by David Carr
The fault lines in Los Angeles have shifted again — but I’m not talking about earthquakes.
ICE raids are taking a toll on the city and its suburbs, with pregnant mothers rounded up, a 9-year-old detained, and day laborers terrorized at a local Home Depot. So much for deporting dangerous criminals.
Tens of thousands of people protested — the majority peaceful — against the raids and Donald Trump’s dictatorial actions over the weekend. Trump responded on Sunday night by directing ICE to “detain and deport” even more Angelenos.
That’s troubling enough. But as a native Angeleno who taught at Compton High in the 1990s during the city’s shift from being majority Black to majority Latino, what has also been troubling is the rhetoric coming from some in the Black community that ICE agents rounding up Latinos is not our issue.
Some have voiced opinions on illegal immigration, changing neighborhoods, and competition for jobs. Others point to the real, painful anti-Black and anti dark-skinned sentiment that is pervasive in parts of Latin America and how that cultural baggage has played out in historically Black communities like Compton, Watts, and South Los Angeles.
Then there’s the violence between Black and Latino gangs, the ongoing fight for political power between Black and Latino officials, not to mention the 2022 scandal of three then-city council members — Gil Cedillo, Kevin de León, and Nury Martinez — being caught on tape making racist, anti-Black statements.
But focusing solely on those challenges risks erasing a long, intertwined history of shared struggle and solidarity — one that is not only unknown and overlooked, but is also now in danger of being erased by this current administration’s crackdown on teaching truth. What we need now is a history lesson on who we are to help us forge a pathway to who we can become.
A Legacy of Coalition
Let’s be nostalgic. At the height of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. set out to create another March on Washington to address poverty. King was planning a Poor People’s Campaign, and in 1968, he reached out to Cesar Chavez, Rodolfo Corky Gonzales, and Reis Lopez Tijerina to not just be participants but co-leaders.
Chavez was already on a hunger strike, but he sent members of the United Farm Workers (UFW) to be part of the campaign. Gonzales and Tijerina jumped at the chance to lock arms with King and made sure to have busloads of Mexican Americans at the march. This was not just symbolic. It was strategic — and rooted in a knowledge that poverty and injustice are our shared enemies.
As quiet as it’s kept, the UFW had a working coalition with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for many years before that. The UFW educated SNCC members about the plight of Mexican American farmworkers, and SNCC members taught the tactics of nonviolent protest and how to effectively deal with growers and the police.
The ongoing Black freedom struggle at the time provided both inspiration and allies to the farmworkers. In 1965 and 1966, during the farmworker strike, organizers from SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality, along with student activists from the Bay Area, arrived in Delano, California, to offer support, drawing parallels between the Jim Crow South and rural California in the fight for racial justice.
From Gang Violence to Grassroots Unity
Decades later, in the 1990s, it’s true, Black and Latino gang violence grew to a fever pitch, specifically in the heart of Venice Beach. In 1994, after months of gang chaos and bloodshed — 19 dead, 50 wounded, none of them gang members but all either Black or Latino — a group of teachers, activists, artists, former gang members, counselors and priests came together to help broker a truce between a Latino gang, the Venice 13 and a Black gang, the Shoreline Crips. It is one of the few gang truces that has held strong in L.A.
In 1980, Compton was approximately 74% Black and 21% Latino, but by 2000, it had become about 40% Black and 57% Latino, according to U.S. Census data. That made Compton the first urban area in Los Angeles County to see Latinos become the majority in a formerly predominantly Black community. And although tensions sometimes ran high, a group of churches came together to form a political action committee. The parishioners were Black and Chicano/Latino, and they had one goal in mind: electing city leaders who would truly help and support a new Black and Brown community.
We’ve Been Neighbors. We’re Also Family
These are just some of the ways Chicanos/Latinos and African Americans have come together for the greater good. These two communities are so intertwined in Los Angeles that now, Black folks in historically Black areas like Compton, Inglewood, and Watts have lived alongside Latinos for decades. We are neighbors, friends, and, thanks to intermarriage, family.
Now is the time to support and stick up for one another. We saw some of this coalition-building in action in a video posted on Instagram last Thursday by commentator Keith Boykin, who interviewed some of the young African American and Afro Latino Angelenos who went to last week’s protests.
Remember Our Better Angels
These past few days have reminded us that Black and Brown lives are still precarious in America, and they’ve also reminded us of the radical, difficult, beautiful work of coalition building. And while all this has been going on, we lost two musical legends/geniuses who tried to appeal to our better angels.
Brian Wilson wanted everyone in Southern California to feel those “Good Vibrations” and enjoy that “Ex-ci-tation.” We could use some good vibrations right about now, brother Brian.
Meanwhile, Sly Stone made his feelings clear in the tune “Everyday People”: “There is a yellow one that won’t accept the Black one that won’t accept the red one, that won’t accept the white one…You love me you hate me you know me and then, you can’t figure out the bag I’m in”.
After the chorus, Sly made his marching orders clear when he emphatically proclaimed, “We gotta live together! We gotta live together!”
During this chaotic time, I hope Black and Brown Los Angeles — and the rest of the nation, too — heeds this clarion call. We do indeed have to live together.
David Carr has been in public education for 30 years. He is currently a teaching and learning coordinator with Los Angeles Education Partnership.
