No one I knew in Los Angeles—and I have close friends and neighbors who work in the downtown core—was afraid to go downtown. That is, they were unafraid until President Donald Trump called in the National Guard and then the Marines—against the wishes of Mayor Karen Bass, Governor Gavin Newsom and much of the population of the city. Indeed, insofar as a feeling of crisis now looms over L.A., redolent of the catastrophic fires in January or the pandemic years, it is the deployment of troops that has set it off.
My wife, children and I live in what Angelenos refer to as the “Westside,” the largely wealthy swaths of urban sprawl on the ocean side of downtown that contain some ostensibly independent communities like Culver City and Santa Monica. On Saturday, the day after the protests had begun, we planned a day trip for my wife’s birthday (with our kids, one and seven years old) that took us through downtown with no sense of fear or disruption—indeed, with no awareness of unrest at all.
But all this had changed by Monday, as I stood with other parents to pick up my son from school.
One working-class Latina, who is here legally, told me in Spanish that the public buses had been “vacíos” (or empty) that morning due to fear of ICE sweeps. She rode the bus alone that morning. Another Latino, born and raised in Los Angeles, who is a stalwartly cheerful fellow, looked uncharacteristically troubled. “This is not right,” he said. “They can’t just scare people like this.”
The school had circulated flyers earlier that day in Spanish and English enumerating the rights of immigrants if ICE knocks on the door (e.g. even as a migrant without papers, you have a right to remain silent; you have a right to not open the door if they have no warrant signed by a judge). The Parent Teacher Association also sent out a missive trying to calm fearful parents, assuring them that at dismissal time there would be “adults… to keep all children safe.” No parents were afraid of the protestors. They were afraid of militarized crackdowns breaking up what is an existing community at the local level.
Indeed, as of June 10, Los Angeles has more military personnel deployed within its boundaries (4,800) than Iraq and Syria combined (2,500). This is what it feels like when troops are deployed on your city from on high and afar: like you are in a foreign land. This is what it feels like when decades of endless war are brought back home and, out of a politics of resentment, turned on one’s own citizens.
Mike Davis, in City of Quartz, his celebrated history of the city, referred to Los Angeles as having a dual identity for Americans: a place that was both what he called “sunshine” and an idealized utopia and “mirror of capitalism’s future,” as well as “noir,” or a “deracinated urban hell.” In the reactions to the events in Los Angeles that I read from elsewhere in the country, this same bipolarity was evident. One meme from the right spread around X with variants showing white people enjoying the sunshine and leafy streets before “mass migration… made America unrecognizable,” as Congressman Brandon Gill put it in a post. The unstated xenophobia in Gill’s message is clear: Los Angeles has been ruined by brown people from the south of the border. Before that, it had been a paradise for whites to wander the romantic ruins left behind by Spanish mission architecture while listening to the Beach Boys.
But one thing outsiders need to understand about L.A. and Southern California is that, both temporally and spatially, it is in an indissociable set of communal relationships with people and cities on the other side of the border. Los Angeles was historically part of Spanish America and then Mexico, settled by rancheros. Its full name, which like many place names in California, is in Spanish. The city is named for the Virgin Mary of the angels: El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula.
Catholic readers may be interested that the vast majority of both the legal and illegal immigrants in L.A. help make up the largest Roman Catholic archdiocese in the country. They have called the area home far longer than have the Anglo Protestants who came first in the late 19th century and in much larger waves in the middle of the 20th, as white Midwesterners filled the suburbs rising in all directions. Indeed, I am almost tempted to use verbs in an unfamiliar way and insist that it was the Anglo Midwesterners who “immigrated” here in a huge deluge one generation ago, while the Hispanic population has been here for two centuries. The point is not to exclude anyone from making a home in Los Angeles. The point is that thick local and multicultural ties that bind across languages and, yes, borders have existed here far longer than current myths of ethnic nationalism.
Indeed, significant portions of the massive Hispanic population in Los Angeles (I myself have both Anglo and Hispanic roots) have continuity in their neighborhoods that goes back to before the Mexican-American War. In other words, the border moved on them, but the older cultural pattern and place have been for centuries Spanish and “mestizo.” This is true, for example, of the historic seed of the modern city, La Placita, where I have a habit of going on Good Friday for a Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) that passes through the oldest church in the city, Our Lady Queen of Angels. It was built in 1814, when the city was still under Spanish rule. The latter in turn invaded, colonized and also mixed with the indigenous tribes.
Spatially, the city has never been disconnected from a wider cultural network that includes Mexico either. Angelenos who are here legally often have relatives across the border everywhere from Baja California to Mexico City. Crossing the border can even form a regular commute into Southern California (I know a dentist who lives on the Westside but who visits her family every weekend in their home city of Tijuana). Community businesses, schools, churches and more embrace individuals that challenge the simplistic ethnic ideology of MAGA.
The abstractions of nationalism erase from us a simple fact: Human associations and communities crisscross the border. There are dependencies of family, work, faith and more that are not reducible to the dystopian nationalist dream of ethnically cleansing the map.
Los Angeles is the second-largest city by population in the country, but spatially it dwarfs its rival New York. Even inside the city limits, one can move a few blocks away in the downtown urban core and not even notice that protests are occurring.
In such a city, events capable of rippling through the entire metropolis are extremely rare—the combination of the pandemic and George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020 did reach those levels. But the protests as of June 10 were contained in what is, relatively speaking, an extremely small portion of the city (the mayor’s office was reporting that protests were “limited to about five downtown streets”). This is in a city with more road mileage than nearly any other in the United States.
Fear of the protests was not detectable or even notable in the city at large. But fear of the arrival of the National Guard and then Marines was felt throughout. So much so that 30 cities across the L.A. metropolitan area, including the mayors of Downey, Culver City and Huntington Park, have joined in a public denouncement of Trump’s deployments, asking him to immediately rescind what is being experienced as a military occupation. Mayor Dan O’Brien of Culver City said on June 11: “We have people who are staying in their homes, locked for fear of walking in the streets in the communities that they once felt was their home. That’s not right.” Alas that sense of political fear, even terror exercised not only on immigrants but entire cities, was the point.
Mr. Trump seems to be conducting an endless campaign to accumulate as much power to himself personally—as a supreme executive—as our country will allow him. To this end, he has usurped the power of governors to decide whether to call in the National Guard. His recent actions in this regard put underfoot what the great political theorists admired as the American tradition of the independence of the city. As is known to political historians, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not think of freedom as primarily belonging to individuals. They thought freedom was a term that related to cities and their ability to give themselves their own laws.
Visiting antebellum New England, Alexis de Tocqueville recognized that the fierce independence of cities to self-govern in America went back to the ancient world of Athens, Corinth and Sparta. The same notion also found a place in America’s system of federalism and its insistence on devolution of self-rule where possible to a locality. In both its ancient and American forms, the independence of cities is much older than the modern nationalism wielded from Washington by Mr. Trump.
As of this writing, MAGA legislators are proposing what they call “the Lawless Cities Accountability Act” to pull federal funding from cities that they claim “let criminals run wild.” This is an attempt to selectively and punitively destroy the independence of one of America’s great (if imperfect) cities, and claim more power for a D.C.-seated absolutist executive at the helm of an ethnic nationalist movement. It marks a full frontal attack on the independence of cities that goes back to ancient republicanism, in favor of a modern Hobbesian conception of the state and nationalism.
Although we are undoubtedly in for many difficult days, I suspect that in the long run cities like Los Angeles will outlive this nationalist wave. Just as L.A. persisted to see Spanish and Mexican rule come and go, it will outlive Mr. Trump’s attempt to destroy the independence of cities too.
