The Green Jobs Revolution Needs to Include All of Us

 By: Audrea Lim

Adan Anguiano had been working in the solar industry only a few months when his company, Evolution Energy, got a contract to install a solar-heating unit two blocks from his home, in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles. “I was working on the roof and looking straight at the view of where I grew up, and it was like, wow,” he recalled. Candles were flickering in the distance, and he recognized them as part of a sidewalk memorial for his friend Fred Barragan, who had been shot by police in March 2017, just weeks after Anguiano joined Evolution. 

Just a few years earlier, Anguiano would never have imagined himself with this job, or any job. The 33-year-old had begun “making mistakes, getting into trouble” in high school, leading to a two-year stint in a juvenile-detention facility when he was 16, and then a couple of short prison terms in his twenties. “I didn’t have anything,” he said. He was no longer living with his ex and his kids, so he sought distraction by drinking and hanging out in the streets. “I fell back in the same old ways.”

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