Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
is an arts and general assignment reporter on LAist's Explore LA team.
Published November 1, 2023 5:00 AM
Mexica warrior, Book 12 of the 'Florentine Codex' on the conquest of Mexico (detail).
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Courtesy the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT
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Topline:
The Getty has unveiled a nearly decade old effort to digitize the Florentine Codex. The 2,400-page encyclopedia of indigenous Mexican culture has had a deep impact on these Southern California college students.
Why it matters: The Codex’s indigenous content was written decades after the Spanish began destroying most indigenous historical writings.
The backstory: The Codex has already inspired Southern Californians with indigenous Mexican heritage to delve into their history.
What's next: Scholars say people are needed as guides for the Codex’s content. They can be teachers, professors, and others who should be trained with teaching lesson plans. Who’s going to create those time and money-intensive lesson plans?
How A Centuries-Old History Of Indigenous Mexico Inspired These College Students To Change Career Paths
The Getty unveiled this past week the final product of an eight-year effort to digitize a massive, centuries-old encyclopedia of central Mexican indigenous culture. That process has already started changing lives.
Written about 50 years after the Spanish invaded and defeated the Aztec army, the document’s title when finished was: "Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España" or "General History of the Things of New Spain."
It ended up in a royal library in Italy, which led to the name it’s now known by: the Florentine Codex.
“It really blew my mind,” said Maria Velasco, remembering the 2018 undergraduate class at California State University, Northridge in which she learned about the Codex.
“I [had] never seen any [indigenous] manuscripts and the Florentine Codex was the first manuscript or codex that I had seen,” she said.
She grew up in Los Angeles, but her family is Zapotec, an indigenous community in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.
A career inspiration
As graduation day neared, Velasco set out to start a career working in a museum in some capacity. She started reading the Nahuatl (the language of the Mexica, as the Aztecs are now more commonly called) in the Codex. As she studied the indigenous scribes and painters who created the Codex, she found herself on a different path.
Maria Velasco, a California State University Los Angeles student.
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Ashley Balderrama
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LAist
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Maria Velasco shows a picture of herself as a child in traditional indigenous attire.
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Ashley Balderrama
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“It helped me to navigate then to the Zapotec language because then I was able to translate and transcribe some [Zapotec] words that were written… centuries [ago],” she said.
Velasco became a researcher in that class and began working on TICHA, a project that finds and digitizes colonial-era documents from the Zapotec region of Oaxaca. The idea is to make these documents available for translation and interpretation in order to learn about the lives of Zapotec people centuries ago and find commonalities with modern-day people.
Those efforts led to what she’s doing now: working on her master's degree in anthropology at California State University, Los Angeles and teaching a class this semester on Zapotec language and culture.
The conservation and dissemination of documentary heritage is functional to greater understanding and dialogue between peoples, to promote peace, human rights, and dignity.
“I think [the digital Codex is] going to be really great for... Latinx and Zapotec people and people at large to see it… they’re going to relate to it,” she said.
Until last week, there was no one place online that made available the entire Florentine Codex, transcriptions of the hard to read handwriting, and annotation of the illustrations.
LAist Event: Site & Sounds: The Florentine Codex at the Getty Center
Saturday, November 4, 2023, 4 p.m.
To celebrate the launch of the Digital Florentine Codex, join us for an outdoor concert debuting an original score by musician Lu Coy (they/them). Known for their mastery of woodwinds, electronics and agile vocals, Coy mines inspiration from ancient texts, stories, and musical traditions, guiding audiences through splendid architectures of ancestral memory. Musical group Xochi Cuicatl and Chris Garcia (he/him) will open the performance.
Introducing the performances, LAist higher education correspondent Adolfo Guzman-Lopez (he/him) and Getty Research Institute researcher Kim Richter (she/her) will discuss the historical resonances of the Florentine Codex in Southern California, the ancestral homeland of the Gabrieleño/Tongva, Chumash, and Tataviam people, and as well as the Codex’s impact on numerous Indigenous groups throughout the Americas.
Last week, the Getty, the Los Angeles-based art institution with a multi-billion-dollar endowment, unveiled the results of a years-long effort to create a digital portal to make every page of the Codex’s writing and images accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
“The conservation and dissemination of documentary heritage is functional to greater understanding and dialogue between peoples, to promote peace, human rights, and dignity,” said Francesca Gallori, director of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, the Renaissance-era institution that owns the Codex and is now run by the Italian government.
What's in the Florentine Codex?
There are 2,472 paintings and decorative images within the Florentine Codex’s 2,446 pages that illustrate writing in Nahuatl, pronounced NAH-wuh (the language of the Mexica, pronounced meh-SHE-kah).
The writing and art describes the Mexica world: their gods, their food, their social customs, and their accounts of the Spanish military invasion that took place about 50 years before the Codex was written.
A Franciscan priest, Bernardino de Sahagún, led the Codex’s creation, ultimately to convert indigenous people to Christianity, but also as a way to document a culture he saw being transformed in the decades after the Spanish claimed the land for their country.
Scholars believe 22 people of indigenous descent wrote and painted the Codex. These people were known as tlacuilos, or scribes.
During the five hour-plus unveiling ofthe Digital Florentine Codex, researchers, the digitizing team, as well as scholars, and indigenous language and culture experts from Mexico described previous digitized versions of the Codex, translations of the texts, and reproductions of the images.
“The Digital Florentine Codex stands on the shoulders of these great scholars. To complement these already published versions, we invited scholars to provide new translations,” said Kim Richter, senior research specialist at the Getty Research Institute.
A chapter on feather work
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Courtesy the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT
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Disguised Mexica merchants in Tzinacantlan acquiring quetzal feathers in Book 9 of the Florentine Codex, 1577
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Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT
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Heroic Tlatelolcan warrior, Tzilcatzin, throwing stones at the invading Spaniards in Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, 1577
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Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT
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Hummingbirds (huitzitzilin) in Book 11 of the Florentine Codex, 1577
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Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT
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Water creatures in Book 11 of the Florentine Codex (“On Earthly Things”), 1577
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Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT
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The new translations, along with recordings of the text and searchable tagging of content, are meant to bring the 16th century Mexica culture within reach of the modern person.
Modern day tlacuilos
The Codex is inspiring a new generation of Latino people.
“As a first generation student, [the Codex] exposed me to entirely new ways of learning, research and even careers,” said recent UCLA masters graduate Roxanne Valle. She took part in the unveiling to talk about her research into how handwriting in the Codex revealed how many tlacuilos worked on it.
Roxanne Valle, a UCLA student in a masters program for Latin American Studies.
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Like Maria Velasco, Valle learned about the Codex as an undergrad several years ago. Until learning about the Codex, Valle was planning an academic career studying some aspect of Latinas in sports.
She grew up in Azusa and her parents were born and raised in Mexico.
Valle’s experience researching the Codex led her to see it as a foundational document in Mexican history that’s not well known to people of Mexican heritage. She wants to change that in order to “extend these experiences to people I know, many who are also people of color and children of parents who came to the U.S. years ago, like my parents, and whether or not they had the privilege to attend college or not."
A promise of connection
The Codex has been generating buzz since the Getty showed two of its three volumes at its museums in 2010 and 2018, and began digitizing efforts in 2015.
The unveiling doesn’t mean the work is done.
“You still need a bridge, you still need to encourage people because this information is clearly being rotated in this kind of academic circle, but now we need to bring it to the communities themselves,” said Xóchitl Flores-Marcial, a professor of Chicana/o Studies at CSU Northridge.
That bridge is taking the information online and turning it into lesson plans for various grades and learning levels, and for the indigenous people for whom the Codex is a deep cultural document. Creating that learning material is time intensive and expensive, she said, and points to the Getty as the institution that needs to follow up to ensure the connections between the 16th century content and our modern day lives happens.
The Getty says it’s on it.
“With UCLA’s Latin American Institute, we co-organized a workshop in 2020 for local teachers that helped them develop curricula based on these historical sources,” Getty spokesperson Alexandria Sivak said in an email.
It’s also developing recommendations for how to use the Codex in classrooms, and offering workshops for teachers and professors.
Fiona Ng
is LAist's deputy managing editor and leads a team of reporters who explore food, culture, history, events and more.
Published April 1, 2026 12:00 PM
Tennis courts featured in an April Fools' Day social media post by Irvine.
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City of Irvine / Instagram
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Topline:
Many Southern California cities and institutions are dropping big, grabby news today — from the city of Irvine going "pickle-ball" only, to the Huntington Botanical Gardens announcing it'll be bottling the scent of the famed corpse flower as a perfume.
Why now: Before you go "what the what" — remember today's the first day of April.
Read on ... to find a roundup of some of the April Fools' jokes from your city and local trusted institutions.
Many Southern California cities and institutions are dropping big, grabby news today. Before you go "what the what" — remember, it's the first day of April.
Here's a roundup of some of the April Fools' news dump items.
Irvine, the 'pickleball-only' city
Irvine announced that it'll be converting all tennis courts into pickleball courts by 2027. That's one notch for Team Pickleball in the ongoing turf war between tennis lovers and pickleball players over the fight for court space to engage in their beloved sport.
"Starting today, April 1, all tennis courts are being converted to pickleball courts as part of a citywide effort to make Irvine a pickleball-only City by 2027," the post stated. "We don’t just think this is a good idea … we dink it’s a great one."
Over in Long Beach, Mayor Rex Richardson announced the city's reigning royalty, the Queen Mary, will be renamed after another queen.
"After careful consideration, I am proud to announce that the Queen Mary will officially be renamed the RMS Queen Latifah," he said. "Long Beach is stepping into a new era as a major music destination — with a new amphitheater, a deep cultural legacy, and a future built on sound. It’s only right that our most iconic Queen reflects that energy."
In real-real news, LBC native and everyone's favorite Olympics commenter Snoop Dogg is headlining the grand opening show of the Long Beach Amphitheater in June. That's the new waterfront venue near the RMS Queen Latifah.
Suspense writer James Patterson has more than 200 novels to his name, selling more than 450 million copies. If anyone deserves his own namesake branch, it would be Patterson, no?
The Los Angeles Public Library certainly dinks so, announcing today the James Patterson Canoga Park branch, "with wall to wall Patterson books and programming centered around this prolific author."
The opening of the corpse flower has become an annual event at the Huntington Botanical Gardens. The event brings legions hoping to get a whiff of the famed flower's "pungent aroma."
The San Marino institution announced that it's bottling the scent, as part of its new "The Huntington's Stank Collection."
"A musky gym sock note opens this unique fragrance, with a sweet, rotten-egg base to ground it. Smells like you – but smellier," the post explained.
Payton Seda
is an associate producer for AirTalk and FilmWeek, hosted by Larry Mantle.
Published April 1, 2026 11:30 AM
We curated some great spots to thrift throughout the region.
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Becca McHaffie
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Topline:
Southern California is home to a vast array of vintage boutiques, thrift stores, and resale shops. Here are the hottest recommendations from our most avid thrifters.
Palm Springs is a apparently a thrifting hot spot. This thrift chain has locations throughout the Coachella Valley.
Read more... for lots of other secondhand spots.
Los Angeles may not be the fashion capital of the world, but it could contend for best thrift, at least in our humble opinion!
The key is knowing where to look.
Here are some of the best thrift and resale stores in different parts of Southern California according to our listeners and (very stylish) LAist colleagues.
The pinnacle of Pasadena and open every third Sunday of the month, the flea market houses 400 vendors with goods ranging from antique furniture to unique second-hand clothing.
If you’re looking for more affordable clothing and household items, Delaine Ureño, LAist senior institutional giving officer, frequents Hotbox Vintage in South Pasadena.
This thrift shop in San Pedro is owned and operated by the Peninsula Chapter of National Charity League and comes recommended by Mel in the South Bay, who says proceeds support local charities and scholarship funds.
This thrift store rec near Elysian Park comes from Lulu in Glendale, who says shoppers can grab a cute pair of pants along with unique furniture to put them in.
Anything on Long Beach’s aptly named Retro Row is worth hitting, according to AirTalk producer Manny Valladares. His favorite spot is Far Outfit. They have unique finds mostly from the early 2000s with a self-described “weird” factor.
With several locations throughout Orange County, including Costa Mesa and Aliso Viejo, LAist reporter Yusra Farzan recommends Laura’s House, noting they have a great curated collection and proceeds help domestic violence victims.
Old Towne Orange is home to many great thrift stores and antique malls. If you’re looking for some good streetwear and sports jerseys, Timeless Vintage is a good choice. They have a great selection of 90s Looney Tunes and Disney graphic tees as well.
Another O.C. favorite is a fairly new addition to downtown Fullerton. Retropolis has a wide selection of apparel, but I like to go there for their chunky 80s sweaters and colorful jackets.
“[Eco Thrift] has really good discount days on top of already affordable clothing,” said Dañiel Martinez, LAist’s Weekend Edition producer. “Tons of good vintage and designer finds hidden in the racks.”
“I went to Palm Springs where they have some of the best thrifting,” said AirTalk listener Monica in Artesia. She bought a pair of Ferragamo shoes for just $8.
Kevin Tidmarsh, LAist’s All Things Considered producer, specifically recommends Revivals, a thrift chain with locations throughout the Coachella Valley.
611 South Palm Canyon Drive, Palm Springs
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The storefront at Echo Park Eats, which rents ghost kitchens to 40 restaurants.
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Jarrett Carpenter
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Crosstown
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Topline:
Some of Los Angeles’s most iconic eateries — Papa Cristo’s in Pico-Union, Guerrilla Tacos in Downtown and French eatery TAIX in Echo Park — have closed their doors, prompting hand-wringing about the decline of the city’s rich and diverse food scene. But those closures obscured a more notable achievement; 758 new restaurants opened last year, surpassing the previous record set in 2024, when 729 restaurants opened.
Self service and delivery apps: The explosion of digital-order services has rewritten the business model for restaurants, which are now operating with less space, reduced staff and tighter margins. Many of the new eateries do much of their business from behind a screen — either through self-service tablets or off delivery apps such as DoorDash, GrubHub and Uber Eats.
Ghost kitchens: Ghost kitchens, or private kitchens used exclusively for delivery and takeout, have become a business model of their own. At Beverly Bites, 56 restaurants operate out of one facility serving the densely populated Beverly Hills and Beverlywood neighborhoods, though not all of them are open simultaneously. At Echo Park Eats, 40 restaurants are now within a five minute walk of Dodger Stadium.
Some of Los Angeles’s most iconic eateries — Papa Cristo’s in Pico-Union, Guerrilla Tacos in Downtown and French eatery TAIX in Echo Park — have closed their doors, prompting hand-wringing about the decline of the city’s rich and diverse food scene.
But those closures obscured a more notable achievement; 758 new restaurants opened last year, surpassing the previous record set in 2024, when 729 restaurants opened.
The split-screen view of dining in Los Angeles is part of a broader transformation that is reshaping the industry nationwide.
The explosion of digital-order services has rewritten the business model for restaurants, which are now operating with less space, reduced staff and tighter margins. Many of the new eateries do much of their business from behind a screen—either through self-service tablets or off delivery apps such as DoorDash, GrubHub and Uber Eats.
So-called “limited-service” restaurants now account for nearly a third of all newly opened establishments. The number of traditional, or full-service, restaurants has also been growing, hitting 539 openings in 2025, and a record-high 587 the year before. If you count the number of coffee, smoothie and snack joints, the numbers rise even further.
Pizza to go
Many of Los Angeles’s restaurateurs are adapting to this burgeoning business model. Last year, Liz Gutierrez turned her pop-up restaurant, Fiorelli Pizza, into a small brick-and-mortar location in Beverly Grove with just a couple of stools at a counter for seating. As she saw restaurants closing their doors, the advantages of the new business model quickly dawned on her.
“This was something that could be operated with minimum labor, it could be way more manageable in terms of fixed costs and expenses, and we could still deliver restaurant-quality [food],” Gutierrez said.
The bevy of new food establishments opening their doors is a lone bright spot in an otherwise bleak economic picture: The total number of new businesses opening in the city is nearly half what it was a decade ago. That is driven in part by some of the same forces, such as Amazon.com, Inc. and other online retailers that put pressure on businesses operating out of traditional storefronts.
But the flourishing restaurant industry has been able to buck that trend so far. While Amazon can deliver clothes and even groceries, it still can’t deliver a fresh pizza or poké bowl.
The QR code will take your order
Linchi Kwok, a hospitality management researcher at Collins College of Hospitality Management at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, said a lack of interest in working in the hospitality industry, paired with rising labor costs, has pushed restaurant owners to find cost-effective workarounds to run their operations with fewer people.
“Limited-service restaurants don’t have to hire many people to do the work. It saves labor costs, saves space, and saves the service turn-around time. They don’t have to worry about it,” Kwok said.
Restaurants must share a portion of their already slim profit margins—usually between 2-4% in L.A.—with an app service and the driver. To offset that, restaurants have cut down on staff, letting go of waiters, hostesses and dishwashers, many of whom are no longer needed when orders are increasingly being delivered in disposable containers.
Despite the record number of openings, running a restaurant in the city has not gotten any easier. Jot Condie, president and chief executive of the California Restaurant Association, noted that in 2024 taxable restaurant revenue hit $11 billion, which, when adjusted for inflation, is on par with 2012 levels.
“The piece of the pie that each restaurant gets is slimmer.”
Condie also said that the hollowing out of entertainment work, increased presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and stricter regulations “are conspiring against the L.A. restaurant scene.”
Condie said that regulations from city hall, such as stricter labor oversight and a proposal for a $30 minimum wage for some workers, are making it even tougher.
“The business environment is bad generally in L.A., but the city council and the mayor seem to be throwing salt in the wound.”
As the number of new restaurant openings has spiked, so have the number of closings reported to the city. However, business closure figures are not as reliable as business opening data, as some establishments close without reporting it to the city. Since 2021, 593 full- and limited-service restaurants have reported closing, compared with 3,148 openings.
Jimmy Chu spent several years working in fine dining, which inspired him to start his own restaurant. He knew it would be expensive. Rather than opening another fine-dining establishment, he opted for a limited-service restaurant where customers could order at the counter, no waiters involved.
Chu quit his job by the end of 2024, and in May 2025, he opened Bomb Hot Dog in Downtown Los Angeles. He estimates that his eatery gets roughly a third of its customers through mobile delivery orders.
Ghost kitchens
Ghost kitchens, or private kitchens used exclusively for delivery and takeout, have become a business model of their own. At Beverly Bites, 56 restaurants operate out of one facility serving the densely populated Beverly Hills and Beverlywood neighborhoods, though not all of them are open simultaneously. At Echo Park Eats, 40 restaurants are now within a five minute walk of Dodger Stadium. The Los Angeles Dodgers schedule was hung on the wall inside the facility, so owners can anticipate heavy foot traffic and delivery orders during home games.
Last December, Ali Elreda rented out a space for his Mediterranean-Mexican fusion restaurant, Fatima’s Grill, at Echo Park Eats.
Elreda operates four brick-and-mortar Fatima’s Grill locations, and this is his first time renting a ghost kitchen. He said the decision to start a delivery and takeout location was both a matter of savings and efficiency.
“A lot of people are going the ghost-kitchen route because it’s quicker, it’s faster,” Elreda said. “You avoid a lot of overhead and foot traffic and having to find staff these days with the expensive economy out there is kind of tough.”
With ghost kitchen facilities, business owners also no longer have to compete with each other to find prime real estate in Los Angeles.
“You don’t have to do that research where you’ve got to find the right location. It’s just right there waiting for you,” Elreda said.
How we did it: We examined more than 15 years of business license data reported to the Los Angeles Office of Finance. Have questions about our data or want to ask us something? Write to use at askus@xtown.la Hyperlocal News
It's been more than one month since the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran. The war has widened bitter ideological divides among Iranians in and outside the country over whether the conflict has been justified.
Lost opportunities: The commonality among most Iranians NPR spoke with is that they feel they have lost opportunities — to make a living, to voice their opinions, simply to live — under the current government, which they say must go. One man said, "Iran's security forces … took everything from us. They only give pain." However, another man said "There is no such thing as hardship in Iran. Everyone lives freely, woman or man."
Some remain hopeful: Nearly all the Iranians traveling in Turkey who spoke to NPR said they are hopeful about Iran. They have immediate plans to return to their country and stressed that they are not leaving it. Bout as one Iranian university students said, "The war should never have started. But now that it has, the U.S. and Israel should finish it," meaning toppling Iran's regime.
VAN, Turkey — It has been more than one month since the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran. The U.S. says it has hit more than 10,000 targets. But U.S.- and Norway-based human rights groups estimate that at least hundreds of Iranian civilians have also been killed.
The war has also widened bitter ideological divides among Iranians in and outside the country over whether the conflict has been justified.
"There is difficulty [with the bombing], but we are not that weak," says one Iranian woman from Tehran, traveling to Turkey for a short break, given that her work has stopped due to the U.S. and Israeli bombing of the capital city. "In the past few years, the Islamic Republic [of Iran] has proved to us that we cannot trust them. But we were in war with Israel in the summer [during the 12-day war], and we saw how precise their targeting was, so we trust them."
"We are going to build a nuclear bomb now, because there's no fatwa against it anymore," interjects an Iranian man, overhearing her remarks, referring to a rumored religious ban on nuclear weapons issued by Iran's former supreme leader, whom Israel assassinated with U.S. help at the beginning of the war in late February.
Like all the Iranians in this story, the two people asked to remain anonymous. They have received texts from the Iranian government and have seen signs coming out of Iran warning them not to speak to foreign media on pain of arrest.
A microcosm of divergent opinions
Just across the border with Iran, in eastern Turkey, the Turkish city of Van is just as full as during prewar times, with thousands of Iranian workers, consulate employees, students and tourists, who are traveling despite the war in their home country. Van has also become a microcosm of the full range of divergent opinions that Iranians have about the war.
"There is no such thing as hardship in Iran," says one Iranian man, who crossed into Turkey for his job last week. "Everyone lives freely, woman or man."
Next to him, a second Iranian man looks at him, wide-eyed and shaking.
"In two days, the government killed 40,000 people," the man says, referring to a government crackdown in January on protesters. A U.S.-based human rights group has confirmed over 7,000 deaths, but many Iranians believe the death toll is far higher.
NPR has not been able to travel and report inside Iran, so it has been interviewing Iranians traveling through border areas, including in eastern Turkey.
The dozens of Iranians NPR has interviewed transiting through Van may not be representative of all Iranians in the country. Many Iranians in Van are those wealthy enough to travel. But there are also poorer Iranians working, often under the table, in Turkey. A few Iranians I met and interviewed say they are heading off to study abroad.
The commonality among most Iranians NPR spoke with is that they feel they have lost opportunities — to make a living, to voice their opinions, simply to live — under the current government, which they say must go.
"Our pain is something you have to feel for yourself [to understand]," says one Iranian man who has been working in Turkey for the last year. He spent the previous seven years in prison, he says, after being accused of being an anti-Islamic heretic. "Iran's security forces … took everything from us. They only give pain. They are pain incarnate," he says, so much so, he is willing to lose all he has, even his family in Iran, for his government to be wiped out.
"The war should never have started," says one Iranian university student. "But now that it has, the U.S. and Israel should finish it," she says, meaning toppling Iran's regime.
"Met with bullets"
Some Iranians who support the war against their own country say their perspectives are indelibly shaped by that government crackdown in early January. This year's killings of demonstrators finally made them realize, they say, that decades of popular resistance would never change their government.
"Three of my own friends were killed" in the crackdown, says one Iranian man. He crossed into Turkey last week to earn money, more than he could make in Iran. "My friends were all young. I knew them all my life. Yet the government killed them so easily."
"Every two years, there is a big protest," he says. Research from Stanford University published this year found thousands of instances of dissent over the last decade and a half, averaging to one protest every three days inside Iran.
But this time, his hometown, in Iran's western Kermanshah province, was brutally punished by government paramilitary groups for people in his town participating in January's protests.
"It is as if my town has been burned down. Nothing is left of it," he says. "I see no future for my children in Iran." His only hope now, he says, is a foreign intervention. "Our only hope is Trump. Our only hope is that Trump and Bibi [Israel's prime minister] make the right moves."
"We are scared of the bombing," an Iranian woman says. "But we are happy thinking that there might be a light at the end of this darkness. When our young people went out and protested this January, they were met with bullets. With slaughter. With executions."
Nearly all the Iranians traveling in Turkey who spoke to NPR said they are hopeful about Iran. They have immediate plans to return to their country and stressed that they are not leaving it. Migration data from the United Nations shows fewer Iranians are leaving Iran for Turkey than before the war.
"We are not fleeing," says one young Tehran resident. Even though she almost lost an eye in the anti-government demonstrations this winter, she says she is going back to Tehran in a few days. "We are determined to rebuild our country, and if the government changes, I will work, for free if needed."
Copyright 2026 NPR
