La Virgen de Guadalupe is everywhere in every neighborhood with any degree of Latinidad in Los Angeles, framed as a print behind the taqueria’s cash register or painted on the street side of a business and only occasionally marred by graffiti. La bandera nacional de México—the Mexican flag—is newly everywhere these days, too, where police officers, members of the Army National Guard and U.S. Marines confront those gathered in the streets to protest heavy-handed immigration enforcement. It could hardly be otherwise.
In a city intimately connected to Mexican lineages and history, where nearly half the population of 4.2 million has some Hispanic heritage, the Virgin and the flag are commonplace symbols, unremarkable to Angelenos. The flag is a guarantor of identity and autonomy in a regime of cultural erasure, not a provocation. The Virgin is a complementary image of solidarity with suffering. She is transnational, borderless and as hybrid as we are, making her the mother of every Angeleno.
We are balkanized by class, politics and sports franchises in Los Angeles, yet most of us accept every mixture of color and ethnicity in those we welcome as neighbors and receive as lovers. Uncomprehending Americans from elsewhere—and President Donald Trump, specifically—recoil from what Angelenos do and have always done. We are marginal people, perpetually colonizing and being colonized, used to ambiguity, and citizens of the northernmost capital of the tropical south.
Los Angeles is not burning.
The texts and emails came, as they always do, from family members and friends when the stench of tear gas is in the air or the sky of Los Angeles is hazy with smoke. “Are you safe?” they asked on the morning of June 7 after a night of clashes with police and the agents of ICE; “Is your neighborhood burning?” The imagination of disaster always goes to Los Angeles, even though the city at large was untroubled. No one thought the city was under siege that morning. No one needed rescue on the terms ICE offered.
That evening, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller (who shapes Mr. Trump’s vindictive immigration policies) militarized the federal government’s response to the demonstrations and occasional vandalism that followed an ICE roundup of laborers waiting at a Home Depot in suburban Paramount and workers at their sewing machines in the downtown garment district. The reckless ICE sweeps and preemptive military deployment were widely regarded as political spectacles for those Americans who have always seen Los Angeles as suspect. A combustible city was expected to burn gaudily on Fox News. It didn’t.
Federal agents on June 6 had arrested David Huerta, a California union leader, charging him with “conspiracy to impede an officer.” A week later, U.S. Senator Alex Padilla was hustled out of a Noem press conference by federal security officers, wrestled to the floor and restrained. In occupied Los Angeles, no matter who or what you are, if you fit the profile, you’re just another Mexican.
The sidewalk vendors are gone.
The rhythms of city life changed as federal agents continued incursions into Latino neighborhoods south and east of downtown. The city’s immigrant cosmopolitanism dimmed. Sidewalks emptied. The taco carts and fruit sellers—the taqueros and fruteros—went into hiding along with their customers, fearing arrest and deportation. Small businesses in immigrant neighborhoods struggled to stay open, their workers absent, cutting off families from paychecks and rent money. Parents kept children home from the last days of school or didn’t attend graduations. Swap meet dealers stayed away from weekend spots. Parts of downtown returned to the days of Covid-19 sheltering. As another night of curfew began, a coyote trotted down a deserted Spring Street near City Hall.
Fear in Los Angeles is compounded by sadness that the losses will continue. Secretary Noem told reporters on June 12, “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership” of California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. By June 16, 4,800 Army National Guard and Marine Corps troops idly patrolled federal facilities.
After 20,000 mostly peaceful Angelenos assembled at “No Kings” demonstrations on June 14 and thousands more gathered in San Diego and San Francisco, President Trump escalated the reaction nationally by directing ICE to target New York and Chicago to meet ICE’s daily quota of 3,000 deportations. The trauma of “liberation” may soon be everywhere in America.
800,000 ‘dangerous criminals’
Los Angeles County, with a population of 9.7 million, has an estimated 800,000 residents whose immigration status leaves them open to arrest and deportation. In the neighborhoods, workplaces and parking lots where the vulnerable can be found, ICE teams move quickly and anonymously, arresting people within minutes. The masked officers say nothing except commands to comply; they zip-tie the hands of those they’ve targeted and leave in unmarked vans to undisclosed detention sites. Bystanders hold up cell phone cameras and post videos of the disappearances to YouTube.
Left behind are wives without husbands, children without mothers, disabled parents without caregivers. But that is the point. Migrants are taken, but those left on the street have been reminded—if such a lesson were needed—that the undocumented are excluded, uninvited or at best unwelcome, and of no concern except as “dangerous criminals” and “insurrectionists.”
The flag-waving and slogan-chanting crowds of “No Kings” day are gone. The nighttime curfew downtown is over, but immigration sweeps continue throughout Los Angeles while the children of immigrants staff the lunch counters and storefront businesses of their frightened parents. Pacified for now, Los Angeles is still poised between fire and ICE.
Some Angelenos hope that the continuing roundups and presence of troops in battle harness will have clarified the importance of strong borders and respect for immigration law. How those values can be reconciled with their effect on the 300,000 Angeleno families whose members include both citizens and the undocumented is left unanswered. Can ICE and the Marines unmake the hybrid Los Angeles we have? And if they could, what would Los Angeles become?
Federal agents stood outside the church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in the Latino suburb of Downey on June 11. They took one man into custody as he brought his daughter to the parish school. A mixture of devotional artworks is displayed inside the church and on the church grounds. The Virgin of Guadalupe is among them. It is unlikely ICE agents noticed her mestiza features, perfectly fitting the profile of just another Mexican.
For even faithless Angelenos, no belief is required at the Virgin’s shrine, only a longing to be reconciled together. Among the hopeful and fearful seeking their place in an occupied city, the Virgin—Patroness of All the Americas—is a sign that a community with humane borders and greater compassion may be possible.
