Saturday, July 12, is a warm evening in Los Angeles, and the city glistens. I leave Apartment 501 in Koreatown, where HoodRave has just pulsed with ecstatic energy. The politically and community-conscious underground party series—organized by multidisciplinary artist Kumi James, also known as BAE BAE—centers Black, trans, and other racialized lives. On the dance floor, we shouted “FUCK ICE!” and passed out rapid defense cards against Immigration and Customs Enforcement while moving among strangers and friends. Joy is inseparable from resistance. Especially over these past months, when ICE has met Angelenos with brutal violence: attacks on homes, children being pulled away from their mothers, churches targeted, vendors and workers abducted off the streets, queer nightlife surveilled.
In the midst of repression and fearmongering, presence and political consciousness feel like defiance, a refusal to shrink in fear.
This is Los Angeles’s dual reality today: flourishing cultural life against the backdrop of state repression. A month prior, on June 6, President Trump deployed the National Guard and Marines in Los Angeles, launching a mass deportation operation that targeted the city’s diverse migrant communities. As a result, majority Latinx neighborhoods in Downtown, Compton, South Central, and Inglewood were assaulted by federal agents at their homes, schools, and workplaces. A curfew was put in place by Mayor Karen Bass, and the harsh detentions and extinguishing of life caused by ICE raids, in addition to the everyday constrictions of policing, left our communities in a state of constant fear.
Fear here is undeniable, but it coexists with collective care, with the persistence of gathering and the necessity of sharing resources as a way of holding onto life. Life, as embodied by Angelenos, is nurtured and sustained by our legacies of refusal, by resisting systemic oppression, locating mutual care, and reminding ourselves that beyond pain, joy, and collectivity move us forward.
Immigration is Sacred
From Koreatown, I make my way to Mid-City for The Land Will Never Forget Us, the first solo exhibition of Mexican-Salvadoran photographer Thalia Gochez. Known for her portraits of femme Latinas and racialized people—their aesthetics, environments, and everyday rituals—Gochez has cultivated deep respect as a cultural steward, documenting lives too often misrepresented or unseen.
The exhibition begins with an installation at the threshold: a colorful piñata hugged by balloons, at once familiar and uncanny. It evokes downtown LA’s rows of party-supply shops—many Latinx family-owned, many destabilized by ICE raids and curfews that magnify public fear. Piñatas, typically vessels of joy, appeared here as fragile testaments of labor under threat. Yet when struck, the installation erupts with color, sound, and movement. What ICE and state power attempt to fracture—families, neighborhoods, dignity—this exhibition reassembles.
If raids aim to scatter us, Gochez shows how we burst open instead: into art, into memory, into collective aliveness.
These collaborations underscore what Los Angeles cultural workers know intimately: sustaining life here requires shared labor, material support, and creative risk.
An estimated 600 guests filled Amato Studio for the exhibition, featuring works by more than 30 artists from Los Angeles and Oaxaca, spanning sculpture, photography, and painting. The artists came together in response to Gochez’s call on social media asking for support, bringing not only their work but also their deep ties to love, family, community, and care—reminding the city that, as the title declares, The Land Will Never Forget Us. Despite colonial violence that has stripped Indigenous communities of land rights around the world, and ongoing state violence that targets those who steward and sustain Los Angeles, no force is stronger than our collective commitment to remember and to learn from one another. These intergenerational knowledges remind us how critical it is to show up, to speak out, to share our grief, anger, joys, and hopes for a better tomorrow.
Each work narrated a story, building upon the others to affirm our undeniable presence here, rooted in history and reaching always into the future. The scale was impressive, but its force was in its intimacy.
For Gochez, the exhibition grew out of noticing absence. Her neighbor, Doña Sylvia, a local flower vendor, had stopped going to work. Asking around, Gochez learned she was staying home out of fear of immigration enforcement. The show became a response. Drawing on the networks she has long nurtured, Gochez helped raise $10,000 for the community, dividing $5,000 for the National Day Labor Organizing Network and the rest for the Immigrant Defenders Law Center. At the show, she ensured that Doña Sylvia’s flowers were sold in her stead.
“Everyone showed up for each other,” Gochez told me of the event. “People came up to me and said they needed this moment of connection. LA needed this. I needed this. A space that felt safe and contained.”
That spirit of mutual aid reverberated throughout the evening. The tequila company Don Julio gifted alcohol to support fundraising efforts, and neighborhood businesses like Mariscos Marias, the streetwear label Kids of Immigrants, the radio station Dublab, and community planners like Victoria offered food, apparel, music equipment, and space planning to arrange a night of joy, nourishment, and community. Local brands and community faces remind us of safety, of family, of one another.
These collaborations underscored what Los Angeles cultural workers know intimately: sustaining life here requires shared labor, material support, and creative risk. For Gochez, care is both aesthetic and practice, extending across art, organizing, and everyday survival. It is enacted through showing up, listening, speaking, and doing: the domino effect of care that sustains Los Angeles.
In the midst of dancing and greeting, hugging and holding space, I was drawn to the work of Mexican-Costa Rican LA-based photographer Brittany Bravo. Her photographic work, Immigration is Sacred, depicts an older Latinx man embraced by butterflies—approaching, landing, and leaving him. Bravo, who explores the intimacies of love, family, and culture through her work, reminds us in this piece that migration is not only an act of survival but also of dignity, a sacred pursuit of safety and recognition. In Bravo’s vision, as in Gochez’s, migration is reframed not as loss but as possibility, a way of remaking the world despite systemic violence.
This ethic of care echoes elsewhere in the city. Lava Market, a shop run by two Asian women and a Latina woman and founded in response to the lack of size inclusivity in local flea markets, has remained committed to uplifting historically excluded community members. A week after Gochez’s show, on Saturday, July 19, Lava hosted “LAVA FOR IMMIGRANTS,” inviting primarily LGBTQ+ and racialized vendors to “show up for our neighbors and community in the ways that we can. Every interaction and contribution is a testament to the transformative power of community, compassion, and solidarity,” read the event post on Instagram. The caption concluded: “LAVA MELTS ICE!!” That night, Lava raised $10,271.38 for immigrant mutual aid and families directly impacted by ICE.
Like Gochez’s exhibition, Lava Market demonstrates that in Los Angeles, care is not sentiment but strategy—a way to ensure collective survival. It is the condition of possibility for art-making, for organizing, for simply continuing. I spent my night at Lava supporting loved ones, finding articles of clothing that affirm my identity, and exchanging words with people who understand our capacity and willingness for change—in Los Angeles and beyond.
Pausing, Listening, & Moving Together
Cine Apartamento, a queer cinema founded in 2023 by Michael Hall and Ryan Luis Fuller in their Koreatown apartment, extends this blueprint. Usually screening queer films from around the world, they turned towards dialogue, holding space for members to share anxieties, hopes, and strategies in response to a wave of ICE raids. That decision—to withhold spectacle to honor grief, fear, and conversation—was itself a cultural intervention.
Across markets, studios, cinemas, and clubs, care becomes a strategy of resistance, a blueprint for moving forward with critical consciousness.
“It felt necessary to take the time to check in on our community while providing resources for resistance, safety, research/historical materials, and, most importantly, an open circle discussion to let out anger, grief, and anxieties,” the founders shared in an interview. “It was easy for us to feel angry and powerless and knew it was needed for us to come together and discuss our inner thoughts, identities, and personal roles in our own communities.” Cine Apartamento reminds us that resistance sometimes means making room for pauses: to speak, to listen, to sit together in the heaviness of the moment.
Taken together—HoodRave, Gochez’s exhibition, Lava Market, Cine Apartamento—these efforts illuminate a broader lesson: living in Los Angeles is never solitary. Our collectivity is forged through networks of care that stretch beyond what we immediately see, extending across neighborhoods and diverse diasporas. Carrying our own histories of violence and undoing, our strategies towards collective liberation stand as both a testament to caring for one another and a responsibility to those across the Américas living under the shadow of enforcement and displacement.
Los Angeles cultural life, then, is not only about art or nightlife or gathering for its own sake. It is about learning how to hold one another in the face of repression. It is about building infrastructures of care that keep us alive while pushing us toward collective transformation. Across markets, studios, cinemas, and clubs, care becomes a strategy of resistance, a blueprint for moving forward with critical consciousness. A reminder that this work will always be bound up with our practices, our urgencies, and our insistence on remaining creative.
In a city where repression is constant, it is care—messy, collective, diasporic, and insistently present—that ensures we endure. The task ahead is to not only celebrate these moments of solidarity but to sustain them: to keep showing up for one another, to redistribute resources, to document and remember, to pause when needed, and to listen deeply. For artists, organizers, and neighbors alike, this means treating care not as an afterthought but as daily practice—woven into how we create, collaborate, and live. If mutual aid and collective care have kept us alive in the face of raids, curfews, and displacement, they must also guide how we imagine the future. The next step is simple, though never easy: to keep holding each other close, to widen the circle of who we consider “us,” and to insist that survival is always shared. As Gochez reminded me at the end of our interview, “I want this work to inspire others, to pass the torch down, share knowledge, and come together.” It is in this passing down and in-between collectivity that we can begin to ask the necessary questions and readjust, together.
S. Quechol is a trans Latina cultural critic, scholar, and writer from LA. Her research engages trans-travesti communities in Latin America and the United States, foregrounding intergenerational knowledge, collective care, and joy. She explores how these communities resist through art, storytelling, and self-imaging to world-make toward restful futures.