Los Angeles, CA – John Sermeno was once a gang member who would go on to become a revolutionary and Marxist-Leninist. He died on August 12, 2026. Born August 2, 1944, Sermeno was raised in Boyle Heights’ Ramona Gardens housing projects. In his youth he joined the Big Hazard gang.

I first met John in Boyle Heights during the rise of Chicano Power movement. I was in the Brown Berets, John was part of forming La Junta. La Junta united gang members to promote peace in the neighborhoods and social activism. He later was part of forming La Colectiva, a revolutionary group that began to study Mao Tse Tung and other Marxist readings. He was instrumental in recruiting gang members to the Chicano movement and to socialism.

John participated in various Chicano movement activities, but I remember him participating in the Chicano Moratorium of December 20, 1969 (the first), when we protested the Vietnam war and the higher casualty rates of Chicanos. He later joined the La Raza Unida Party Labor Committee and then the August Twenty-Nine Movement (ATM), where he began labor organizing.

Due to heavy repression, I left LA and went underground, losing contact with him. But when I was rearrested in May of 1977, John joined the committee that worked for my freedom. He was active in ATM-ML, an organization that I had also joined in El Paso, Texas during the big Farah pants strike. John attended my court hearings and was part of the campaign that won my case. I recall one little conversation we had at the International Institute at a fundraiser for my case on supporting the important role of women in the movement. He later joined the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS) and continued organizing as an M-L, until its dissolution.

We reconnected in later years in the fight to save Hazard Park, from a University of Southern California street encroachment, where he reminded me that this was his hood. He was also active in the Exide clean up from lead pollution. John gave a lifetime to the struggle for Chicano liberation and socialism.

I got the opportunity to call him before he passed, and he was glad that the nursing staff were in a union. Carmen Dillard, his partner, had a memorial for him in East LA on October 1, 2026, where several former ATM-ML and LRS members spoke. He was a revolutionary to the end and an M-L.

Long live the memory of John Sermeno!

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