The Brief

This story  was originally published by Boyle Heights Beat on July 1, 2025.

In 2015, photographer and videographer Piero F. Giunti had a dream about Art Kane’s iconic “A Great Day in Harlem” photograph featuring 57 jazz musicians — including Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie — on the steps of a Harlem brownstone.

Originally shot in 1958 for Esquire magazine, the photo followed Giunti for weeks, popping up in conversations and on social media. When a musician friend mentioned the photograph at a Boyle Heights recording studio, he knew he had to honor Eastside musicians in the same spirit.

“When Black and Brown people weren’t allowed to play the Sunset Strip and the clubs downtown, East L.A. always had its doors open,” said Giunti, who was born and raised in L.A. to a Mexican mother and Italian father. “There was Lalo’s Nightclub, The Paramount ballroom, Catholic Youth Organization (C.Y.O.), which became Self Help Graphics. East L.A. has always been a safe haven for every genre.”

Giunti teamed up with musician and historian Mark Guerrero, whose father, Lalo Guerrero, is considered the “Father of Chicano Music.” Together with UC Riverside Chicanx history professor Jorge Leal and LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes senior curator Karen Crews Hendon, they co-curated “A Great Day in East L.A.: Celebrando the Eastside Sound,” the largest exhibit of its kind, which opened Saturday at LA Plaza.

Co-curators of “A Great Day in East L.A.” exhibit at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes. From left: Piero F. Giunti, Esperanza Sanchez, Karen Crews Hendon, Mark Guerrero and Jorge Leal.

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Courtesy of LA Plaza.

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Giunti shot 170 black and white portraits of 450 artists, including East L.A. DIY jarocho punk band ¡Aparato! and Indigenous Chicano rap-rock band Aztlan Underground standing proudly in full performance attire. The portraits form the visual centerpiece of the exhibition.

“I’ve been a part of the East L.A. music scene since 1963. I know everybody, played with everybody, worked with everybody,” said Guerrero, 76, who as a teenager sang in the popular band Mark & the Escorts, playing at dances with Thee Midniters and The Premiers. In 1972, he released the socially-conscious hit protest song “I’m Brown” on Capitol Records. “The interviews we conducted are basically conversations with my peers.”

In 1998, Guerrero started chronicling Chicano and East L.A. musicians who, like himself, are often ignored by mainstream media. His website is an encyclopedia of untold Eastside music stories that helped inform the exhibit, which spans 75 years–from the 1950s to the present–and features 500 artifacts, including rare photographs, clothing, instruments, concert tickets and posters of over 450 artists who are from, inspired by or are beloved on the Eastside.

A woman plays an instrument during the opening of “A Great Day in East L.A.: Celebrando the Eastside Sound,” on June 28, 2025.

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Courtesy of LA Plaza.

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Scribbled Los Lobos song lyrics, a sleeveless polyester pantsuit worn by tribal electronica duo Mezklah, soul singer Brenton Wood’s very own grey wool zoot suit and the dress that Martha Gonzalez of Quetzal wore to the Grammy Awards are on display for the first time. Band merch like bright cotton T-shirts, CDs and stickers, nostalgic flyers, records and out-of-print magazines fill El Rockero Store, one of six themed galleries that include The Venue, The Garage, Radio Rebelde, From East Los to the World and Los Lobos’ very own Come On, Let’s Go!

“The biggest fear of a project like this is people passing away,” said Giunti, citing Wood, who died January 3, and Rudy Salas of Tierra, who died in 2020. “It made it even more important to capture as many artists as possible. No artist was left behind.”

The project, which took 10 years to compile interviews, shoot photos and gather paraphernalia from community donors and the curators’ and artists’ own collections, drew hundreds of musicians and music aficionados to the opening.

“We would crash weddings to hear Thee Midniters,” Olivia Rodriguez, 82, who grew up in East L.A. and attended the opening with friends, said with a laugh. “One night we saw them open for The Temptations at Union Hall. They didn’t charge much. It was like $2. Shows were jam-packed with wall-to-wall people. Sometimes you couldn’t even dance, but they sounded fantastic. We cheered them on and they played for hours.”

The exhibition opened amid ICE raids and uprisings — a resonance not lost on those involved. The Eastside sound has long intersected with social justice movements: bands like Tierra and Los Illegals provided the soundtrack to a generation asserting cultural pride in a post-Moratorium era. Later generations, including Quetzal and Las Cafeteras, developed their sound alongside immigrant rights advocacy.

At LA Plaza, local artist collectives Ni Santas and Art Space HP hosted anti-ICE-fueled art-making workshops as KCRW Summer Nights headliner The Altons conducted sound checks for an eager audience. Across the way on Olvera Street, labor and immigrant rights groups continued their 30-day “Summer of Resistance” activation, with lucha libre-masked cumbia group El Conjunto Nueva Ola performing “El Jom Dipo (Pa’ la People)” to a crowd protesting ICE raids.

“A Great Day in East L.A. is born out of resistance,” said Giunti, who’s working on a Los Lobos documentary. “Resistance to systematic oppression, cultural erasure, elitist gatekeeping of our stories by institutions, academics, authors and museums that continue to revise, distort or ignore our truths. This project stands in solidarity with the immigrant community.”

KCRW Summer Night with The Altons during “A Great Day in East L.A.: Celebrando the Eastside Sound” Opening Day Celebration on June 28, 2025.

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Photo courtesy of LA Plaza

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East L.A. was a high-energy tour stop for bands like Slayer, Metallica, Bad Religion and the Dead Kennedys and artists like Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder. In 1981, Paul Ruben released “The Pee‑Wee Herman Show,” an original cast recording from a live performance at the Roxy Theatre on Fatima Recordz, the first independent punk music label in East L.A., co-founded by Yolanda Comparan Ferrer, Tito Larriva of The Plugz and printmaker Richard Duardo, who also signed East L.A. punk band The Brat.

“I was a part of this Eastside music world,” said Leal, 48, who was born in Guadalajara and raised in Glassell Park. “I never played an instrument, but I went to shows in East L.A.

It was three bucks and a kegger. You paid and stayed until the cops showed up.”

As The Altons took the stage at Saturday’s opening, Chicana singer-songwriter Irene Diaz watched from the back with bandmate and partner Carolyn Cardoza.

“I never imagined something like this,” said Diaz, whose silk slip dress and portraits are a prominent part of the exhibit. “I started my career in 2010 and to be able to see myself in an exhibit where I’m still alive is pretty amazing.”

“A Great Day in East L.A.: Celebrando the Eastside Sound” exhibition runs at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes from June 28, 2025, through August 23, 2026.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Louis Armstrong was in the “A Great Day in Harlem” photograph. It also misspelled Piero F. Giunti’s last name. The story has been updated.

A criminal justice watchdog is calling into question whether Latinos in the L.A. County Superior Court get a fair shot at bail.

The new report from the nonprofit La Defensa, which advocates for reform in the legal system, analyzes a sample of pretrial decisions from 2025 which had been documented by community court-watching volunteers.

One of the key findings was that defendants who were perceived to be Latino had an average bail amount of $157,700 — more than 15 times higher than white defendants and nearly three times higher than Black defendants.

Studies show that inability to pay bail can affect defendants’ livelihoods and their ability to defend themselves, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.

“ Most families — no matter what they did, no matter what they sold — cannot actually purchase that person’s freedom to give them the fighting chance to go against the state,” Titilayọ Rasaki, La Defensa’s state policy and legal affairs director.

The L.A. County Superior Court says it’s following the law on bail requirements and that the findings are missing context because observation is limited.

How court-watching works

La Defensa’s Court Watch LA program is a community-led effort to document and hold the courts accountable. They train volunteers to go in and observe cases.

The volunteers take notes on the charges, the judge’s conduct and the person’s criminal history, if it comes up. That then gets analyzed against publicly available case information and state law. Programs like this exist in several other cities around the country.

For the latest report, La Defensa volunteers observed 140 felony and misdemeanor criminal cases, chosen at random, between January to November 2025.

Judicial accountability lead Bryanna Siguenza explained how she decided where to send the volunteers.

“ I choose a department, specifically ones that are pretty busy, have high case loads, and are arraignment and pretrial,” she said.

What watchers saw

Racial disparities in pretrial settings have been researched at local, state and national levels, but La Defensa’s findings are based entirely on human observation, Siguenza said.

The volunteers are trained to listen for important details that come up in proceedings, but they may not always get the full story behind the charges, like a defendant’s criminal history.

L.A. County Superior Court spokesperson Rob Oftring said the report needs more context.

“Many of the report’s findings, for example, do not appear to account for charge severity or criminal history, both of which are legally significant factors in any release decision…” he wrote in a statement.

La Defensa did not include in its report what charges had been filed in the cases observed. However, according to the report, comparable charges still had disproportionate bail outcomes that “couldn’t be explained by charge severity alone.”

The severity of charges legally informs bail decisions. The Superior Court is required to have standard bail amounts based on the crime, which judges have discretion to adjust.

State law also requires judges to weigh issues like public safety in bail decisions, as well as the defendant’s ability to post bail. According to the volunteers’ observations, the judges considered the latter in just a quarter of cases when setting bail.

Oftring said the court has taken steps to reduce money bail’s usage as allowed by law.

“Bail at arraignment is set only after both the defense and prosecution have been heard and the judge has weighed the specific facts of the case,” his statement read.

The limits of the findings

Oftring said the court values the role organizations like Court Watch LA play in keeping the justice system accountable, but that the sample size of the researchers used in their report is too small to draw any definitive conclusions.

Roughly 272,000 criminal cases took place during that time period, according to Oftring.

Representatives from La Defensa said they know the report is only a snapshot of the system, and that human observation has its limits.

That’s why in November, they requested 10 years of de-identified data to analyze whether bail outcomes differ across judges, courthouses and demographic groups. Rasaki said they haven’t received it.

“  We would say release the data … by all means, we want to partner. We want to analyze,” she said.

Oftring told LAist they are working on several projects that “provide data-informed scrutiny of how the court operates.”

Southern Californians are in for yet another scorching weekend.

The National Weather Service has issued a heat advisory for much of the region through Monday, with temperatures expected to hit their peak on Sunday.

Highs in the San Fernando Valley, San Gabriel Valley and other inland areas of L.A. County are expected to range from the mid-90s to about 105 degrees. Downtown Los Angeles and much of Orange, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties will get up to the lower 90s. Beaches will also be hot — in the lower 80s.

Moving farther east, things get really toasty. Forecasters have issued a more severe extreme heat warning for parts of the Inland Empire, where temperatures could get up to 108 degrees, and for the Coachella Valley, where they could hit 120.

Humidity will likely also continue to add to the discomfort, but will be concentrated in areas closer to the coast, where it will keep nighttime temperatures relatively warm and make it more difficult to cool down. Inland areas will feel drier.

Those who are most at-risk from the heat are people who work or spend time outside, people without access to air conditioning and those who are either over 65 or young children.

Forecasters are also warning of dangerous rip currents and swells along the coast this weekend.

If you’re headed to the beach to beat the heat, as many Southern Californians likely are, they recommend staying out of the water or, if you do go swimming, stay in front of lifeguards. It’s also a good idea to avoid jetties and tidal rocks.

Wildfire risk

This weekend will also come with a high risk of wildfires.

Forecasters warn that fire danger will be elevated through at least Monday, driven by heat, dry vegetation and low humidity levels away from the coast.

Despite some extra moisture in the air over the last several weeks, there hasn’t been enough to actually produce rain. Without precipitation, and under consistently high temperatures, plants will continue to dry out and become fuel.

“We have humidity, but it's not reaching the saturation point. Therefore, we won't have a cloud. We won't have precipitation,” said Rong Fu, an atmospheric scientist at UCLA who specializes in weather patterns and wildfires.

Fu said a system of high atmospheric pressure sitting over the Western U.S. is pushing warm, dry air across the Sierra Nevada from inland deserts and into Southern California.

That can generate what’s known as downslope wind. Those winds plus the already dry conditions align to create some especially dangerous fire weather.

One spark can easily turn into a large blaze, and humans are the most common cause of wildfires in Southern California, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

People can accidentally start wildfires in a range of ways, including throwing a lit cigarette into dry brush or dragging a chain behind a vehicle, creating sparks. One of the most common human causes is improperly extinguished camp fires.

Lightning can also start wildfires but is unlikely under current weather conditions. Southern California has seen minimal thunderstorms this summer.

The new normal?

Heatwaves in the summer and fall are obviously not new for Southern California, but they are getting worse.

Much of the heat currently blanketing the region is being driven by the high-pressure system, which traps warm air and compresses it against the ground, heating it even further. Forecasters say it’s likely to stay that way through the end of July.

But high-pressure systems like this one usually don’t stick around this long.

“For this pattern to linger almost two weeks — yeah, I would say, from a climatological point of view — that's pretty unusual,” Fu said.

One major driver of the change, Fu said, is climate change: As the climate warms, this kind of “anomalous” high pressure system will become stronger and more frequent.

And one consequence of hotter and longer heatwaves, is extended elevated periods of risky fire weather.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Los Angeles will be under a heat wave advisory until Monday evening as temperatures show no signs of letting up over the weekend.

Temperatures will linger in the high 80s and low 90s in downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods, including Koreatown, Pico Union and Westlake.

The National Weather Service projects temperatures will peak on Sunday afternoon. Meteorologist Bryan Lewis with the National Weather Service said residents can expect more humidity than usual. 

While dense, urban centers have more concrete and see more vehicle traffic, downtown and the surrounding areas will not be the hottest locations during this heatwave in the Southland, as the Antelope Valley will be under an extreme heat advisory over the weekend.

During hot weather, the beach is an immediate go-to for folks that want to stay cool, but Lewis warns against this as the surf will be extra choppy.

The Pacific Coast will see large swells “coming up from tropical systems off the coast of Mexico,” Lewis said. “We are issuing a beach hazard statement that’ll be in effect through at least the weekend [which] may be extended.” 

While the weather is expected to cool down on Monday, forecasts show that another heatwave could develop by the end of next week.

Pools nearby

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Echo Park Pool

Eleanor Green Roberts Aquatic Center

Cooling centers

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Pico Union Branch Library

Felipe de Neve Branch Library (Westlake)

Pio Pico – Koreatown Branch Library

Councilmember Heather Hutt’s office recommends residents to rest in shade or a building with air conditioning and to stay hydrated with plenty of water.

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