The Brief

On a cool afternoon in February 1931, some 400 people strolled about La Placita Olvera in downtown L.A. when, suddenly, immigration agents descended on the site and sealed off its exits. Some agents wore olive green uniforms, others wore plainclothes. Wielding guns and batons, they forced people to line up and prove they were authorized to be in the U.S.

The agents ultimately arrested a few people, including 11 Mexicans, five Chinese people and one Japanese person.

Scholars of the period agree the raid was designed to incite fear. It was part of wider efforts to forcibly remove people of Mexican descent from the U.S. during the Great Depression — or to make life so miserable for them that they would choose to leave on their own.

Throughout the 1930s, local, state and federal authorities across the country either expelled or pressured an estimated 1 million people of Mexican descent to leave the U.S. According to historians, about 60% of them were U.S. citizens.

Adriana Darielle Mejía Briscoe, a fourth-generation Mexican American, did not know about this history growing up. She also didn’t know her family bore witness to it. Now, she’s sharing what she uncovered with the world.

A fateful party

Mejía Briscoe is an evolutionary biologist at UC Irvine, where she studies the evolution of color vision and coloration in butterflies.

“We mostly work on butterflies from Mexico, Central and South America,” she told LAist. Currently, she and her team are focused on morpho butterflies, known for their large, iridescent blue wings.

In 2017, two decades into her career, Mejía Briscoe went to a family party in Redlands. There, an uncle showed up with an unexpected favor: a thumb drive, full of scanned photos that once belonged to her grandmother.

Adrian Mejía Briscoe stands in front of a Zapotec rug from Oaxaca dyed with cochineal scale insects at her home in Irvine, Calif.

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Carlin Stiehl

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The women in the family gathered around a computer and pored over each image. As they clicked through the black-and-white photos, Mejía Briscoe learned about her great great grandfather, Luis Hernández. Before immigrating to the U.S. from Mexico in the late 1800s, her family said, he’d been a teacher. He was also a writer.

"What did he write?" Mejía Briscoe asked.

Poetry, they told her.

"Really? Do we have any of his writings?"

In 2021, a relative sent Mejía Briscoe copies of Hernández’s work.

No one had stopped to look at his writing in ages. His great great granddaughter studied every word.

A ballad for Juan Caldera

The documents Mejía Briscoe received were written in the 1930s. One poem, titled “Despedida” (a farewell or departure), grabbed her attention. Composed of 24 verses, it tells the story of a man named Juan Caldera and others who were forced to leave. As Mejía Briscoe translated the words from Spanish to English, the phrase “Mexican Repatriation” stayed with her.

Then, being a scientist, she delved into research.

Mejía Briscoe, at home in Irvine, surrounded by photos of Luis Hernández, his children and his grandchildren.

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With time, the biologist realized that her great great grandfather’s poem was actually a corrido, or ballad, a traditional style of Mexican songwriting made up of quatrains.

According to the late music critic Agustín Gurza, historically, corridos “served as newspapers for society’s oppressed and dispossessed. They were a first draft of history from the perspective of the poor.”

Through archival research, Mejía Briscoe learned that Juan Caldera had lived in Colton, the same city in San Bernardino County where her family had settled. But Caldera was “perhaps, the most successful businessman in [the region].”

At 39, Caldera owned a dance hall, a public pool, a baseball field, a park, a grocery store and other property. And yet, in 1931, he and his family boarded a train to Mexico.

If a man with all those resources decided, “I better leave,” how terrible was it for everybody else? Mejía Briscoe wondered.

Among other texts, she read Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, a seminal work co-authored by California scholars.

In it, Mejía Briscoe learned that U.S. employers recruited scores of Mexican workers to fill agricultural and industrial jobs. Then, during the depression, those workers were accused of “stealing American jobs.”

She learned laws were passed barring Mexicans from employment in public and private sectors. She learned that people were accosted in public places because they “looked Mexican.” She learned about the immigration raids, including the one at La Placita Olvera. She learned that individuals who were detained were denied the right to seek legal counsel and not accorded due process. She learned that some people were duped into thinking that, if they left voluntarily, they could return to the U.S. once the economy improved. She learned that the term “repatriation” did not adequately capture the forced exodus of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens.

“Decade of Betrayal,” one of the first texts Mejía Briscoe used to learn about "Mexican Repatriation" in the 1930s.

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Carlin Stiehl

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Aside from narrating what happened to Juan Caldera and others like him, Hernández’s corrido personifies California and bids the state a sad goodbye, from the perspective of people of Mexican ancestry.

“You are the Pearl of the West,” he tells her. A “Beautiful Star of the Sea.”

One of the corrido’s quatrains inspired Mejía Briscoe to dig into what compelled her family to leave Mexico in the first place. It reads:

La suma necesidad (The utmost need)

Nos hizo venir aquí (Made us come here)

No ha sido por ambición (It wasn't for ambition)

Solo por casualidad (Only by chance)

Learning from family

Through her research, Mejía Briscoe discovered that Hernández was a teacher at a hacienda in Michoacán, a state in southwestern Mexico rich in butterflies.

The estate, however, was not idyllic. It was owned by a Frenchman of Basque descent, who received it as part of a dowry. It was the sort of place where laborers had 14-hour workdays. It was also the sort of place where henchmen brought back anyone who tried to flee.

The owner, Mejía Briscoe learned, did not pay his employees in pesos. Instead, he printed vouchers, with the words “half a job” on them. This gave him the power to determine the value of his employees’ labor. Workers could only use the vouchers at his store.

The workers “would have to pay whatever he felt like charging them,” Mejía Briscoe said. “So people accumulated a lot of debt. And when you accumulated debt, you never got rid of it. If you died, it got passed on to your family. It was impossible for anybody to escape from poverty.”

Perhaps that’s why Mejía Briscoe’s great great grandfather, who was in his 90s when he wrote the corrido, opted to stay in the U.S. and risk being removed, she said.

“He was a very old man at that point,” she said. “He was definitely not going to be able to go back to Mexico. He wouldn't have survived the journey.”

'History's repeating itself'

Earlier this month — after immigration agents arrested hundreds of undocumented workers at licensed cannabis greenhouses in Camarillo, after a Mexican farmworker named Jaime Alanís García died after being critically injured during the raid — farmworkers and activists gathered at La Placita Olvera to call for a three-day strike. Chief among their demands was an end to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, this at the very site where hundreds of people were once rounded up.

Reading the news brings Mejía Briscoe a sense of déjà vu. Then, as now, she told LAist, immigrant laborers are being blamed for the country’s woes and pressured to “self-deport.” Then, as now, U.S. citizens are getting caught up in immigration dragnets.

“History's repeating itself,” she lamented. “The kinds of things that my family experienced in the Great Depression are happening again.”

That's why Mejía Briscoe shared her research with the Zinn Education Project, which is offering it on its website as a resource for teachers.

“We make this reality for people,” she said, “but it doesn't have to be this way.”

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Since 1977, Richard Santillan has been to every Opening Day game at Dodger Stadium. 

“The tradition goes from my father, to me, to my children and grandchildren. Some of my best memories are with my father and children here at Dodger Stadium,” Santillan told The LA Local, smiling under the shade of palm trees near the entrance to the ballpark Wednesday morning. He was there to protest the team less than 24 hours before Opening Day.

Santillan, like countless other loyal Dodgers fans, is grappling with his fan identity over the team’s decision to accept an invitation to the White House and owner Mark Walter’s ties to ICE detention facilities.

More than 30 people joined Santillan on Wednesday morning for a press conference held near 1000 Vin Scully Drive to convey a message directly to the team. 

“We are demanding the Dodgers stop participating in funding of inhumane treatment of families and do not go to the White House to celebrate with the criminal in chief,” Evelyn Escatiola told the crowd. “Together, we have the power to make a change.”

Escatiola, a former dean of East Los Angeles College and longtime community organizer, urged fans to flex their economic power by “letting the Dodgers know that we do not support repression.”

Jorge “Coqui” Rodriguez, a lifelong Dodgers fan, spoke to the crowd and called on Dodgers ownership to divest from immigration detention centers owned and operated by GEO Group and CoreCivic.

Jorge Coqui H Rodriguez speaks at a press conference outside Dodger Stadium on March 25, 2026, to demand the Dodgers not to visit the White House following their 2025 World Series win.

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J.W. Hendricks

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In a phone interview a day before the protest, Rodriguez told The LA Local he did not want the Dodgers using his “cheve” or beer money to fund detention centers. 

“They can’t take our parking money, our cacahuate money, our cheve money, our Dodger Dog money and invest those funds into corporations that are imprisoning people. It’s wrong,” Rodriguez said. 

Rodriguez considers the Dodgers one of the most racially diverse teams and said the players need to support fans at a time when heightened immigration enforcement has become more common across L.A.

The team’s 2025’s visit to the White House drew ire from the largely Latino fan base, citing the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on immigrants. 

In June, the team came under further scrutiny when rumors swirled online that federal immigration agents were using the stadium’s parking, which immigration authorities later denied in statements posted on social media accounts.

The team again came under fire after not releasing a statement on the impacts of ICE raids on its mostly Latino fan base at the height of immigration enforcement last summer. The team later agreed to invest $1 million to support families affected by immigration enforcement.

When he learned the Dodgers were pledging only $1 million to families in need, Rodriguez called the amount a  “slap in the face.” 

“These guys just bought the Lakers for billions of dollars and they give a million dollars to fight for legal services? That’s a joke,” Rodriguez said. “They need to have a moral backbone and not be investing in those companies.”

According to reporting from the Los Angeles Times, former Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershawsaid last week that he is looking forward to the trip.

“I went when President [Joe] Biden was in office. I’m going to go when President [Donald] Trump is in office,” Kershaw said. “To me, it’s just about getting to go to the White House. You don’t get that opportunity every day, so I’m excited to go.”

The Dodgers have yet to announce when their planned visit will take place. 

Santillan sometimes laments his decision to give up his season tickets in protest of the team. His connection to the stadium and the memories he has made there with family and friends will last a lifetime, he said. On Thursday, he will uphold his tradition and be there for the first pitch of the season, but with a heavy heart.

“It’s a family tradition, but the Dodgers have a lot of work to do,” he said.

A local favorite mom-and-pop bookshop in Eagle Rock is facing displacement due to a steep rent hike. The owners say theirs is just one of several small businesses along Eagle Rock Boulevard struggling to keep up with lease increases.

Over the past 19 years, many in the neighborhood have come to love READ Books for its eclectic collection of used titles and shop dog Florence.

Co-owner Jeremy Kaplan said it’s been a delight to grow with the community over the years.

“Like seeing kids come back in, who were in grade school and now they’re in college,” Kaplan said.

But the building where Kaplan and wife Debbie rent was recently sold, and the rent increased by more than 130% to $2,805 a month, Kaplan said. He told LAist it was an increase his small business simply could not absorb.

Kaplan said he originally was given 30 days notice of the rent increase. After some research, assistance from Councilmember Ysabel Jurado’s office and some pro-bono legal help, Kaplan said he pushed back and got the 90-day notice he’s afforded by state law.

California Senate Bill 1103 requires landlords to give businesses with five or less employees 90 days’ notice for rent increases exceeding 10%, among other protections.

Systems Real Estate, the property management company, did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment.

What can small businesses do? 

Nadia Segura, directing attorney of the Small Business Program at pro bono legal aid non-profit Bet Tzedek said California law does not currently allow for rent control for commercial tenancies.

Outside of the protections under SB 1103, Segura said small businesses like READ Books don’t have much other recourse. And even then, commercial landlords are not required to inform their tenants of their protections under the law.

“There’s still a lot of people that don’t know about SB 1103. And then it’s very sad that they tell them they have these rent increases and within a month they have to leave,” Segura said.

She said her group is seeing steep rent hikes like this for commercial tenants across the city.

“We are seeing this even more with the World Cup coming up, the Olympics coming up. And I will say it was very sad to see that also after the wildfires,” Segura said.

Part of Bet Tzedek’s ongoing work is to advocate for small businesses, working with landlords who are increasing rents to see if they are willing to give business owners longer leases that lock in rents.

What’s next 

After READ Books posted about their situation on social media, commenters chimed in to express their outrage and love for the little shop.

While he looks for a new spot, Kaplan says he’s forming a coalition of local businesses and activist groups to see what can be done to help other small businesses facing similar displacement. He wants to address the displacement issue for businesses like his, which have made Eagle Rock the distinctive neighborhood that it is today.

Owl Talk, a longtime Eagle Rock staple selling clothing and accessories in a unit in the same building as READ Books, is facing a “more than double” rent increase, according to a post on their Instagram account.

Kaplan said he’s been in touch with the office of state Assemblywoman Jessica Caloza and wants to explore the possibility of introducing legislation to set up protections for small businesses like his, including rent-control measures or a vacancy tax for landlords. Kaplan said he also reached out to the office of state Sen. Maria Durazo.

By his count, Kaplan said there are about a dozen businesses within surrounding blocks that are at risk of closing their doors or have shuttered due to rent increases or other struggles.

When READ Books was founded during the Great Recession, Kaplan said he knew it was a longshot to open a bookstore at the same time so many were struggling to stay in business.

“It was kind of interesting to be doing something that neighborhoods needed. That was important to me growing up, that was important to my children, that was important to my wife growing up,” Kaplan said.

“And then somebody comes in and says, ‘We’re gonna over double your rent.”

Topline:

Frozen budget: Most of the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting budget comes from an assessment that people who own property illuminated by lights pay on their county property tax bill. The amount people pay depends on the kind of property they own and how much they benefit from lighting. A typical single-family home currently pays $53 annually, and in total, the assessments bring in about $45 million annually for the city to repair and maintain streetlights. Changing the amount the Bureau of Street Lighting gets from the assessment requires a vote among property owners who benefit from the lights.

Ballots: L.A. City Council’s vote gives city staff the green light to prepare and send out those ballots. Miguel Sangalang, who oversees the bureau, said at a committee meeting earlier this month that he expects to send out ballots by April 17. Notices about the ballots will be sent out prior to the ballots themselves.

Near unanimous vote: L.A. City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez was the only “No” vote Tuesday, saying she wanted to see a more current strategic plan for the bureau. Sangalang said the bureau developed a plan in 2022 that lays out how money will be spent. Councilmember Imelda Padilla was absent for the vote.

Vote count: Votes will be weighted according to the assessment amount. Basically, the more you’re asked to pay yearly to maintain streetlights, the more your vote will count. Ballots received before June 2 will be tabulated by the L.A. City Clerk.

How much more money: According to a report, the amount needed in assessments from property owners to meet the repair and maintenance needs of the city’s streetlighting in the next fiscal year is nearly $112 million.

Use of the money: Sangalang said at a March 11 committee meeting that the extra funds would be used to double the number of staff to handle repairs and procure solar streetlights, which don’t face the threat of copper wire theft. That would all potentially reduce the time it takes to repair simple fixes down to a week. Currently, city residents wait for months to see broken streetlights repaired. The assessment would come with a three-year auditing mechanism.