ... we had a clubhouse, which was ... a vacant storefront. And, it was used basically to, you know, we had parties there, teenage parties. I won't tell you everything that went on there, but we had parties.
Miguel Hernández (00:24:43): And, so I talked to some of those guys and I went back there and the, believe it or not, the clubhouse was still there. And I talked to the guys and they said, oh yeah, we remember you, Mike. They call me Mike, everybody call me Mike, then, you know, oh, we remember you. And ... all that stuff. So, I said, well, look, I'm having this problem. So they said, okay, we'll talk to somebody where we know in up in Williamsburg, closer to where the action was, you know, so they helped me get access to that community. So I started, you know, shuttling back and forth because that's all, I really knew how to talk to this one. I never knew the concept of bringing people around the table, or I never really used that at my, you know, in that time. And, so, you know, conversations started going and that the word got out to the wider New York City community about what was going on in Williamsburg and the, you know, and the conversation.
Miguel Hernández (00:25:46): So I got a call from the mayor's office. At that time it was Mayor Beame, you know, so this guy says, isten, Hernandez, we know you're working out there and then, you know, we're, the mayor is very concerned about the situation, blah, blah, blah. And we wanna know what you're doing. And so, so they invited me to a meeting at Gracie Mansion, which is the mayor's house, man, you know, and it was a Sunday morning and I go up there and the meeting is held in the kitchen so the mayor is there, Abe Beame was a little short guy, you know, about five foot, nothing. And so we're talking the meeting, but he has other people there. He has, he had the police commissioner, I think he had, uh, Herman Badillo who was, I think at that time he was a, he was a Bronx borough president or a Congressman, you know, I think he was the first Puerto Rican Congressman.
Miguel Hernández (00:26:45): So Herman Badillo was there, the police commissioner was there. And a guy who was the head of the American Jewish committee, his name was Haskell Lazere. And so we're talking about, you know, this whole situation and you know, what should be done, blah, blah, blah. And, so anyway, they came up with a plan as to how they were gonna reassign apartments. I mean, it wasn't my plan, but they were, you know, I made some suggestions, but you know, they basically cooked it up and so I thought, fine, this is fine. This is great. This's terrific. And they went back and they sold it to the community, you know, because the house, New York City housing, all right, that housing, the guy who was the head of the housing authority at that time, he was there at that meeting too. So he had all the players, in other words, present, you know, New York City people present and somebody from the Hispanic community and one of the leaders of the Hispanic community, Herman Badillo and ... so forth.
Miguel Hernández (00:27:53): But there wasn't people there weren't the people from the, from the neighborhood itself. Okay. You know, this was like a top down decision. Alright. So anyway, it was done. But when I got back to next day, I got back. I don't know if it was Monday or Tuesday sometime during week, I was back at the office and a guy from the U.S. Attorney's Office shows up his name was the Dennison young and Dennison Young was the principal assistant to Rudolph Giuliani who at that time was the U.S. Attorney. Okay. And he was like very famous. He arrested and investigated a lot of mafia, people, you know, and he made quite a name for himself and this guy Young said to me, he says, Mr. Giuliani wants you to stop working in Williamsburg with this case. Okay. Because we are investigating a civil rights complaint by somebody in the neighborhood.
Miguel Hernández (00:29:05): I said, well, who's actually, he said, I can't tell you. Alright. And ... we are investigating this civil rights complaint and we are gonna prosecute it. Okay. We don't want you CRS or Mike, you know, we don't want you Mike, in this, in this thing, you gotta drop out of this thing. So I, you know, I called the mayor up. I said, I didn't know, you know, and they were gonna report me to the, you know, to the U.S. Attorney. No, you gonna go all the way up to maybe to the president. I don't know, but it was like a threat, you know what I mean? And, the U.S. Attorney, you know, is the highest federal official in the city of New York. And so anyway, so I called the mayor and the mayor said to me, something, something to you, if I don't remember his exact words, but he said to me over my dead body, you know, so I ... never heard anything more about it and, you know, and the problem was solved, at least that particular problem, you know, at that time.
Miguel Hernández (00:30:09): So that was, you know, that was what, basically, that was a, I think one of the more memorable cases because of the characters and the, you know, the whole, the whole thing was really, and in some instances it was very funny and serious and, you know, whatever. So basically they ... worked out a settlement for the, for how the apartments were gonna be. It was basically what it was, it was a lottery, you know, and everybody could say, alright. I don't know why I didn't think of that, but, you know, I was there when it happened.
Bill Froehlich (00:30:49): There you go. And if you hadn't used your connections to get things started, maybe it would've escalated.
Miguel Hernández (00:30:56): That's right.
Bill Froehlich (00:30:57): That effort to gain entry to get into that conversation by leveraging your contacts, it's just really dynamic. You said, you, at least at that time, you were shuttling, you were using shuttle diplomacy being a diplomat.
Miguel Hernández (00:31:13): Yeah.
Bill Froehlich (00:31:13): Didn't have conversations around the table. Later on in your career, did you have table oriented conversations?
Miguel Hernández (00:31:21): Yes.
Bill Froehlich (00:31:21): What brought about that change?
Miguel Hernández (00:31:22): Well we, at some point, CRS decided to get serious about, about that aspect of the agency. And, so what they did, they sent us all to training in, mediation and, they got a ... we had people from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, whatever it's called. I forget. And there was, yeah, that's the name? Right. And they had some guys who ran a mediation program in Manhattan. The guy's name was Arthur Barnes. And I forget the other guy's name, but ... one person was the Manhattan borough president. I forget his name, but anyway, they were central figures in New York, not for profit world, you know, whatever. They were very well known. So ... and they had a labor mediator who earned his, his stripes, settling transit disputes in New York city.
Miguel Hernández (00:32:37): Oh, geez. I can't forget his, I forget his name at the moment. I'm having a lot of temporary Alzheimer's, you know, but, I just can't come up with it, but anyway, he was, he was really big. And, so we went up to their offices and we had, I know a couple of weeks of training and role plays and all that stuff. And so that's how we got trained in ... mediation. So I had a couple of mediation cases and after a while after I came back, I think it was, one of them was ... involving a huge oil company Texaco at that time Texaco. And there were a number of ... black employees who filed discrimination complaints. And it was a big, you know, it was in the newspapers and all of that stuff. And it was in federal court and it so happened that somebody I knew, in fact, a guy who was lived in my home, my adopted hometown, of Austin in New York, was a federal judge who was ... his name was Charles Brieant. And he was, he was a chief judge of the Southern district and he was a conservative Republican. I think he appointed by Nixon or Bush. I'm not sure, but anyway, I used ... to come to work together because it, you know, it was across the street from where CRS was the federal building there and the federal court. And anyway, so he called me and said, you know, I remember you told me you work with CRS and blah, blah, blah and, yeah, I have this case. I wanna get it off my chest. I wanna get it off my table, my desk, you know what I mean? This is a mess. So he said would, why don't you talk to them and see if you can do something and I, okay. You know, Charlie, I'll do whatever you say. You know? So ...
Bill Froehlich (00:34:50): So this is, this is, a mediation. This is a formal court annexed mediation.
Miguel Hernández (00:34:54): Yes. Right.
Bill Froehlich (00:34:56): Work connected mediation, outside of your typical scope of work. Right?
Miguel Hernández (00:34:59): Yeah. Right. But, you know, I had some training in it, you know, I mean, I never really tell you be very frank with it, I never particularly community mediation, I never felt it was really, first of all, it was almost impossible to do because in most mediation, labor mediation, you have two definable sides. You know, you have labor on one side and you have management on the other. And you know, sometimes you have disputes with, teacher groups and whatever. And, you know, you can say who, who can speak for who this community major mediations, they're wild because a lot of people, you know, jump in and they're screaming for their side. And they ... you know, they're not accepting what leaders say. They say, oh, you sold us out. And this and that, you know, so there were whole different ... business people involved, you know, if it was a chamber of commerce, like, you know, a lot of times, you know, there was street riots and stuff like that stores being burned stuff.
Miguel Hernández (00:36:06): So they, you know, it was difficult. So, but anyway, I said, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna jump into this because Charlie Brieant is my friend I gotta do right by, you know.
Bill Froehlich (00:36:16): He's the chief judge of the Southern District
Miguel Hernández (00:36:18): You know what I mean? So I ... met with ... the Texaco people and they had, you know, they had the best lawyers, you know, they could hire, they hired some what we call a white shoe law firm, you know, that's what called 'em in New York. They, you know, they, in the summertime, they put on white shoes and, you know, those boater hats, those kind of guys, you know, so they had ... the black employers had very good lawyers, too, civil rights lawyers, you know, who knew what the, you know, knew what they were doing there.
Miguel Hernández (00:37:04): So, after a lot of back and forth, they finally agreed. And basically they agreed because Brieant called them up and says, look, you gonna mediate this thing. You know, he told them, you know, and you're gonna, you're gonna meet with Mr. Hernandez and blah, blah, blah. You know? So they got scared, you know, they didn't wanna upset the judge. Right. So ... I had leverage so to speak. Okay. So anyway, we'd go up there to, you know, we decided we were gonna meet at Texaco and they had the best offices and the best conference rooms and, whenever we went to these conference rooms, there would be all kinds of refreshments and sandwiches and all kinds of things, you know, just the right atmosphere. So we'd try to meet there and we'd start off the, you know, and I explained to what mediation is.
Miguel Hernández (00:38:01): And I told him I'm a neutral third party and I don't take sides. And I'm not a judge, I don't make the decisions. You make the decisions and you know, this is gonna be cheaper than the court case. And you know, why it cost less, you know, I told him I don't get paid, you know, like, so anyway, I gave that whole spiel anyway, I don't know if they ever accepted that or not, you know, but ... you know, we had, I don't know, a whole bunch of meetings. I didn't went back and forth, back and forth. And then, one day out of the clear blue sky, I get a notice. I get a call rather from a guy who's a lowly clerk, you know, in the mail room or something like that. I don't remember his name to this day, but anyway, he worked there.
Bill Froehlich (00:38:56): At Texaco?
Miguel Hernández (00:38:58): Yeah. At Texaco and ... he was ... white himself. He wasn't a, he wasn't a minority person. And he told me he had, he had information to the facts there he had heard conversations and he had documentation and all stuff that these Texaco employees, higher level people had in fact discriminated in one way or another against the black, you know? And I said, well, that's very interesting, but I don't know that, you know, I'm, you know, I'm here to try to settle the case. I'm not prosecuted. I'm not deciding who's guilty and who's innocent. Okay. That's not my, that's not what I have to do. So I said, but if you have something, you know, that, that borders on that, the right party to handle that is the justice department, you know? And so, and you gotta, you know, but anyway, this guy didn't do that either.
Miguel Hernández (00:40:04): He went to the media and bam, the whole case blew up in my face, you know, the whole mediation, because now he went to, he went to the lawyers, he went to the media media for the, they sent him to the Texaco. They sent rather to the civil rights lawyers, you know, and the guy called me from the civil rights group and said, forget it, Miguel, this case is over, you know, and that's what happened, you know? So, Texaco altered, they went back to the court. I told the judge what happened. Obviously I had to report them to, you know, I didn't report them every single detail of it. He didn't want to know that, but I told him, I said, I told him, I said, this is not going any further. And he said, well, why not? I said, well, this guy is revealing everything, you know, what happened and so forth. So it's out of my ... it's beyond mediation. So anyway, that's what happened to my famous top level media making mediation.
Bill Froehlich (00:41:16): Can only control what you can control.
Miguel Hernández (00:41:17): That's right. You can't control these things.
Bill Froehlich (00:41:19): That's right. Well, that, that is fascinating. And it's amazing to me that you did that in your capacity as a CRS conciliator. But outside the scope of your normal work there was flexibility in office to do that.
Miguel Hernández (00:41:33): Oh, one more thing if I may on that, on that thing.
Bill Froehlich (00:41:36): Yeah.
Miguel Hernández (00:41:36): I don't know, six months later, a year later, I forget what it was. I get a call from this guy who was a writer and he had writing a book on behalf ... ghost writing a book on behalf of the ... of the complainants. Okay. Telling the whole story of how what's, what thing, you know, and I thought it was a bad idea because anyway, so he wanted to know chapter and verse what happened. He wanted to get my version of what happened. And I was under this not secrecy. What do you call it? Confidentiality clause. You know, where people CRS are not to reveal publicly what they're doing and everything like that. I don't know how for how long that's supposed to last.
Miguel Hernández (00:42:33): I mean, statute limitations has gone now. You know, I've been gone for more than 20 years from CRS, but anyway, so I told him, I'm sorry, I can't tell you, you know, anything, anything at all about this, about the mediation. I said there was a mediation and you know, how it ended. Okay. So they wrote the book, he wrote a book, he put my name on it. It wasn't, what do you call it? Complimentary to me I was, I had my nose red, you know, by that, you know, but anyway, yeah that was a, that was the case. But you know, we, other times ... there were mediations of a kind between when I had parties, community parties together and so forth. But as I said, you, they were wild and woolly and you know, sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't, I don't know what my percentage was, you know, but it, I wasn't batting 500. I can tell you that.
Bill Froehlich (00:43:42): Okay. So I, so just a couple other markers for me. So what did you do in between your stints at CRS?
Miguel Hernández (00:43:54): Two things, one when the ... case with the Hasidim ended after a while about, maybe about six months to a year later, I got a call from the mayor's office from this guy Haskell Lazere who was with ... American Jewish committee. And he said to me, I think I have a job for you. I said, yeah, what? I thought he was gonna get me in another thing, you know, he said, well, there's a vacancy at the New York City Human Rights Commission. They need an executive director. And at that point, Eleanor Holmes Norton, who's now the representative for Washington DC. She's the, you know, she was the executive, she was the ... chairwoman of the committee. And she brought along and she got, she brought along this guy who was the executive director to go with her to Washington, you know?
Miguel Hernández (00:44:57): And so, said the mayor's hiring a new chair and they need an executive director. And, you know, I think you would be the right guy for this job and everything else. So I said, okay, I'll go talk to them. So I went to the office and I met a guy there named Stanley Friedman, who was the top aide or the principal aid, or deputy mayor I forget his exact title, but he was way up there in the Beame administration. And he said to me, he interviews me. He said, I want to interview you for this job, blah, blah, blah. But in interviewing me, he's laying down on a couch like this, you know, and he is asking me questions and you know, so anyway, at the end he says, you're hired. I said, well, you know, I have a job. You know, I went back to CRS and ... I called up the director at that time.
Miguel Hernández (00:45:51): His name was, Mexican American guy, Gil Pompa, Gil Pompa called Gil Pompa. And I said, Gil, I got this offer and said, but you know, I don't really wanna go. I said, can you give me a leave of absence? He said, absolutely not. He said, you go, you go, that's the end. You know, I don't know if he was mad or what I really, or, you know, maybe he wanted to get rid of me all along. I really don't know, you know, so, okay. So I took the job, but as it happens, I get the job and everything else. There was a whole other story I won't go into, but a year or so later, Mayor Beame loses the election to Ed Koch.
Miguel Hernández (00:46:37): So January, it was, comes into office a few days later, I get a call from Koch's office. Some guy said to me, Mr. Hernandez, Mayor Koch wishes to thank you for your service to the city of New York. He said, but leave your office by noon today or something. I had a deadline, you know, I said, oh, Christ, what do I do now? It wasn't funny at the time. But anyway, so I get a job. I go upstairs, I get a job, you know, they have a bulletin board, you know ... at the civil service commission there. And I see that they have a job they're looking for loan executives. So what the hell is a loan executive anyway, I applied filled out the paperwork and blah, blah, blah. So they ... I get chosen to be a ... for the job. And so they start lending me out to different federal agencies and nonprofits. You know, when they have projects and things. So one of them, I get loaned out through a group called National Urban Fellows Program.
Miguel Hernández (00:47:56): And so I was there six months or so. I get loaned out to the Puerto Rican Forum, nonprofit at another nonprofit agency. I get loaned out and then finally I get loaned out to believe it or not the IRS, my God, you know, that was a trip. But anyway, I kept trying to get, you know, get jobs. I didn't wanna work for the IRS. I mean, you know, I mean, I had a nice job. It was like assistant resources services manager, or something like that, personnel training, all that stuff and ... facilities too, you ran the facilities thing. And so I learned a lot, I did I learned a lot about federal operations and what a real federal agency looks like. And so I worked there and then an opening about 1986 or so 1985, maybe you know, it's hazy, I don't know, but somewhere in the middle of eighties there, this job opening in CRS and I applied for it and I went through a whole lot of changes, but ultimately I got it. I got my old job back, you know, and I said, hallelujah, you know, I got saved once again by CRS. So I went back. Were
Bill Froehlich (00:49:27): Were you a conciliation specialists during ...
Miguel Hernández (00:49:30): Yes. Yes, exactly. You know, it was various titles, community specialists, conciliation specialists, mediation specialists, you know, we could call ourselves whatever we wanted, you know what I mean? It wasn't CRS is not a real federal agency, you know, very loosey-goosey. Okay very loosey-goosey. No, but, and every time, you know, they kept reducing the number of people and stuff like that, and we get different directors and, you know, things would start all over again. So, at that point I went back and as I said in ... and I went, I had some very interesting assignments in Guantanamo Bay Cuba ... when the Cubans and the Haitians were there. And then they sent me to Panama because they had a big riot, but the Cubans rioted in ... Guantanamo. So I was sent there and it was a big, big deal, you know, like ...
Bill Froehlich (00:50:34): I wanna go back before we get into this case because I wanna hear about Guantanamo. I wanna go back to Williamsburg real quick and ask you a few follow up questions that I should have asked earlier.
Miguel Hernández (00:50:45): Yeah. Okay. I went on and on. I didn't let you ask questions.
Bill Froehlich (00:50:48): Oh, no, no, no. It's a great story. Why interrupt? So with Williamsburg, how did you first get involved? Did CRS just send you out there and say, you know ...
Miguel Hernández (00:50:58): Yeah, because, you know, put something in the paper we had in the office at that time, there were no computers and all that stuff, but what we had was a teletype machine, you know what the thing with the bubble, you know, with the glass top?
Bill Froehlich (00:51:11): No, I don't know that. Sorry.
Miguel Hernández (00:51:15): Anyway ... a little ribbon came out. So you would go in that room, you know, every once in a while and read the tape and, you know, to see what was going on.
Bill Froehlich (00:51:24): I've seen this in movies now. I understand.
Miguel Hernández (00:51:26): Yeah you've seen it in movies, you know. So they ... and we monitored it, you know, several times a day to see what was going on, you know, because they would report from all over the region. And ... anyway, so I think that's how I got the news on the teletype machine that they had been some trouble in Williamsburg. So I said, I better go out there or, you know, whatever. I went out there and to assess the situation, you know?
Bill Froehlich (00:51:54): Yeah. And tell me a little bit more about that assessment. What did you do when you first got out there? It sounds like you tried to gain entry by ... you had to leverage your connections.
Miguel Hernández (00:52:05): Right. That's right.
Bill Froehlich (00:52:07): So what did you first do to try to gain entry?
Miguel Hernández (00:52:10): Well, I, you know, I went knocking on, on people's doors and, you know, going in the nearby, nearby to where the action happened as to what happened and, you know, and, I said, well, who's who the community leaders here, and nobody wanted to tell me anything, you know, really. You know, I mean, the people are suspicious, you're a fed, you know, they're not just gonna open up to you, you know, I hadn't moved outta Williamsburg a long time ago. I wasn't, you know, so they didn't know me. Uh, uh, although I did, you know, as I said, I knew people there, but, I had sort of lost contact with a lot of 'em by the way, too. But anyway, that's how I got into it. And, tried to find out what happened, get ... the real, try to get the real situation, not what was reported on the, on the ticket tape, you know what I'm saying?
Miguel Hernández (00:53:02): And that's what I had to do. And then you come back to the office, you do some paperwork, you fill out a form. And, you know, the ... level of, you know, we had levels of violence, you know, one from one to five or one to ten whatever it was. But that was it. And then you shipped it off to ... Washington and, you know, Marty Walsh got ahold of it. He was the director of the what was it called? Crisis response unit. So they had ... a whole, you know, and he had, it was very funny. He had a big map of the U.S. electronic map, and every time something broke out anywhere, he'd put a little pin in it and it lit up, you know, blinking and had different colors. Like if it was in the, if it was in the assessment, it was like yellow. And if it was a full scale riot, it was red, you know, so it was like the war room ... in 10 Downing Street, you know, people moving around planes and that, you know, like that. So anyway, that was it.
Bill Froehlich (00:54:12): I appreciate that. Did you do anything to prepare before you left for Williamsburg for a case like Williamsburg?
Miguel Hernández (00:54:20): No, I didn't. I didn't put on any riot gear or anything like that. No, no, no, not really. You know, you had to find, you had ... to make some phone calls. I don't know if I did that. Then you had to figure out how you were gonna get out to the community wherever it was. I had a government car assigned to me. I called it the gray goose. It was all gray. It had government plates on it. So you know, you figure out how you're gonna get to, you know, sometimes you had to take a plane. You had to make a ... you know, you had a ... you kept in your office, a go bag, you know, you had your toothbrush, you had change of underwear, you know, in case, you know, whatever it was, a flashlight, you know, stuff like that. So that was it, you know, and then you got on the first thing going to, Cleveland, wherever it was, you know, they sent us all over the country by the way, but, you know, I went, I went all over, but ...
Bill Froehlich (00:55:26): So one more question before we talk about them sending you to Guantanamo. So you got out, you did a little assessment by knocking on doors, trying to figure out what was actually happening.
Miguel Hernández (00:55:38): Yes.
Bill Froehlich (00:55:38): And what, how did you decide on your initial response plan based on that assessment, maybe it's that you decided, well, nobody will talk to me I need to, I need to get somebody else in here. And that's why you called the subject matter expert or found your old friends, but how did you make that decision?
Miguel Hernández (00:55:56): Well, you went back to the office and ... you know, I spoke to, at that time, Wally would basically it was another guy named Ed O'Connell, who was a regional director, I think at that time. And you know, I spoke to Wally and the, you know, and I said, look, this is happening. And ... so I guess he made some calls to Washington. He, you know, basically he was the decision maker, you know, ultimate decision maker and, you know, obviously he had a lot of experience. And so he ... said, well, you know, go back there and see what you can do and all that stuff. So that was a, that was basically what it ... it wasn't, it was a sort of a, a touchy, feely kind of decision. You know what I mean? You knew instinctively what was, it wasn't anything scientific that, you know ..
Bill Froehlich (00:56:50): There's not a rubric for it.
Miguel Hernández (00:56:52): No, no, no, there isn't. And you know, maybe you like that community, you know, I mean, maybe some personal reasons, you know, you knew somebody there or whatever it was, or you just felt in your bones, you had to do something, you know, maybe you were bored waiting around for something that happened. Okay. This is my chance. You know, all we needed was one of those firemen poles, you know, come down the fire engine and go, I all.
Bill Froehlich (00:57:23): I like it. Well, I'm just gonna hit the pause button for one second.
Miguel Hernández (00:57:27): Okay. Sure. Let me get some water
Bill Froehlich (00:57:29): So you were gonna take me to Guantanamo Bay, and if you could before going there, tell me, you know, why you, how you were sent there and what you did to prepare?
Miguel Hernández (00:57:40): Okay.
Bill Froehlich (00:57:41): It sounds like Guantanamo might have a little more preparation than Williamsburg.
Miguel Hernández (00:57:44): Yeah. Yes. Well, when Grace Flores-Hughes took over the agency, she got settled or she accepted a program to work with the settlement of unaccompanied minors. This thing of unaccompanied minors coming into the country is not a new thing you know, and this group was originally I think in Department of Education. I'm not sure, but anyway, they got put into, for some reason I really don't know what the rationale was. Okay. But for some reason they brought on these people from that program and ... to work with CRS and, you know, there was some tension between the two groups, like who the heck are these people coming in? You know, whatever, you know, that kind of thing. So, but anyway, when the whole crisis of the Cubans and Haitians, not the first, not the first time when the people from Mariel, Cuba under the Carter administration, I think it was right.
Miguel Hernández (00:59:08): Mariel Cubans. I forget what president it was then came into Miami in droves. One of the others after ... I forget what year it was now, but anyway, they started getting on ... rafts and all kinds of decrepit boats, you know, to come to the U.S.. So the government sent out the Coast Guard and the Navy to pick up these people. Okay. And on the ocean, in fact, I was in, on one of those, one of those rescues, but anyway, that's a whole other story, but anyway, so they, I don't know if it was the .. who called in CRS. And they said, okay, we are, and the State Department was involved here. And, because they didn't know where they were gonna resettle these Cubans. They did not want to resettle them in the U.S. They didn't want that same problem they had with the Mariel Cubans.
Miguel Hernández (01:00:13): So they were gonna keep they ... decided to put all these people in Guantanamo and Panama. Okay. Two places. So they set up these huge, some people call 'em concentration camps. Okay. Because they had barbed wire all around. They had army troops guarding it. Okay. They had watch towers. They had, you know, people in tents the whole thing. So ... they called CRS, somebody called CRS. And they used to be part of this group that of federal people. I think maybe there were people there from FEMA too. I don't know. But anyway, they had lots of people and we were called in and one of our ... CRS people was there too. Ernie Stallworth. He can tell you more. But anyway, we were ... reported to Florida. We went to a Naval airport in north of Miami.
Miguel Hernández (01:01:26): I forget what it's called now. And, you know, they assigned me to cots, you know, and we slept there waiting for a plane to take us to Guantanamo. So anyway, two days later, but you know, we were told to, and that we would be received in Guantanamo, by people from the State Department, and Department of Defense and they would give us whatever we needed, housing vehicles, you know, whatever we needed to do, our job, we would get from them. And they would tell us where to go, when to go and so forth and so on. And to try to talk to the, to, I wanna call 'em inmates but that's not the correct term, but you know, the people who were there in the camps.
Bill Froehlich (01:02:18): Refugees perhaps
Miguel Hernández (01:02:18): Yes. And couldn't leave. So ... flew to Guantanamo on this huge C530 Coast Guard Plane, you know, which is loaded with trucks, tanks, you know, and all sorts of equipment and you know, other stuff.
Miguel Hernández (01:02:47): And I was confined to a little area inside this plane. I was actually I was the only on that particular flight I was the only person only civilian, you know, because they couldn't get everybody on, you know, whatever it was. And so as we're flying toward Guantanamo, they spot some boats in the water in the ... Gulf of Mexico there, Caribbean and whatever it was. And you know, this was like a this huge plane. So other guys said, I said, well, gosh, I know I said, I told 'em, I said, look, this, cause they went down low, you know, really low to the water, maybe, maybe a hundred feet, maybe less even, you know, you know, and it said well, Mr. Hernandez, our first mission is to rescue these people. The second mission is to take you to Guantanamo and they had priority, you know, so anyway, though, they landed on the water was that, you know, like pontoons they had, you know, so they land on the water and no, no ... I made a mistake. They did not land on the water. They kept on going, but they radioed in the location of these people. Okay. Yeah.
Miguel Hernández (01:04:15): I thought they were gonna land in the water, but they didn't. But anyway, they ... radioed in the position and so eventually they brought them to Cuba. So when I got there, they took me to the camp, you know, and they put me on a big cruise ship that the government had hired. It was an old decrepit cruise ship called the something sky. Anyway, it was so cruddy we call it the pig sty you know, so I get there and there's a guy in charge of assigning where you go to sleep, you know? So he puts me down way down in the bottom of this ship. I'm claustrophobic I mean. And they put me with a guy who was huge. I don't know where he was from, you know, from another agency. I don't know where he was from, but I said, I'm not gonna sleep with this guy.
Miguel Hernández (01:05:18): No, this is impossible. You know? So I get up there, go back to the guy. I said, listen, I lied to the guy. Okay. I said, I'm a GS-15, which is equivalent to a Naval Captain. Okay. Or a Colonel in the army, you know? And I took out my credential. I show it to him quick. It says conciliation specialist on it, but so he said, okay, Mr. Hernández we'll see what we can do for you. So they put me on the top deck in this huge, anyway, so every day, all of the CRS people that were there from this program and some of the conciliation specialists came down later, every morning we would meet there and kind of discuss what we were gonna do. And we would be assigned to different parts of the camp, you know, we would ride out there.
Miguel Hernández (01:06:19): And so I was like the liaison between the camp leadership. Okay. Which was the indigenous people from Cuba and Haiti, you know, they had different camps. They had one camp for the Cubans, one camp for the Haitian it was segregated that way. And my job was to go to these camps and as a liaison and find out what concerns they had, what problems had and so forth. And then I would relay this ... to the military people. Okay. And say, look, we're having a problem here, a problem there and so forth, like one problem was that, where they set up the dining room, the dining area, they had huge dining area where they fed the refugees. And but right outside the dining room is where they set up all the latrines, you know, the porta potties. Oh, God smell was horrible.
Miguel Hernández (01:07:23): So I said, look, you can't have this here. I mean, people are eating here. You know, I said, oh, we didn't realize we do that in the Army. Well, they're not in the Army. You know, that was the thing, you know ... anyway, so we kind of work out problems like that, make the thing go, be easier and so forth. And then ... a riot broke out in Panama. So they wanted all the Spanish speaking guys from CRS. There was several of us to go to Cuba, several to go to ... Guantanamo to Panama. So we get there.
Bill Froehlich (01:08:02): And let me pause you for a second. This, the, you went from the Cuban refugee camps for lack of a better term to the similar version that was in Panama?
Miguel Hernández (01:08:12): Correct. Yes.
Bill Froehlich (01:08:13): So these were camps that have been set up and so they are similarly set up, they probably had latrine and food problem. That could have been the cause of the riot.
Miguel Hernández (01:08:22): They had different problems and, you know. But the ... Cubans, you know, the Haitians were peaceful. You know what I mean? They didn't, I mean, they had problems, we worked on them, we solved them. So it was kind of mediation if you want to call it that. But, you know, we never had the together, you know what I'm saying? The military and them together, we just reported back to the military, said, look, but anyway, we get there. And the ... Cubans had rioted and a lot of the military people got hurt. You know, they were throwing rocks, you know, huge rocks and everything. So I wasn't too happy about going there, you know, but I said what the hell, I got nothing else to do. And I go there and you know, I would go every morning, I would drive from Panama City to camp S Cruz.
Miguel Hernández (01:09:23): They gave the name of the camp, they call it the Cubans called it Celia Cruz. So the military adopted it, you know . . . [inaudible] . . . everything. So I would go there every morning and meet with the camp leadership. And the Cubans were very formal, you know, they would call me Don Miguel. Okay. Don doesn't mean, mister Don is like, sir, you know, you know what I mean? It's an honorary title in Hispanic countries for people who are professionals of one kind of the landowners, you know, blah, blah, blah, government officials, you know, military officers, they're all Don, they call Don Miguel. Like you like the mafia, Don, you know what I mean? But you it's different.
Bill Froehlich (01:10:13): You're GS-15. So probably.
Miguel Hernández (01:10:14): Yes, allegedly. Yeah. So they ... would say Don Miguel, un problema and un problema would turn into a whole morning discussion. But in between all of that, they would be making Cuban coffee. And if you've been to Miami and you've had Cuban coffee, you know, it's this much coffee liquid with this much grounds in it, you know what I mean? It's like, oh man, it's got caffeine. So you, you know what I mean? But anyway, they would make coffee for me. They had, you know, whatever food they got from the military rolls, donuts, mostly donuts, you know, and we would sit around the table and just BS, you know what I mean? Just normal conversation. And if there was a problem and everything, I went back to the guy who was in charge of my camp, who was a part who he was an Air Force officer who he was Hispanic himself, but he was in charge of the that elite Air Force group, you know, that goes in and the secret missions and, you know, rescued people and stuff like that, you know, that are being held by the terrorist and stuff like that.
Miguel Hernández (01:11:35): But anyway, so have a tough bunch of people, you know, I mean, so I go to talk to him and, you know, and he was pretty, he was a pretty good guy. I mean, he, you know, he was, he was excellent actually. So we'd say this had happened. So one day the, oh, and then my, the other part of the job was, and this is where the State Department got involved. They would ask me to go to various councils and embassies in Panama City to see if any of them would accept any of the Cubans to go to third countries. You know? So that was pretty nice duty in a way, because, you know, they had parties, you know, I mean that social occasional, and they would invite me and ... them, you know, they want to know all about CRS and all that stuff.
Miguel Hernández (01:12:23): And so we would ... you know, we, not every, we weren't successful every time, but we did get some people, fairly large group to go into Sweden was one country that took people. Not because everything I did, but I, you know, it's still really done by the State Department. I was just a guy on the scene there, you know what I mean? So anyway, it came time and then we were told specifically, do not say, or do anything that encourages people, that they are going to be resettled in the U.S. whatever you do, we could say whatever you want, but do not give them the impression on any level that they're going to the U.S. Alright. Right. You know and you said, and the other thing I wasn't supposed to do was accept any mail from them.
Miguel Hernández (01:13:18): Cause they wanted me to take letters and stuff and send it to their relatives in ... when I got back to U.S. and give it to their relatives in ... Miami or wherever they were, you know, so, okay. I won't do that. But at some point I think it was like end of summer of 92, somewhere in there, they decided that the Cubans decided of their own volition, that they were gonna open up a school for the kids, you know, because their kids had not been in school. So they organized on their own. No, no help from the us whatsoever, including me did not open up, opened up a school, you know? And not only did they open up a school, but they took whatever materials and things they could find and they made shoes for these kids. Okay. So that they would go to school, not barefoot and they had dresses and pants, the kids, boys had girls had dresses and pants that were sewn.
Miguel Hernández (01:14:28): Okay. With materials that they got there, fresh starts. I mean the first day of school, these kids marched off to school. You wouldn't what else? I mean, what a scene that was, I mean, unbelievable. I said, whoa, you know, these Cuban's had their act together, you know? So ... anyway that worked out, ultimately, you know, the government accepted that. And then we had some classes, you know, how to open up a bank account, you know, stuff like that. Just, you know, day to day lessons when they got to Miami or wherever it was. The government changed their mindset, we're gonna take people to Miami or back to the back to the U.S. so we, that's how they got resettled. A lot people, Cubans got resettled, you know?
Bill Froehlich (01:15:18): And so how long were you involved with this? It sounds like months.
Miguel Hernández (01:15:23): Yes. It was months. It was like three, four months there. And between between Guantanamo and ... Panama and I think it was like 96 and we got, we had an operation, I got the card somewhere and I'll show it to you. We got identification cards, you know, from the military, they fingerprinted us and we had, you know, kind of stuff to wear, you know, but after the riot, you know, nothing, everything basically calmed down there, you know, nothing happened. But so the problem was getting people resettled basically and ... settling these little, teeny tiny disputes.
Bill Froehlich (01:16:02): And so were you in that time period, when you were in Panama specific? So the Cubans were rioting and the Haitians were peaceful?
Miguel Hernández (01:16:15): Yeah I wasn't there doing the riot. I was, I came in after the riot.
Bill Froehlich (01:16:18): After the riot?
Miguel Hernández (01:16:18): After the riot.
Bill Froehlich (01:16:19): Yes. So were you doing something similar with the Haitians as well or were
Miguel Hernández (01:16:23): Well, no, because there was no, there was no conflict with, in the Haitians as I think I mentioned that, right? No, they ... didn't have any physical disorders in Guantanamo. The Haitians were ... peaceful, you know, they were not, you know, they were just, they were more stoic you know.
Bill Froehlich (01:16:45): I see
Miguel Hernández (01:16:47): About the situation
Bill Froehlich (01:16:47): Did they have a list of concerns that arose daily? Did you?
Miguel Hernández (01:16:51): Yeah, they had ... problems that arose daily, but they never, as I said, there were things that ... Ernie Stallworth and I spotted, you know, that were problems, you know, like the latrine issue, you know, hours of recreation, you know, when they could have ball games or stuff, you, whatever, you know, stuff like that. It was like, no, it was no problem. We just went there every day, stayed in the camp. So I don't know, 3 or 4 in the afternoon or something sometimes into the evening, depending, but that was it. No, no, there was no problem, you know, at all, either, either with the Cubans ... or the Haitians. Guantanamo was very interesting also because the, the Navy employed a lot of Cubans. Okay. Who were living outside the camp in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba I say. Santiago was like a few miles from the, from the perimeter of the camp.
Miguel Hernández (01:18:03): I don't know if you saw that you saw that movie ... with this guys are in Guantanamo and ... one of the soldiers winds up dead, one of the Marines winds up dead anyway, that's what it was. It was a ... so, but anyway, yeah, and so they would employ a lot of Cubans and there were a lot of who were servicing the camp. Okay. They would run the kitchens. The, you know, all the other Guantanamo was like a mini U.S. city. It had a, you know, bowling alley, it had, it had movie theaters, it had a golf course, swimming pools, you know, all kinds of, kind of facilities to keep the troops happy, you know? And so they hired people and we interacted with them too on the, you know, we, we ran into them from time to time, just, you know, just chit chatted with them.
Miguel Hernández (01:18:57): And so we went to parties that the Jamaicans organized, you know, the, a lot of the troops had been in I think Afghanistan at that, or somewhere in the Middle East, and they would make Middle Eastern food, you know, stuff like that, you know? So, so, yeah, it's a Haitians Cubans, you know, people from Jamaica and wherever else. So it was that kind of a thing was more, but we were one thing we did have one problem there in Guantanamo. I don't know something happened in one of the camps and ... gosh, I can't remember the details, but I wasn't involved. That's why I don't remember it, but I was, I was pretty pissed off that I wasn't called, you know, to go, I had the most experience than anybody that you guys sent you, you know, but anyway ... they sent people, you know to deal with that problem at one of the Cuban camps and, you know, or Haitian camp. I don't remember it was over, it was over pretty quickly.
Bill Froehlich (01:20:11): Great. Well, this has been great background about these, these two cases in Williamsburg and in Panama, Panama slash Cuba. Really fascinating, incredible work. So I'm gonna turn now to more specific, sorry, if you want,
Miguel Hernández (01:20:30): No, I just wanted to mention one thing. I also went, they sent me to Ireland to work with the police and the people who they call 'em the travelers. They consider themselves gypsies, like the gypsies is the bad term I learned. Okay. The travelers and the travelers are under a lot of pressure by the Irish non-travelers, because, you know, they travel in these caravans, which are basically trailers and campers and all that stuff. And they don't like to travel as camping in their front yard and stuff like that, you know? So that was a whole big magilla. And ... I think at that time, or shortly after that time was one, all the trouble was in Ireland and they sent George Mitchell there to help them settle this whole thing. And somebody said, well, the travelers aren't being consulted, you know and all this stuff, and they have a stake in this too. So we got called, I got called in by this group and went over there and ... to give some mediation training lessons to this private nonprofit group in Dublin. And then I also went to, they also sent me to Romania because
Bill Froehlich (01:22:05): What was the nonprofit group, if you don't mind me asking?
Miguel Hernández (01:22:11): I'll have to look it up. Okay. I can't, I can't come up with it, but it's a big group and they're right there in Dublin. I'm trying to think of it, but if I come up with the name, I'll tell you.
Bill Froehlich (01:22:25): Okay. And you were saying you also were assigned to go to Romania?
Miguel Hernández (01:22:28): Romania. Yeah. I suddenly became the CRSs expert on Roma people. Yeah. And anyway, Romania the ... the Roma people have a reputation that they're not that they're not good people. Okay. It's just ... how people feel. Some are not, and some are okay. Just like any other group anyway. But anyway, so again ... I was assigned to work ... with a nonprofit group there, who were of non-Roma and Roma people, and talk about mediation thing. And I worked with the, also with the ... Romanian national police, in fact, they gave me a medal, which I have somewhere around here. It's a big gold thing, you know, wear it on New Year's Eves. No, no.
Bill Froehlich (01:23:40): Why not.
Miguel Hernández (01:23:40): Yeah, why not but anyway, it was a good ... so no, no, no trouble happened while I was there because, because I was there, everybody calmed down, but no, you know, so we were there about a week or so maybe, so giving the training to the people. Every time I went to the police headquarters, national police headquarters, you, they would have a guy out there that would salute me and I would salute them back. That was pretty, pretty damn interesting. And, one of my big problem, one of, I thought one of my problem was gonna be there by the way, this is why I really wanna say was that I, you know, I try to be as humorous as I possibly can be, you know? And I thought that since they had translators, okay, I didn't know a word of Romanian. Okay. I only learned one thing, buna dimineata which means good morning or something like that. And Romanian is ... the purest Latin language there is as far as I understand. And they speak it with a kind of Italian litle to it, you know, anyway. So .. I met the ... a lot of interesting people there.
Miguel Hernández (01:25:01): The head of the police department of course, was one, another one was the, the king of the gypsies or the emperor of the gypsies they call this guy. You know, so then I told somebody, oh, I met the emperor of the gypsies. They have dozens of emperors, you know, and oh, they put me in, um, a house, they set me up in this house. That was one of the homes of the Romanian dictator Ceaușescu his name was, I think, you know, he had been deposed. This was after the revolution there and he had been deposed. So they put me in this huge mansion, you know, I was the only one there only person there. And I had two servants assigned to me, a cook and a driver. Okay. And you know, they would cook meals for me and all that stuff. And the table was like 12 feet long and I was the only one there. And, you know, I couldn't really talk to them, whatever, but, you know, it was interesting to be there. And then ... they took me to this other town that I had to go to, which was in the carpathian mountains.
Miguel Hernández (01:26:26): I can't think of the name of the town but anyway, it was the town closest to where, Dracula's castle was. And so when I get there, they put me up in a nice hotel room. I was with the people from the nonprofit group and gave me a nice room and everything. So, I find out that there's a Chinese restaurant in town, so I decide I'm gonna go there and have some dinner, you know? So I go there and I said to a waiter, you know, I try, listen, I want dumplings, you know. So he says, we don't make that, he spoke English. We don't make that. You know, he just said, you don't make dumplings. What kind of Chinese restaurant is? He said, I tell you what, I'll show you how to make dumplings. And I knew how to make, so I went in the kitchen. I showed him how to make dumpling. Oh, they were so happy. What else happened there?
Bill Froehlich (01:27:30): Did you see the castle?
Miguel Hernández (01:27:31): Oh, yes. Yeah. We went, I went, obviously it was a tourist spot.
Bill Froehlich (01:27:36): So what, and that's probably why he spoke English because it was a tourist spot
Miguel Hernández (01:27:38): Yeah I guess
Bill Froehlich (01:27:40): I wonder, is there anything you took back from these stints in Romania and Ireland?
Miguel Hernández (01:27:47): Souvenirs. No took back, you mean lessons learned?
Bill Froehlich (01:27:51): Yeah. Lessons learned that you incorporated into your practice at CRS as a conciliator.
Miguel Hernández (01:27:58): I really ...couldn't apply because, you know, it was so different. You're working, you know, you're not working in the U.S. You're not working in your own culture. I mean, something are the same, you know, as you would do state side, but I think the thing you had to get across was that you were there, that the settlement of any problem was their own, that they owned it and try and get that, that over to people. But, there weren't any other CRS people that I recall that were sent over, over to foreign countries, you know, I mean, I consider myself fortunate and, you know, I had pictures and things like that, obviously, but ... I don't think there was something that you could apply of, except the fact that you had to understand that you were in a foreign culture, you were not in your, you know, in your comfort zone on any level.
Miguel Hernández (01:29:03): I mean, that also happened here in the U.S., You know? But it certainly not as intense as it is when you go to a foreign country and then you have like, you know, State Department looking over your shoulder, you know, whereas most of the things in the U.S., when we went out there, we were basically out there on our own, you know, we had, you know, I guess the other thing just generally speaking about the whole thing is that you had two CRSs and all you had the regional offices and you had the Washington field office and ... it was hard to mesh those things together sometimes, you know, because we would say all those guys in Washington, they don't know nothing, you know, and the people in Washington say, you know, those guys in the field, they're just a bunch of cowboys. They, you know, they don't have the big picture, you know, we know everything else. So try to resolve the, the conflict between headquarters and, you know, and CRS ... was a challenge, always whether we were,
Bill Froehlich (01:30:13): Can you tell me a little bit more about that conflict? Give me a concrete illustration, perhaps?
Miguel Hernández (01:30:19): Let's see. Well, it ... we would, you know, Washington would call us, you know, from time to time and you know, and we sort of knew what they were gonna call and complain about, or say, you should do this and you should do that. And in one way or another, the, the field people, not in every instance. Okay. But there was a certain amount of resistance to taking any kind of direction from headquarters, you know, what was, what we call malicious compliance, you know? Yeah. Okay. You know, say, okay. But it was rare that we, unless it made sense, you know, now I can't think of a particular instant, but we would sort of, kind of mull it over. And, you know, I mean, it wasn't like in every instant, but I think it was a kind of a natural thing, you know, like you have this some business, I think, between the corporate headquarters and the people, you know, who really do the work out there, you know, in the various cities, that kind of thing.
Bill Froehlich (01:31:46): That's a good analogy. Well, I'd like to talk a little bit about your process for conciliating or mediating or whatever you don't wanna call it. You are not the first person I've interviewed who doesn't wanna call it, any of those things. So I wanna talk a little bit about, wanna focus in two ways, one on the table oriented process, which you've been through a little bit in the judge, the context with the judge from the Southern District. Yeah. But when you're mediating in a table oriented process, a dispute, a traditional CRS dispute around race or ethnicity, I want to ask you to talk me through the steps in that process. And there's a number of questions that I have, but I'll start with, with this one. So for table oriented processes, who was at that table, how were the participants at the table selected and what were the challenges to getting particular individuals to the table?
Miguel Hernández (01:32:57): If it was a community, let's say a community police dispute, as an example, you know, we had a lot of 'em where a black teenager was killed by a police officer. I did a couple of those. And so naturally you had at one side of the table, the chief of police of the commissioner, whatever the highest title was, or the, you know, the police chief and he would have some of his people on one side, or sometimes it included the mayor, but generally not. And the other side were, let's say the guy who was the head of the NAACP in that town, or if it was a, you know, a black, white thing, it would be the minister, local clergy, black clergy would be there. And then there would be if it was a, if there was some kind of other agency like a ... involved when there was some, person of color on that agency that, you know, was recognized as a leader in the community of a nonprofit or whatever it was, generally they would be there.
Miguel Hernández (01:34:19): And inevitably you would have some guy who was, who was identified as a leader of a militant quote-on-quote militant organization, you know, not a regular nonprofit group, you know, but a neighborhood person. Okay. So you, so you had ... and that kind of leadership changed sometimes during the, during the process, you know what I mean? You didn't have the same person, you know, at the table every time. So it was wild and woolly in that, in that sense that, that, you know, you couldn't say I talked to the leader, you know what I mean? You know, I talked to the mayor you could say, you could talk to the mayor or chief of police, you know, there and was present, but you couldn't, you couldn't quite come to that level because even the community, they would have problems as to who in fact was the spokesperson.
Miguel Hernández (01:35:22): Okay. That was, that was hard because as much as we tried to say, you know, off camera, so to speak off extra outside the meetings, and before you'd jump to prepare people ... for the mediation, you would say, you know, you need to select a spokesperson. It would be good if you did that, you don't have to do it, but it would be good idea because, you know, and ... it would lay out what the rules were and it didn't work a lot, most, I would say a lot of the times, you know, you couldn't, because there were people that had different agendas, you know, I mean, it was natural. It wasn't out of ... what do you call it just to be ornery? You know what I mean? It was, it was a natural thing. You had guy who was the NAACP, a guy who might have been from the another African American or Hispanic education.
Bill Froehlich (01:36:25): Sure. Urban League, LULAC, something like that.
Miguel Hernández (01:36:26): Yeah.
Bill Froehlich (01:36:28): So, one challenge about bringing this group together is that the leadership is shifting.
Miguel Hernández (01:36:33): Yes. Yes.
Bill Froehlich (01:36:34): And that could be with the LULAC or the community leader or even the mayor could get elected or the chief fired something like that's, so they're shifting on all sides. Were there other challenges to getting representatives from these groups to the table?
Miguel Hernández (01:36:50): It was not a problem getting them to was getting 'em out, you know, excluding people, you know, that's. So that's ...
Bill Froehlich (01:36:58): They wanted to be it.
Miguel Hernández (01:36:59): Yeah.
Bill Froehlich (01:37:00): So when you convened a table oriented process, what were some of your goals? And we can stick with the police involved shooting as just something to make this part of the conversation, more concrete, what were your goals for involving ...
Miguel Hernández (01:37:18): Okay. If, for example, there had been a a street disorder, a riot with stores being looted and that kind of stuff. Okay. One of the groups that we tried to get involved was for example, chamber of commerce, as an example, because there people were being hurt and we would try to tell the mayor, okay, look, you gotta, we gotta settle this because every day, these guys, that these stores are closed and everything else. And if there was a boycott, it's gonna be difficult for you to recover this, you know? So we try to play to people's self-interest whatever, whenever we found what those were. So the businessmen obviously want to be there and they act as pressure groups, if you will, external to the, to the mediation, to the mayor, or whoever's the superintendent at a school to whatever it happened to be, to get them to ... come to an agreement.
Miguel Hernández (01:38:25): Okay. So that's the that's kind of the dynamic that, that was going on both inside the mediation and outside of the mediation, whatever, you know, whatever situation was, we, we needed to ... bring resources, whatever, or people who had influence, okay, on some level ... we tried to do that. You know, outside of the community, but people who had, regional or wider influence in the community, you know, who weren't necessarily from there per se, but from that neighborhood, but, you know, who were respected and had a reputation. And sometimes I tried to get mediators who were, you know, real mediators from the outside. Okay. People who were teaching mediation were, you know, later on and you know, became a field, you know, and who had, because a lot of the issues were complex and things that I had absolutely no expertise in, you know what I mean? But some of the people did. So I tried to get 'em in, or if I couldn't get them in, I, I would call 'em up. And I said, listen, I'm so and so from the CRS, if I, you know, and I'm involved in this situation, everything, and I'm hoping I could, I could, uh, what do you call it? Uh, scratch your brain.
Bill Froehlich (01:40:13): Pick your brain
Miguel Hernández (01:40:14): Pick your brain, that's it pick your brain
Bill Froehlich (01:40:17): When you're saying mediators, are you thinking of, you know, if you're in Columbus, Ohio, a local mediator?
Miguel Hernández (01:40:26): No. Like I would call this guy like from Harvard, Yale stuff like that, those kind of guys. And I would say, yeah, I'm gonna pick your brain. And you know, I mean, if I call them in, you know, I have to figure out some way they're gonna get paid. You know what I mean?
Bill Froehlich (01:40:48): Yeah but they'll talk to you on the phone.
Miguel Hernández (01:40:49): Yeah. They'll talk to you on the phone. You know? So that's, that's the kind of dynamics that I tried to, to bring to it if I could, because I, you know, I know what I don't know, you know, I know what I don't know. And, you know, so people, don't trust anybody from the justice department too?
Bill Froehlich (01:41:13): Right, right. So how did you, so you had your ... some of your goals in mind?
Miguel Hernández (01:41:19): Yes.
Bill Froehlich (01:41:20): And the participants all had different goals? I assume.
Miguel Hernández (01:41:25): Yeah.
Bill Froehlich (01:41:25): How did you weave those goals together in the mediation session?
Miguel Hernández (01:41:31): As I said, I tried to find out what their, what they wanted and try to put it in different language. Like if they would say they generally community, something happened with the, with the police, you know, the first thing you hear in any community, almost any community I guarantee you is they go say, we want the police chief fired, you know? So you have to say things like, yeah, you know, I understand what you're saying to me, but you know, there's he has, he has a civil service job. He has civil service protections. He's gotta go through the village or the town whatever he's gotta go through this whole process. And it's gonna take like forever to get there. I mean, I know you want this guy gone now. Okay. I understand that. But you wanna, you know, you gotta think about what, how we're gonna get, how we're gonna get something.
Miguel Hernández (01:42:30): Some maybe we could start the process for getting him fired, you know, but it's not gonna happen right away. You know that don't you, or you realize that. And most people did, you know? Oh yeah. I never thought about it that way. So, or the guy would say, I want $10 million. I'm like, oh, so you want a lot of money? Huh. You know, so you come up with stuff like that and you had a trick bag, you know what I mean? You had stuff in your that you could, that worked in other places. And so you'd try it out but for the most part was gaining people's confidence, you know, because particularly community people look, every you, whatever community go had been some trouble, well, this wasn't the first time that happened there. It goes back way back, you know? And then people would talk to me about stuff that happened 20 and 30 years ago that hadn't been resolved, you know, murders and lynchings and you name it. So you had to, you know, you, I heard all before, but I had to sit there and listen to it all over again. And people go off point and they come back. Oh my God. It's, you know, I like to get to it, but now, and so you have to learn that and that helps you weave different things together, you know?
Bill Froehlich (01:43:57): Yeah. That sounds like a huge opportunity to build trust between the parties listening to their baggage, listening to their background. What are other opportunities and other ways that you built trust between yourself and the parties and among the parties themselves?
Miguel Hernández (01:44:15): Well, obviously the other thing is you get other people to help you build that trust. Like I did in the Williamsburg case, that was not the first time, you know, because if somebody vouchers for you, okay. Then you're taking on the, that person's credibility with you in a way, you know? So that, that's one of the things that happened. And, you know, I always just start to tell people, oh yeah. You know, they would call me to community meetings and stuff. And I say, I'm so happy to be back in my hometown. And so what thought yeah, I said, my parents' honeymoon here room 102 Holiday Inn or whatever it was, you know, I would get yeah. That would get so, so that tricks for the trade, you know?
Bill Froehlich (01:45:10): Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You like to use humor that's for sure. It works for you. Yeah. Well, it wouldn't for me. But good. You mentioned before you would go over rules with the parties. Well I would call them ground rules.
Miguel Hernández (01:45:25): Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Bill Froehlich (01:45:26): You used you, it sounds like you had 'em. What were some of your ground rules and did they work?
Miguel Hernández (01:45:35): Yeah, but I had to constantly reinforce them. You know what I mean? I had to constantly come back to it didn't we agree to, you know, like that, you know, as opposed to say you violated the rules, that wouldn't work. Okay.
Bill Froehlich (01:45:47): Of course not.
Miguel Hernández (01:45:48): You know, didn't we agree that we gonna limit ourselves to five minutes per person or whatever it was, you know, you know, that kind of stuff that, but sometimes it worked and ... you know, as I'd say community mediation is very wild, wild, and unruly. It is, it isn't very, you know, it isn't that simple thing sitting down a table and everybody behaves diplomatically, you know, reasonably, there's a lot of shouting, there's a lot of anger, because you have different people, you know, a different situation. It's not people, aren't ... community mediation is a whole other, a whole other thing.
Bill Froehlich (01:46:39): So we talk about in mediation training about setting an agenda of negotiable issues. Did you set the agenda yourself or did you develop or did you identify an agenda by consensus?
Miguel Hernández (01:46:54): Yeah, generally by consensus. Okay. Look, you know, we wanna make this as speedy as possible. I know you want get it over with, you know, and we don't wanna go on and on, you know, we want it to be as productive as possible. So, you know, maybe we should talk about this first and this second, that third, you know, sort of put something out like that. And you know, an agenda is a plan, you know, and you know, in the military, when I was in the military, I learned that your plan blows up the first time you get out there on the battlefield, you know, and ... this was the thing, you know, sometimes you could keep to the agenda and sometimes you know.
Bill Froehlich (01:47:46): Sometimes it changes
Miguel Hernández (01:47:50): Yeah.
Bill Froehlich (01:47:52): Who in these conversations, did you typically facilitate the discussions or did you allow someone else to facilitate conversations?
Miguel Hernández (01:48:01): I typically facilitated it. Yeah. I can't think of another thing. I ... not in another role that I had as a Village Trustee of Ossining where I live, we had a big community fracas here. And this was of a housing project that was going on. But anyway, I called Tim Johnson, you know, and I said, Tim, we need you to facilitate this meeting because the part of this community, most of this community practically are not gonna take it from me because I'm an elected official here. You know what I mean? They ain't gonna buy it and I had a very hard time convincing our mayor, then mayor that we should have an outside facilitator. I said look, this way, you know, you stay out of the limelight. You're not gonna get all this heat and everything else. And you, and ultimately, you know, the board will get together and make decisions, but we're gonna get, we're gonna hear what the community has to say. Okay. And it's better if somebody else was not involved is here to do it. And so that's what I use it then. But anyway, I didn't use it when I was the mediator. I didn't want anybody I knew what I was doing.
Bill Froehlich (01:49:37): Did you have any effective techniques for persuading, a party to reframe a problem to make it negotiable?
Miguel Hernández (01:49:45): Well, I would, as I said mentioned you earlier, I would say if they said they wanted chief fired I would tell 'em why that presented some difficulties or if they, you know, come up with a, you know, we wanna settle money or this or that, or we want, you know, we want so and so to be hired or, you know, or so and so to be fired, you know, you had to come up with an alternatives to slow things down a bit, you know, and let people let it digest for a while. And then you'd see what would happen. But as I say, you know, it wasn't a every time, you know, oh, the mediation, I settled it, you know, we signed a paper and, you know, everybody went away happy, and that was the end of it. No, it didn't have to happen that way. And we were like,
Bill Froehlich (01:50:39): So how did you deal with disagreements over facts?
Miguel Hernández (01:50:45): Like, did the cops shoot this guy or not, you know?
Bill Froehlich (01:50:50): Maybe it, or yeah. You know, what happened before the shooting? Obviously ...
Miguel Hernández (01:50:55): What led up to the thing. Well, no, I didn't get into the facts of the case because first of all, I didn't really know what the facts were. I mean, you know, I knew generally what happened. Okay. But I tried to convince people that I wasn't the, the fact finder. Okay. Or the guy who put those out to me, I just let them okay. So, you know, people say to me, well, you know, this cop he'd been in trouble before I said, is it, I was, is that a fact, you know, that okay. Or, you know, I mean, I didn't dispute it, but I ... questioned it in a way that made people think about it a little bit. So that's kind of what you kept, you gotta do in, in these things where you don't know really what the hell happened.
Miguel Hernández (01:51:52): We weren't, you know, I would tell people, people would say, well, you know, that this and that, I really don't. I wasn't there. I wasn't there, you know? But you could, and if there was a technical kind of thing, more, you could call somebody who knows what the facts are, who has that evidence, you know, or somebody who had quote-on-quote a photograph, even then that was not really taken at face value, you know? But if you had something that was considered to be proof, not he said she said, you know, that didn't fly.
Bill Froehlich (01:52:38): So let me pause right here for one second.
Miguel Hernández (01:52:40): Yeah. Okay.
Bill Froehlich (01:52:43): Alright. So, how would you deal as a conciliator with fundamental disagreements over values at a table oriented mediation process?
Miguel Hernández (01:52:55): What, what do you mean by values?
Bill Froehlich (01:52:57): Yeah. So one way to think about values would be political belief to be a value system. Another way is you mentioned in the Williamsburg example, there might be disagreements about what to do because some are connected to religious values and others are other matters are not folks don't have that religious guideposts.
Miguel Hernández (01:53:21): Yeah. Yeah. Well, I learned a lot in terms of values of, for example, believe or not, maybe it was too late, but from the, situation involving the travelers and the Roma. Okay. Because those were really different cultures and, you know, they have terms and customs and traditions that are very different from, you know, my own, you know, I mean, people are people wherever you go, and as they say, but, you gotta know where people are coming from, as we say on the street, you know, where are you coming from? Is the, is the phrase. And so you have to get an understanding of that. And sometimes people said, well, you understand that we're doing this because X, Y, and Z, and, you know, and I'm saying, you know what, really, I don't understand that tell me more about it. You know, you know, educate me, you know? So that's the way you can get to ... deal with the cultural issue. That when, when you try to explain that to the other side, so speak because you have ... sometimes you table negotiation, you have joint sessions, and then you have th. Separate ones. What do they call them? I've forgotten now,
Bill Froehlich (01:55:01): Caucus sessions or shuttle diplomacy.
Miguel Hernández (01:55:02): Caucus and all that stuff. You have to explain to the other side where the other side is coming from. And it could be because of cultural differences, or it could be because of the history that one side had been with the other, you know, a long thing, it's not necessarily cultural, but it has to do with historical situations. So all I was gonna tell you about that is you try to do your best to help people understand what is happening and why it's happening, you know, like why, well look man say why did so and so walk out the meeting, you know, that's the meeting. I mean, I thought we, I thought we had an agreement we were gonna meet. You know, so he say, you know, here's the way I read it, Joe left the meeting because he got very frustrated. Now, I don't know if that's true or not, but you know, it's plausible, you know, it doesn't have to be, you know, that accurate. It doesn't have to be the absolute truth, you know, unwanted truth. But you know, you have to come up with something that's plausible to explain. You can't explain other people's behaviors, you know, so, you know, do what you can.
Bill Froehlich (01:56:43): How would you deal with power disparities at the bargaining table? You know, you mentioned previously you had identifiable parties, union and management, theoretically, those parties have equivalent power. If you had one party that, that was really had limited power. Did you do something to empower them or train them before a mediation session?
Miguel Hernández (01:57:07): Yes. You try to, we try to ... well it sounds ... like a patronizing term and maybe it but we try to educate people, you know, through the process and, and why it's important that they understand how, how this thing works. And to explain the other side, look, people say, look happens to me, say, community people say, well, they don't understand our culture. You know, I said, well, you know that the cops have a culture. Do you know that, you know, they grow up in families of cops or generations. They've been cops and they have a certain world outlook. Now I, you and I may not agree with that. You know, you and I don't agree. I've tell myself you and I, you know, kind of draw people in. So you and I don't understand that, but they, they have a different culture, you know, and you gotta be careful with the cops because you don't know what happened before.
Miguel Hernández (01:58:14): You know, they get, they get the wrong messages sometimes from over the police radio or whatever happened to be, you know, that happened, you know? So... you try to explain that and say, but you know, you were there, you know, what happened? And, you know, so anyway, so yeah, that's why you try to find it's, it's an educational system. It's being able to express some alternative ways of looking at the situation and let them, you know, mull it over say, well, it doesn't happen that way. I say, okay, you know, no, don't argue with them, you know, don't argue with them because then you'll get into it. You mediated to settle that, you know.
Bill Froehlich (01:59:04): We know, obviously there's a lot of tension in many of these table oriented sessions and tension escalates. How did you diminish tension or help cut through the tension at the mediation table?
Miguel Hernández (01:59:19): Like I say, you know, I try to use some level of humor in the conversation, try to put it at, you know, this level here, try to level it, speak as softly as I possibly can. And sometimes people said, you know what we hate about you, Miguel, you talk too softly, you talk and okay. I said, I'll talk louder the next time. You know, I know what you mean. I know what you mean. I'll talk about, but you know, you gotta bring people in. And that, that seems to include people in the conversation, make it a as one on one as we possibly can in that situation. Try not to argue with people, you know, there's always gonna be tension. We had, and you gotta be not to overreact. Victor and I went out to this is a perfect example to Elizabeth New Jersey.
Miguel Hernández (02:00:24): There had been a riot there a disorder, a riot, whatever you want to all it. So the mayor called a big meeting at the high school. And it was like, I don't know, a hundred people there, maybe more and sitting in front of Victor. And I, we sat in the back, back row, sitting in front of us is a huge African American guy who is into, who is identifiably, African American and African more, you know, he had back in those that people wore dashikis, you know, was that symbol Afros as they call him in, you know, and you know, that whole regalia, if I wanna call it that, okay, so he is in front of us. And during the meeting he gets up. And when he gets up, we noticed that under the dashiki he has a big bulge and you not to be, what do you call it jump to conclusions to put it mildly. But we both look at each other and we say, oh my God, he's got a gun.
Miguel Hernández (02:01:51): How we came to that conclusion. I don't know. Okay. So when he jumps up, he goes back into, back of the dashiki back pocket and he reaches for something and he brings it out and says, oh my God, you know? Right. You know, we were getting ready to jump on this guy, you know, because you know he had a gun and now we're not cops, obviously, but you know, here's ... some violence's about to occur. Right. What the hell were we gonna do, you know, let 'em shoot people. So you know what he pulled out of his pocket. Robert's Rules of Order. And I though what
Bill Froehlich (02:02:36): Good for him.
Miguel Hernández (02:02:37): Yeah. You know, but we looked damn foolish, you know, because we ... stereotype them because of whatever he was wearing.
Bill Froehlich (02:02:48): Yeah. Maybe
Miguel Hernández (02:02:49): Whatever ... and the situation and ... the adrenaline is flowing, you know? So you gotta be careful about that .. you don't, you know, it's hard, it's hard not to ...
Bill Froehlich (02:03:05): Did anyone ever threaten violence when they were involved at a table oriented mediation or threaten to leave or, or leave?
Miguel Hernández (02:03:16): Oh, yeah. Threaten to leave is always a thing. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And what you do in that thing, what they, they don't really wanna leave. Okay. They don't really wanna leave, but what they, what we would do is stand at the door. I said, Jim, Jim, I don't want you to leave now. You know, if you, you know, leave this thing's gonna fall apart, or this thing's gonna, you know, tell something, you know? And it's like, when you're breaking up a fight, people don't wanna fight. You got, hold me back, hold me back. You know what I mean? That's what they want. They wanna be held back, you know, nine times out of ten. Now not every time, but you know
Bill Froehlich (02:03:51): I like that. That's a great analogy.
Miguel Hernández (02:03:54): Yeah.
Bill Froehlich (02:03:55): So how long did a table oriented process last a day? Several months?
Miguel Hernández (02:04:02): Well ... they lasted long days for me. I wasn't one of those quick guys, you know, I couldn't, I couldn't do it. You know, maybe some people could do it in, you know, in a day or so, but these things were very very complicated. I felt they were complicated. Maybe they weren't, maybe they made a big deal out of it, but I, it took me a long time.
Bill Froehlich (02:04:27): So when they developed ...
Miguel Hernández (02:04:28): But I didn't ..
Bill Froehlich (02:04:29): When they develop solutions, you've said that folks had to own the solution. So were the solutions your idea? Were they their idea? How were they developed?
Miguel Hernández (02:04:40): I found that if I posted an idea that it wasn't accepted nobody. I don't have any credibility on that. Yeah, no, I really, I went back. If I made a solution, I would try to put it. If I had an idea, I would put it occurred to me, but I don't know if it works. Like, what do you think? You know, think so, you know, sometimes they bought it and sometimes they didn't, but I I'd try not to because I knew you know, nobody, and if they didn't accept it then it would take a while. Okay. This is why for it, to, for it to gel. And then it would come out like, like they would bring it out. And I would say to myself, quite to myself, goddamn that's my idea. You know, I'm not getting any credit here.
Bill Froehlich (02:05:32): That's always fun when that happens. So after solutions were agreed upon. What did, did you do anything to assure that they would actually be carried out? Did you or CRS have any role in post negotiation processes to check in with the parties?
Miguel Hernández (02:05:49): No, not really. No mean we, you know, we wrote, you know, in some instances they know we put that on paper, you know, we tried to put it on paper. And then I would say something, you know, this is a contract between each parties and I put it that way and you know, but you know, they talked about us being a quote-on-quote self enforcing mechanism. That was the term, you know, I don't know it, you know, if it was, and you know, a lot of times we, this thing would break down, you know, and you have to go back. Even, you know, even stuff that was on paper, you know what I'm saying? Well, you put said that you signed this off in. Okay. Well that you said that was done. This is now. Yeah.
Bill Froehlich (02:06:43): Very good. That was the last, you just answered the last question for me for this segment.
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Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project Phase 2 As a public service, Beyond Intractability hosts this site in conjunction with the earlier Phase I of the Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project. IRB statement for Phase II interviews “Research conducted pursuant to Ohio State University Office of Responsible Research Practices IRB protocol 2021E0493.” |
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Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project Phase 2 As a public service, Beyond Intractability hosts this site in conjunction with the earlier Phase I of the Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project. IRB statement for Phase II interviews “Research conducted pursuant to Ohio State University Office of Responsible Research Practices IRB protocol 2021E0493.” |
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