Los Angeles Fighting in the Streets: 2025 and 1975
I see my LA in these photos. This is our home. Not Trump’s. Not Hollywood’s.
I woke up Saturday night with a clatter. Something was wrong, and it wasn’t an earthquake.
I grabbed my phone in the dark and there it was, at the top of screen:
Los Angeles is under attack by ICE.
The Gestapo were summoned by Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and the other MAGA flying monkeys who promised to rain hell on California.
It’s their beta test. They’re here in all their glittering halberds. They have come to show the face of hell, and this isn’t the first time we’ve seen such a conquest.
As in 1519, Cortez’ invasion of Mexico City:1
Their iron lances, their halberds seemed to glitter.
Their iron swords gleamed like flowing water.
They seemed to clatter, their iron shirts, their iron helmets.
And some came all encased in iron, they came transformed in iron, they came glittering.
Thus they came causing great awe, thus they came causing great terror.
Thus they were seen with great fear, thus they were held in great dread.
And their dogs came in front, they came in the lead.
They came standing out before them, they came spread out before them.
They came constantly panting, their slaver constantly dripping.
I’d like to share contemporary photos and a few memories with you, because this scene is a Los Angeles I call home.
The shots are all from a photographer I’ve been following closely, Eric Thayer, for Associated Press. He is a veteran photojournalist. His photos of central LA are exactly as I remember it, as I picture it.
The locations of the recent battles, much to my pride, are not of Hollywood. Movie stars and pop influencers have NOTHING to do with what is going on in Los Angeles this week.
This is not the red carpet.
The majority of LA County is as American as chile-apple pie, but it is not white, or English-speaking, and it never has been.
Mike Davis’ history, City of Quartz, is a good place to start. “Los Angeles has always been burning.”
In the above photos, I have to smile when I spy “Dale’s Donuts.” Dale’s is the kind of giant food sculpture LA is famous for. The American Dream.
Good ole’ Dale’s. I mean, who wasn’t there at 2am, after a long day on the line? It closed in 2021 but the Big D is forever.
The woman on the right is my mentor in “how to take care of yourself in a tense situation.” She was an early woman over-the-road trucker, a Teamster, who did not put up with chauvinists, labor scabs, or company goons.
Bitsy was just over five feet tall, and as you might imagine, intimidating. I towered over her, a tower of jelly, and had a lot to learn.
If you’re not familiar with Los Angeles, here’s a tip: “LA” is a large city to itself, but it is surrounded by small incorporated towns, which have nominal city governments, but in reality, are part of LA.
Compton is one of those towns. So is Lynwood; so is Paramount City, which people call “Paramount” these days. When I was young, we enjoyed saying, “Paramount Cit-TAY!”
Why do these pseudo-burbs proliferate? Redlining.
LA was constructed by industry and segregation. When Black families, Chicano natives, and Pacific-Asian-American people looked for homes, there were mapped blocks available, and that was that.
White people were given the pretty neighborhoods— everyone else was pointed to the industrial wastelands, or the rural-undeveloped tracts.
This was not California’s invention, of course. You may know when Henry Ford built his Detroit factories, he build a housing settlement for his white workers, called “Dearborn,” and one for his black workers, “Inkster.” Cute.
When I was a 70s teenage organizer in the Teamsters, Compton was black, yes, but Lynwood was still “white,” rather hilariously so. —Largely white working class families on the edge of either racist hysteria— or, if I had anything to do with it, labor solidarity and getting over themselves.
It was as tough to convince anyone now as it is today, but we had a common enemy: tyrannical bosses. Contemptuous city fathers. Indifferent or brutal law.
At one point, I was part of a small group of rank and filers called “Teamsters for a Decent Contract” who were determined not to be sold out by our corrupt union leadership on the eve of the 1976 contract. We needed everyone to pull together and be done with the bigotry tearing us apart.
I was organizing in every freight yard in south central LA, and all the county southeast toward Long Beach and the Inland Empire. I flyered and held impromptu meetings in countless break rooms and parking lots, usually with one or two other pals.
More than once, there was trouble. Here’s a memory from an old chapter:2
Something hard punched me in the lower back. —Like a brick. I fell, sprawling onto my hands and knees in the dirt. I couldn’t breathe; it hurt so bad.
“Hey girlie!”
I pushed up off my belly, my hands on fire, like the gravel had been shot into them.
A squat muscular guy with a worse grin than a junkyard dog stood above me, a wrench in his hand.
I’d been smacked before, but neither my mother nor the nuns ever smiled at me while they were doing it.
This lady? She reminds me of me, after I got hit in the street, my comrade carrying me back to car. I was bleeding, too.
The only reason it didn’t get worse was because my union brother pulled his .45 from his shoulder holster. Otherwise, they would have beat me into the ground. Self-defense is a multi-layered thing.
Our crime? Nothing. Talking? Eating donuts and talking. Talking about how every day was another struggle.
The consistent piece of Eric Thayer’s photos; his humanity. You find your memories and your family in his pictures.
You see, no one goes to “protests” entirely prepared.
In fact, like many in LA this weekend, most people never went out to protest. They were going to the store. They were on their way home. They were ambushed.
You have to do something when the thugs come at you.
Sometimes you get hurt, sometimes you get away and hide, and sometimes you score. Sometimes another loved one is in your arms, and you’re the one with the water bottle.
—This photo, above! You can tell what this young woman is saying and who she’s saying it to.
“Which side are you on? How can you face your family? What makes you think your bosses care about you?”
I’ve seen the other side of this.
In the 70s, “The GI Movement” and “Vietnam Vets Against the War” were huge. They were survivors. Brown and black working class soldiers, (along with what would have been derided as “white trash”), who’d been called up en masse to die while their superiors smirked.
One of the biggest events to rock Los Angeles during Vietnam years was The Chicano Moratorium. It was anti-draft, anti-war, La Raza-led. High schools walked out all over East LA, in 1968, 1969, 1970– and in commemorations ever since. It was the largest anti-war action taken by any ethnic group in America.
Everyone in the streets today? Their parents and grandparents in East and Central LA County remember the moratorium; they were part of it. You better believe the teenagers on the streets know it.
When you see the Mexican flag being waved, it means: “La Raza.”
It’s not being carried by Mexican infiltrators, ha!— or people who know anything about the politics in District Federale. That’s the GOP fascism talking point. Everything is an invasion to them, but they tell on themselves. They are the invaders.
No, the flag of the eagle vanquishing the snake is the Aztec David vs. Goliath. It’s waved by people whose ancestors came here during the Mexican revolution in the 1850s. Indigenous people from Alta California who were nearly wiped out by Anglo and Spanish colonizers. Today, it’s everyone in LA who ever intermarried and had kids. It’s us, the people of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula. That’s our real name.
I won’t tolerate pundits who characterize street self-defense as deplorable. The street fighters are massively outnumbered and out-armed. They are survivors and heroes, and yes, martyrs.
What would MLK say? “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
What would Malcolm say? “The chickens are coming home to roost.”
Or, as Flavor Flav would say: “911 is a Joke.”
Do we have tanks and machine guns and Pretorian guards on horseback? No. It’s David vs. Goliath, and that’s the way it always is.
The same people who see fighting for their lives are the same ones who tried every other way to live, to speak out, to get along, to ask nicely, to vote, to be reasonable, to talk sense. And we won’t stop doing those things. We want to live. We are not slaves.
Umbrellas repel gas. So do leaf blowers.
Shopping carts. Milk Crates.
Sweet milk to wash the gas burns from your eyes.
Technology doesn’t matter when this is the ground.
This is our ground.
The death cult of today’s smart young Nazis are not folding up their tents. They are pressing their advantage. They come causing great awe.
We come too. Glittering ourselves. It has come to this.
There are more of us.
If You Missed It
The Master Freight Agreement - 1976
I cut last period, “High School Driver’s Education” with Mr. Burns. Burns wouldn’t understand that the revolution was not going to wait for his stop-signal exam.
The Spanish March on Mexico City, 1519, my father’s translation from the monastary eyewitness.
Big Sex Little Death, Chapter: The Master Freight Contract, 1976
I know some of you who are writing have “pasts” in Los Angeles, like me. A lot of us, who are artists, ran away from the apolitical side, the show business con. And yet we always said to friends: “There is so much more to LA.”
Thank you for thinking this piece hits a spot. I got that feeling in my chest writing it. It was also because I was writing “to” Eric’s photos, placing them and letting them tell my story as they told the story he is telling. I hope he is okay. The reporters down there are laying it on the line. Especially photographers who tread with sensitivity like few others.
Devestating and brilliant writing, our hometown burned down in the fire snd now this crap
Miller , noem, hesgeth pure evil