The Brief

Is it a dream? You walk into a store and are greeted with hundreds and hundreds of gorgeously designed high end chocolate bars and other offerings. Shelf after shelf, row after row. And yet, astonishingly, it is real.

The Chocolate Dispensary in Echo Park — part craft chocolate bar seller, part tasting room, part café — stocks over 1,000 chocolate products, from more than 100 chocolate makers across the world. That variety, according to co-owner Kala Maxym, makes it not only unique in L.A., but also, one of a precious few in the U.S. (And no, the name has nothing to do with marijuana. Though it's probably a great place to satiate the munchies).

The seemingly endless range of chocolate creations.

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Courtesy The Chocolate Dispensart

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On a recent visit to the store, which opened in December 2024, my husband and I quickly found our senses overloaded. Where to turn first? Rather than just organized by traditional "dark" or "milk" chocolate sections, the store uses quirkier categories: "hard core" (for super strong 80% - 100% cacao), '"vegan," (though chocolate is naturally dairy-free), "$12 and under," and "weird," among others. ("Weird" included things like a dill bar, a caramelized onion bar, and a tomato basil bar, in case you were interested.)

But the key, Maxym says, is to actually taste the chocolate, not just peruse the labels. She says she conceived of the store from the beginning as akin to a tasting room in a winery,  "a place that you could come in, and you didn't just buy it off a shelf and walk out, you could actually engage with it."

The store's drinking chocolate is in high demand.

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Courtesy The Chocolate Dispensary

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An "oasis" for customers

The genesis of the place came when Maxym, who had previously been an opera singer but had pivoted into wine and cheese tastings, was working at Silverlake Wine. And she thought “why isn’t there anything like this for chocolate?” That idea grew until one night she and her husband Dale Roy Robinson felt the entire project download on high from some creative cosmos when out to dinner.

Dale Roy Robinson and Kala Maxym outside their store.

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Courtesy The Chocolate Dispensary

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She still has the original notes on her phone, she says. "We wrote a business plan in about two weeks, and we opened nine months later," offering their vast selection of craft chocolate that's also ethically made and sustainably sourced.

A "$10 for 10" flight showcasing a range of chocolate makers.

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Courtesy The Chocolate Dispensary

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Maxym says the store has been successful from the beginning, and that it goes deeper than simply stocking excellent chocolate. The store seems to be a respite. Customers tell her "as horrible things in the world ebb and flow, we're an oasis for when they can't handle life right now."

She's developed strong relationships with chocolate makers around the world, speaking with as many as possible (as she says on the website, "time zones be damned") to ensure transparent sourcing.  Not to mention trips to countries like France and Italy where she and Robinson spend much of their days tasting top-of-the-line chocolate to bring home. (Cue the sound of the world's smallest violin.)

To help us through our paralyzing indecision, she proffered us a tasting flight: $10 for 10 bites. Genius. We carefully split each square in half, oohing and aahing as we found our favorites (he loved the one studded with coconut, I Ioved the one with rose petals and dried strawberries), and stared at each other quizzically as we found a few which weren’t quite to our taste (I swear there was one which tasted of curry).

To end our visit, she suggested we try one of the many options of hot chocolate. I took it, I sipped, I moaned with pleasure. It was French-style, unctuous and thick, and not too sweet. She said she makes it with a 100 percent cocoa powder, salt, vanilla, and dark chocolate disks, which gives it the richness.

And yes, I did literally lick the whole cup before I was done.

At a protest this month outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Adelanto, advocates derided what they said are substandard conditions for the roughly 2,000 people imprisoned at the Adelanto campus.

Multiple protesters said the detention center would be more aptly described as a “concentration camp,” drawing parallels to some of the darkest moments in U.S. and world history.

For protesters who opt to use such a charged phrase to refer to immigrant detention, doing so isn’t just a matter of accuracy; above all, they seek to prevent further harm.

What life is like inside Adelanto

Current and former detainees say immigrants at the ICE processing center experience rotten food, inadequate medical attention and punitive isolation.

Immigrant rights groups have filed a lawsuit against ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, seeking to “end the inhumane and illegal conditions” at this facility. The lawsuit describes Adelanto as an unsanitary place where “disease and illness are rampant.”

“Mold grows on bathroom and dormitory walls,” the lawsuit says. “Individuals across various dormitories [have] contracted an infectious skin disease called a staph infection — and more than a dozen detained individuals [have been] hospitalized.”

In recent weeks, two local fathers died following detention at the facility.

What is the state’s role at Adelanto?

California attorney general Rob Bonta, whose office is mandated to monitor conditions inside the state’s detention centers, filed an amicus brief last week bolstering the immigrant rights groups’ claims.

During inspections at Adelanto, Bonta said in a press statement, his team witnessed "shockingly inadequate medical care, a failure to accommodate people with disabilities, disturbingly unsafe and unsanitary conditions and a lack of basic necessities.”

Bonta also said detainees have reported “denied access to facility phones for prolonged periods,” which impeded their ability to contact their families and legal counsel.

What is the Trump administration’s position on Adelanto?

The federal government has denied claims of substandard conditions. In a press statement issued after the death of a detainee, ICE said it is “committed to ensuring that all those in custody reside in safe, secure and humane environments.”

“Comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive and throughout the entirety of their stay,” the statement continues. “This is the best health care tha[t] many aliens have received in their entire lives.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to expand its network of immigrant prisons across the U.S., even as the number of people who’ve died in ICE custody grows.

What protesters fear

The National Day Laborer Organizing Network staged its recent protest outside Adelanto, in partnership with sister organizations across Southern California. In a message to protesters ahead of the event, the group referred to the detention center in Adelanto as a “concentration camp for immigrants.” Out in the Mojave desert, others also made connections to the past.

“ I'm here today fighting for the fathers, the mothers and [the] community members who have been abducted,” said N. Suzuki, a member of Nikkei Progressives, an intergenerational community organization based in Little Tokyo.

“This is a moment in history, much like it was for Japanese Americans during World War II,” they added, referencing the U.S. incarceration of more than 120,000 residents of Japanese descent. “Solidarity from the masses is critical.”

N. Suzuki and Amy Oba carried a poster with an excerpt from Civilian Exclusion Order No. 69, a 1942 army directive forcing people of Japanese ancestry — most of them U.S. citizens — to leave their homes.

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Julia Barajas

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LAist

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Elisa Schwartz, a resident of the San Fernando Valley, traveled nearly 100 miles to join protesters in Adelanto. She also referred to the detention centers as “camps” and said that as a Jewish person, it felt “heavy” to be there.

Schwartz condemned the Trump administration’s rhetoric around undocumented immigrants, including efforts to paint them as a mass of criminals.

“I remember hearing this from my mother when I was a kid,” she said. “‘[When you] other people, you can start to hurt them. Once you start to hurt them, you herd them and you can destroy them.’ And this is what this is — make no mistake.”

Does it matter what Adelanto is called?

Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, backs protesters’ use of the phrase to refer to conditions inside U.S. immigration detention facilities.

Her book, published in 2017, looks at how the idea of concentration camps came into being; how these places led to extermination centers like Auschwitz in World War II; and what’s happened to the idea of “concentration camps” since then.

To write her book, Pitzer conducted research in two dozen countries, across four continents. She also spoke with current and former detainees from various camps, as well as guards. All this was anchored in years of archival work.

In One Long Night, Pitzer defines “concentration camps” as the mass detention of civilians “without due process or a real trial, on the basis of identity — usually political, racial, ethnic or religious” she told LAist.

When it comes to the mass detention of civilians, she added, “Who they are is more important than anything they've done.”

Pitzer said she’s not interested in forcing anyone to use the phrase “concentration camps” to refer to U.S. immigrant detention centers. Instead, she explained why doing so is valuable: As protesters at Adelanto aimed to convey, the phrase can help others “recognize that term as an escalation of the usual state of detention.”

Given that some 70,000 immigrants are currently imprisoned across the U.S., she added, “the current potential for harm is vast.”

Those who support the Trump administration’s mass deportation project might be inclined to say that undocumented immigrants are being detained because they crossed the border without authorization, Pitzer noted, and that “there is something that they've done.” But breaching immigration law is a civil offense, not criminal, she said. Plus, “historically speaking,” when governments detain civilians en masse, they devote a lot of time and resources to criminalizing them.

“In Nazi Germany, for instance, [the government] spent years criminalizing German Jews so that they literally could not be there legally. The whole goal was to turn them into ‘illegal aliens,’” she said.

In Pitzer’s view, “It's clear that people who are being rounded up [in the U.S.] are being detained because of skin color, because it's suspected that they're Latino.”

She pointed to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence in an ongoing case on immigration stops, wherein he gave federal agents the green light to continue making those stops based on factors like “speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent” and “apparent race or ethnicity.” That text, Pitzer said, “starts to clarify why [detentions are] actually happening and why [this] does fit the definition of concentration camps.”

“When people hear the phrase ‘concentration camps,’ they get a little bit confused, and they immediately think of death camps and extermination centers,” she added. “But what they might not realize is that all around the globe ... there were many, many other camps that never became extermination centers. Yet, they were still terrible places.”

In Argentina, in Chile and in the Soviet Union, she said, “those early camps looked quite a bit like some [immigrant detention centers in] the U.S.”

Camps in each of those nations had their “own local cultural conditions,” Pitzer added. But many of their features — including the lack of access to medical care, sanitation and healthy food for detained civilians, and starting with “people being kidnapped off the street by masked gunmen” — are not unlike what’s happening in the U.S., she said.

Libby Rainey contributed to this story.

The “No Kings” protest movement is planning a third national day of action this Saturday in response to the war in Iran and continued immigration enforcement.

More than 50 events are taking place in the L.A. metro area alone, with the largest planned in downtown Los Angeles, where over 100,000 people are expected to attend, according to organizers.

“Many of the organizations that have coordinated with us are sending feeder marches or caravans to attend the rally in downtown L.A.,” said Nick Miller, a press coordinator for 50501 SoCal, which is part of the No Kings coalition.

During the first No Kings protest in June, thousands in downtown Los Angeles marched in the largely peaceful protest before the LAPD issued a dispersal order and employed less than lethal weapons on the crowd, saying people were “throwing rocks, bricks, bottles and other objects."

For this Saturday, an LAPD spokesperson told LAist the department is prepared for the event and "have sufficient resources to respond.”

Law enforcement in Long Beach, where a march is planned, said they're ready as well.

“If you are participating in a demonstration, please abide by all traffic laws. Criminal activity and violence will not be tolerated,” said Jordan McGinleywith the Long Beach Police Department.

There are more than 3,000 demonstrations planned for Saturday nationwide.
Here’s a map of all No Kings events taking place nationally.

L.A. and O.C. demonstrations

Dozens of protests are planned in Los Angeles and Orange counties, including at these locations:

• Anaheim: 2 to 5 p.m. at La Palma Park
• Pasadena: 11 to 1:30 p.m. at Pasadena City College
• Downtown Los Angeles: 2 to 5:30 p.m. at Los Angeles City Hall/Gloria Molina Grand Park
• Long Beach: 12 to 2 p.m. at East Ocean Boulevard & Temple Avenue
• Santa Monica: 11 to 1 p.m. at Palisades Park
• Santa Ana: 10:30 to 12:30 p.m. at South Bristol Street & West MacArthur Boulevard
• Malibu: 12 to 1 p.m. at 23519 West Civic Center Way
• Burbank: 1 to 3 p.m. at Abraham Lincoln Park
• Santa Clarita: 10 to 12 p.m. at 24292 Valencia Blvd at the corner of McBean Pkwy
• Monrovia: 10 to 12 p.m. at Library Park
• Torrance: 10:30 to 12:30 p.m. at Torrance City Hall
• West Hollywood: 11 to 2 p.m. at West Hollywood Park

SACRAMENTO, Calif (AP) — California lawmakers voted Thursday to rename César Chavez Day as Farmworkers Day in an effort to reconcile the Latino labor icon’s legacy with explosive sexual abuse allegations before the state holiday on March 31.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected to quickly sign the bill.

The change comes after allegations became public last week that Chavez had sexually abused girls and women during his days building a major farmworker labor rights movement in the 1960s in California’s agricultural heartland. Among those who accused him was Dolores Huerta, who co-led the movement that eventually became the United Farm Workers.

The state’s effort to rename the holiday is part of a wave of other moves to alter memorials honoring the man who, in the 1960s and 1970s, helped secure better wages and working conditions for farmworkers and had been admired by many Democratic leaders. The swift and sweeping effort to erase Chavez’s name from public life was previously unthinkable, as his status had only grown more iconic since his death in 1993.

California was the first state to designate Chavez’s birthday, March 31, as a holiday to honor the civil rights leader nearly 30 years ago. The Legislature then, in 2000, passed a bill to make it an official paid day off for state employees and require that students learn about his legacy and his role in the labor movement in California.

The California bill passed in the Assembly with bipartisan support on Monday and is now before the Senate.

“We cannot ignore wrongdoing and we should not continue to celebrate a single person when the movement itself is so much bigger,” Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry said before the vote Monday.

Republican Assemblymember Alexandra Macedo said the change is about honoring workers and their families.

“This isn’t just about a date on a calendar or a name on a building,” Macedo said. “It is about the hands that feed this nation. It is about the men and women who are in the orchards, in the fields, before the sun even touches the horizon, and who are still there long after it sets.”

Since the allegations came to light, California State University, Fresno, has covered up Chavez’s statue on campus, while cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sacramento have taken steps to erase his name from public landmarks. Some advocated for Huerta’s name to replace Chavez’s, and several states already said they won’t observe the day.

Senate Pro Tempore President Monique Limon said honoring farmworkers is especially important in the face of a series of federal raids across the state last year. A worker in her district died while being chased by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent last summer, Limon said.

“His death is a reminder of how much farmworkers risk every day to put food on our table,” she said before the vote. “Our farmworkers remind us that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect.”

Republican Sen. Suzette Valladares said her family built a life in California by working the fields and that the movement brought immigrants from different backgrounds together.

“This is not about one person. This is not about one narrative,” she said. “It’s about honoring generations of sacrifice, of resilience and hope.”

The post California lawmakers pass bill to rename César Chávez Day following sexual abuse allegations appeared first on LA Local.