Roberto Hernandez was born in the Mission District and has no plans to leave. “I still live here, and I will die here,” he said.
That’s not nostalgia talking. It’s a statement of purpose. For more than five decades, Hernandez has been one of the Mission’s most consequential community builders: founder of Carnaval San Francisco, the San Francisco Lowrider Council, the Mission Food Hub, and driving force behind the Indigenous Peoples Cultural Arts Healing Center at 683 Florida Street. He sat down with the San Francisco Police Community Foundation to talk about how his relationship with the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) has changed over the past 50 years and why this year’s Carnaval is worth showing up for.
From the Picket Line to the Police Academy
Hernandez’s first organized community work started young: picket lines outside Safeway on 24th and Potrero, boycotting non-union grapes for the United Farm Workers. His relationship with law enforcement during those early years was not warm.
The Lowrider Council, which he founded in the early 1980s, emerged directly from conflict with the police.
It all started in his padrino’s garage. His godfather and the neighbors spent their weekends out there, fixing everyone’s cars, charging nobody, turning the driveway into a social institution. Hernandez was nine when his padrino handed him a Phillips-head screwdriver, and the teaching began. By twelve, he could rebuild an engine, transmission, and brakes, and he was already driving. The first lowrider he ever saw dropped his jaw to the floor. It was love at first sight, and he went on to build several.
When Mission Street became the city’s Friday and Saturday cruise destination in the 1980s, drawing cars from San Jose, Sacramento, and even Fresno, the SFPD cracked down. Hernandez was arrested 113 times and beaten three times before he founded the San Francisco Lowrider Council and filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city, Mayor Dianne Feinstein, and the SFPD.
He won, establishing the legal right to cruise. Since then, the Council has rolled in the 49ers, Giants, and Warriors championship parades, appeared in films and television, and just finished a shoot with Discovery and HBO. This year brought a milestone that took a decade: a national lowrider postage stamp.
“It took 10 years,” Hernandez said, “and we did the unveiling here in San Francisco.”
He filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city, Mayor Dianne Feinstein, and the SFPD, and won. The victory ended discriminatory enforcement practices at Mission Station and established the legal right to cruise. In fact, it’s now common to see them at 49ers games, parades for the Golden State Warriors, and even on a national stamp.
The relationship didn’t stay there.
“We have an Asian Chief now, we had an African American Chief,” he said. “I’ve seen the change. And with that change, it’s easier to build relationships.”
His most striking example: being invited to help train police cadets at the academy. “Who would have ever thought,” he said, “I’d be invited to go to the academy to be part of the training of police cadets?”
Former SFPD Mission Station Captain Dan Pereira, who went on to become a commander and then a deputy, personally volunteered at the Mission Food Hub during the pandemic. When the operation ran out of bags early on, Hernandez sent him to the Safeway on 16th and Division to get more. Pereira went in civilian clothes. The store didn’t believe he was a cop.
“He texted me,” Hernandez said. “’They don’t believe I’m a cop. I’m going home to change.’ He went and put on his uniform, and all of a sudden, he walked in, and he got the bags.”
Mission Food Hub Becomes Community Lifeline
When COVID hit, Hernandez started fielding calls from neighbors who had no food. He recruited about 113 people to each adopt a family and make deliveries. When that became unsustainable, he opened a warehouse at 701 Alabama Street, bought 50-pound bags of rice, beans, masa, and oatmeal, and started bagging out of his garage.
At the height of the pandemic, the Mission Food Hub was providing fresh, culturally specific food to more than 9,000 families every week. He walked the line, making sure the food reflected what people actually ate: mango, avocado, masa, black beans for the Cubans, red beans for the Peruvians.
The Hub also ran rental assistance, COVID testing, vaccine distribution, and arranged free Internet and laptops for families whose kids had no way to attend school online.
What nobody planned for was how much cooking could push back against despair. Every week, Hernandez announced a menu. One week: all the ingredients to make tamales, plus the recipe for anyone who’d never made them. People who’d never cracked a masa bag were making tamales.
Each week, the question came back: “Qué vamos a cocinar esta semana?” What are we cooking this week? That question, showing up again and again in the middle of a pandemic, was its own kind of medicine.
“It brought a lot of joy in a moment of depression,” he said.
The mental health toll was real. He took calls from people who wanted to give up. He cried. The lines, the recipes, the tamale kits, the Peruvian red beans, and the Cuban black beans, those were his answer to something no relief fund could reach.
The Mission Food Hub is still open. Government pandemic support is long gone, and Hernandez runs it week to week on individual donations and small grants. To donate or learn more, visit missionfoodhub.org.
Carnaval San Francisco Turns 48
Carnaval San Francisco celebrates its 48th anniversary this year on Memorial Day weekend, May 23 and 24, along Harrison Street between 16th and 24th Streets in the Mission District. The free, two-day festival draws over half a million attendees and transforms the Mission District into a hub of music, dance, and cultural celebration. Five main stages, 50 local performing artists, and 400 vendors fill 17 blocks. The Grand Parade steps off Sunday, May 24, at 10 a.m. from 24th and Bryant Streets and will be broadcast live on KPIX/CBS 5.
Hernandez began Carnaval with a handful of traditional practices. He’s spent 48 years deliberately expanding it, traveling to Oaxaca, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and throughout the Yucatan to build relationships with cultural groups and bring them into the parade.
“This is the only place in the world where you have all the traditions of Carnaval from all of Latin America and the Caribbean all in one parade,” he said. “You go to Brazil or Puerto Rico, you’re only going to see one style…, Here we have Oaxaca, we have Brazil, we have Nicaragua, we have it all.”
This year’s theme is “La Copa del Pueblo,” lifting the People’s Cup in celebration of fútbol as a symbol of community connection. The Lowrider Council will be there, too, riding low and slow with plenty of cars on display. (Want even more lowriders on display? Check out this June 2026 event!)
Hernandez said security planning happens in direct coordination with the San Francisco Police Community Foundation and the SFPD Mission Station.
What He Wants to See Next
Hernandez was direct about his priorities for the SFPD’s relationship with the Mission: beat officers who stay long enough to know people by name, and captains who don’t rotate out every few years just as the relationship is getting built.
He also laid out a specific vision for the Foundation’s role: officers coming to the Indigenous Peoples Cultural Arts Healing Center to sit in a drum circle with at-risk youth. SFPD officers visiting schools to build relationships with kids before anything goes wrong. Community forums where organizations and police sit down together over food, not in response to a crisis.
“Those little moments go a long way,” he said. “The act and the willingness to do that and contribute back in a different way, these moments are really special.”
Carnaval San Francisco runs May 23 and 24, 2026, free and open to the public. Learn more at carnavalsanfrancisco.org. To support the partnerships that make community policing possible, visit sfpolicecommunity.org.
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