The Brief

Doctors at Adventist Health White Memorial hospital in Boyle Heights told LAist that hospital administrators are allowing federal immigration agents to interfere in medical decisions and block doctors from properly treating detainees who need emergency care.

Administrators at White Memorial have told doctors not to call a detained patient’s family members, even to find out what type of medication they’re on or what conditions they have, doctors told LAist. Hospital leaders also have told doctors to allow immigration agents to remain by a detained patient’s side, even during consultations, inhibiting frank discussions between doctors and their patients and potentially violating patient privacy laws. Doctors say this is not typical protocol for any patients, including those brought in by local police or sheriff’s deputies.

These doctors are equally concerned about their inability to ensure follow-up care for patients released to the ICE processing facility known as B-18 in downtown L.A., where critics say some detainees have been held for days on end with no proper beds or medical care.

Why this matters

White Memorial is part of a network of private, nonprofit hospitals affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist Church, with $7 billion in annual revenue. The hospital has been operating for more than 110 years. Its calling is to “help improve the lives of our friends and neighbors in East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights,” according to its website.

Five physicians at White Memorial shared the details with LAist about ICE’s presence at the hospital and hospital administrators’ response on the condition that they not be named for fear of retaliation from their employer or from immigration authorities. LAist reviewed internal emails supporting their claims.

“We have an ethical and moral duty to provide excellent medical care and to serve the patient’s interest,” one doctor at White Memorial told LAist. But the doctor said the frequent presence of masked, armed immigration agents in the hospital makes it “very difficult to do that.”

The physicians told LAist they believe the directives from their bosses conflict with the responsibilities all doctors have to their patients and with guidance from the California attorney general.

White Memorial did not respond to a request for an interview from LAist or to our emailed list of questions.

In a statement, a White Memorial spokesperson said the hospital’s staff “are passionately committed to providing the highest standard of medical care to all who come through our doors, regardless of their circumstances” and that the hospital has “protocols in place that are designed to help support the lawful respect of patient rights.”

“We are doing everything in our power to provide safe and compassionate care to our community during this time of unrest,” the statement reads. It also urged people not to "delay the medical care you need.”

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, did not respond to specific questions from LAist or agree to an interview.

In a statement, she wrote that “ICE is not denying any illegal alien access to proper medical care or medications.” McLaughlin said it was “longstanding practice to provide comprehensive medical care from the moment an alien enters ICE custody.”

She added that she hoped LAist “would consider NOT writing this garbage” in the wake of the recent shooting outside an ICE detention center in Texas, where one detainee was killed and two injured.

“These types of smears are contributing to our officers facing a 1000% increase in assaults against them,” she wrote.

An analysis of federal court filings for assault on a federal officer by Colorado Public Radio shows a sharp increase in charges in recent months. The data is far short of the scale suggested by officials.

The bigger picture

A version of the conflicts described at White Memorial is happening across the state and the country as hospitals are forced to contend with fallout from the Trump administration’s mass deportation program. Caught in the middle are doctors and other medical professionals who have a legal duty to provide medical care to patients and ethical concerns about policies they feel affect the traditional standards of care.

The five doctors who spoke with LAist say the conflicts are especially acute at White Memorial, a hospital whose patient and surrounding population is mostly Latino and where several doctors told LAist they’re seeing two to three detained patients per shift.

The situation also raises questions about medical privacy at a time when the federal government is seeking access to sensitive personal information, including medical information from both immigrants and U.S.-born citizens.

Lorenzo Antonio González is a physician who volunteers with Unión del Barrio, which patrols Boyle Heights and other neighborhoods to warn people about ICE raids. He does not work at White Memorial but is aware of the doctors’ concerns. He said he fears ICE’s frequent presence at the hospital will further the chilling effect already causing many Boyle Heights neighbors — where more than 80% of households speak Spanish and a quarter of residents are noncitizens — to forgo medical care and avoid leaving their homes. González called White Memorial’s alleged behavior “an  erosion of trust within this pillar of a community.”

Anti-ICE protestors march out of Mariachi Plaza during the 'Reclaim Our Streets" event in the Boyle Heights neighborhood on July 1, 2025.

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Mario Tama

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Getty Images

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How we got here

As immigration raids ramped up in Los Angeles this year, some detainees have needed urgent medical care, either because they were injured while being detained, had a pre-existing illness, or because they became ill while being held at the downtown immigration facility.

Some of these incidents became headlines. In July, a Salvadoran woman was brought to Glendale Memorial Hospital with injuries suffered during a raid. In that case, camera crews descended on the hospital as activists protested the presence of ICE agents in the public lobby.

Meanwhile, White Memorial stayed out of the news. In June, a hospital leader sent an email to colleagues, flagging several incidents involving immigration detainees, including one in which agents remained in the room with a detained patient during the patient’s entire stay at the hospital. The email also noted that agents told doctors they could not call the patient’s family members when the patient couldn’t remember her medications, according to the email and doctors who spoke with LAist.

Doctors at White Memorial and other hospitals told LAist it’s not typical for law enforcement officers to remain in the room during patient care, even with criminal detainees, unless there’s a serious security risk. People in ICE custody are civil, not criminal detainees. Doctors also told LAist it’s common practice to call family members, with a patient’s permission, to inquire about their medical history and current medications.

So the doctors at White Memorial pressed hospital administrators for a clear policy and legal guidance on how to balance ICE agent demands with the hospital’s responsibilities for patient care.

The answer that came back from hospital administrators: defer to the agents.

Hospital leaders told doctors — both verbally, doctors say, and in writing in several emails reviewed by LAist — that immigration agents are allowed to be present at all times, even during discussions about a patient’s sensitive medical information. Doctors also were told they could not call a detained patient’s family member without an agent’s permission. In one email to subordinates, a hospital leader told White Memorial staff that doing so could be a “security risk.”

“That’s like encouraging medical negligence,” one White Memorial doctor told LAist in response to this guidance.

At least one doctor told LAist they are defying hospital leaders’ guidance, deferring instead to their medical duty to the patient and to follow medical privacy laws.

“There’s no way you can get me to not call a patient’s family if they’re hurt and need support,” the doctor said.

Why detainee care is under scrutiny

The concerns about White Memorial come at a time when the care of people in ICE custody is under scrutiny. In August, a man was severely injured while being detained at a car wash in Carson. Agents brought him to Harbor-UCLA medical center for treatment and remained by his bed, to which the man was cuffed, for over a month, according to a recent court ruling. He was never charged with violating any immigration laws, and in October, a federal judge ordered the agents monitoring him to leave the man’s hospital room and remove restrictions on the man’s “ability to make telephone calls to family and friends and to confer confidentially with counsel outside the presence of ICE agents.”

X'tiosu is located on the corner of Wabash and Forest avenues in Boyle Heights

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Brian Feinzimer

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LAist

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Concerns about the medical care of detainees also extends to formal ICE detention centers. In September, Ismael Ayala-Uribe, a Westminster man who was being held at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, became the 17th person to die in ICE custody this year. Last year, 12 people died in ICE custody, according to agency statistics.

Ayala-Uribe, 39, was a former DACA recipient who supporters say had lived in the country since he was 4 years old. He was picked up in an ICE raid in Fountain Valley in August and sent to Adelanto. From there, a medical provider at the detention facility sent Ayala-Uribe to a nearby hospital, where he was evaluated for an abscess, scheduled for surgery and sent back to the facility. He died in custody the following day.

Earlier this year, as immigration raids ramped up, the advocacy group Disability Rights California interviewed 18 people detained at the Adelanto ICE facility. In a subsequent report, the group concluded that "due to the surging numbers of people at Adelanto, conditions appear to have quickly deteriorated.” The report claimed detainees faced "inadequate access to medical treatment, such as life-saving medication and wound care and exposure to widespread respiratory illnesses."

In response to LAist’s emailed questions about medical care for ICE detainees, McLaughlin, the ICE spokesperson, said detainees received “medical, dental and mental health intake screening within 12 hours of arriving at each detention facility, a full health assessment within 14 days of entering ICE custody or arrival at a facility and access to medical appointments and 24-hour emergency care. This is the best healthcare … many aliens have received in their entire lives," she wrote.

McLaughlin did not respond to LAist’s follow-up email asking her to specifically respond to questions about hospital care for detainees outside of detention centers or to questions about the availability of health care at the B-18 processing center, which unlike the Adelanto facility, is not an official detention center.

In a recent, ongoing lawsuit over the L.A. immigration raids, the ACLU and other groups called out alleged unsanitary conditions and a lack of medical care at B-18.

“Individuals with conditions that require consistent medications and treatment are not given any medical attention, even when that information is brought to the attention of the officers on duty,” reads the initial complaint, filed in July.

One doctor at White Memorial told LAist she had called ICE supervisors at the holding center on several occasions to inquire about follow-up care for patients and was told there were no doctors at the facility and there was no way to obtain medication.

What this all means for detainees — and doctors

Other groups have tried to bring attention to the problems associated with immigration agents in hospital settings. The Committee of Interns and Residents, which is is part of the Service Employees International Union, publicly denounced the presence of ICE agents at University of California hospitals in July, saying it creates “an unsafe environment that … directly contradicts our mission to provide safe, effective and quality healthcare to every member of our community.”

Mahima Iyengar, a doctor at L.A. General hospital and secretary-treasurer of the committee, told LAist that having a law enforcement officer present during doctor-patient conversations can compromise care.

“There's that level of trust that people have with their doctor that they don't necessarily have when somebody else is listening,” Iyengar told LAist. “Your doctor is then not getting as much information as they need, and that information … very well could be what helps them come up with a diagnosis or what helps them decide what treatment [the patient] is going to be on.”

Iyengar said doctors also are unlikely to feel comfortable asking a patient important non-medical questions when an ICE agent is present.

“A lot of what determines our patients' health are all of these social determinants, like where they're living, how they're getting to the hospital, if they have money, if they have kids that need childcare right now while they're hospitalized,” she said. “All of those questions are important questions to ask that I would not personally feel comfortable asking if an officer was standing right there.”

McLaughlin, the ICE spokesperson, did not respond to LAist’s specific questions about whether the agency recognizes detained patients’ privacy rights at hospitals.

What do legal experts say?

Last December, California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued “guidance and model policies” for health care facilities in responding to the anticipated increase in immigration enforcement. The guidance is not mandatory for private hospitals, like White Memorial, but all health care facilities were “encouraged to adopt” model policies. Doctors who spoke with LAist said they had read the guidance and felt beholden to it.

The document states that:

• State and federal medical privacy laws apply to all patients “regardless of immigration status.” 
• Health care facility staff “should identify circumstances in which granting immigration enforcement officers access to patients may interfere with physicians’ duty to provide competent medical care, to safeguard patient confidences and privacy, and to otherwise prioritize their obligations to their patients”; and
• Facilities “should educate patients about their privacy rights and reassure them that their healthcare information is protected by federal and state laws.”

A spokesperson for Bonta told LAist the attorney general could not comment on whether the office had received complaints about ICE privacy breaches in health care settings because they are confidential.

“We continue to monitor compliance with all state and federal laws,” the spokesperson said in an email.

LAist also asked two health care legal experts about White Memorial’s direction to staff to allow ICE agents to be present during patient exams and bar calls to detained patients’ family members. Both said the guidance could violate medical privacy laws and ethical standards.

“From a patient safety perspective, it certainly raises red flags,” said Paul Schmeltzer, an L.A.-based health care and data privacy lawyer, referring especially to the prohibition on calling a detained patient’s family member. Schmeltzer also said letting an ICE agent remain next to a patient throughout their hospital stay without the patient’s consent is likely illegal. Patient privacy is protected under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, and California’s Confidentiality of Medical Information Act. Both generally prohibit doctors and hospitals from disclosing a patient’s medical information without their permission or a search warrant or other court order.

Schmeltzer said he saw “no permissible situation” under these laws for “disclosing” a detained patient’s hospital treatment to an ICE agent.

“The fact that an ICE agent is present in the room while this patient is receiving treatment, that's a disclosure,” he said.

Deven McGraw, chief regulatory and privacy officer for the company Citizen Health,  a patient data platform, agreed.

“ You're basically saying, ‘Yeah, patient, you don't have a choice but to disclose your medical information to this law enforcement official,'” she said.

McGraw was in charge of enforcing HIPAA at the federal Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights from 2015 to 2017. She said there are personal and public health reasons for shielding a patient’s medical information from law enforcement. For example, a patient might hide that they have a communicable disease out of fear they’ll be targeted or isolated.

“ We're supposed to treat people,” McGraw said. “The failure to treat them has potential consequences for their own health, plus the health of others.”

Schmeltzer and McGraw both said the administration at White Memorial might be making a calculated decision when weighing the hospital’s potential liability for violating the privacy rights of immigration detainees versus angering the Trump administration. Only the federal government and state attorneys general can prosecute a hospital for violating HIPAA, Schmeltzer and McGraw noted. 

Some of the behavior described by doctors could be prohibited under a new state law, enacted in September as an “urgency” measure. The law requires health care facilities to ban immigration agents from entering non-public areas without a valid warrant and to advise staff on how to respond to agents’ requests for entry.

Even before the law, groups like the Committee of Interns and Residents had begun to train colleagues on the privacy rights of detained patients and how to handle ICE agents. Iyengar said doctors at L.A. General, for example, distribute “Know Your Rights” cards to immigrant patients and hospital employees are instructed to immediately call hospital directors if immigration agents appear.

“ Even just if there is an ICE officer in the hospital, that will put people off from visiting a loved one, or if word gets out, the community finds out, and they don't want come to that hospital,” she said. “So, it's just an unsafe environment to have an ICE officer in a hospital, especially [a hospital] that's serving mostly immigrants.”

LAist’s Ted Rohrlich also contributed to this story.

The Long Beach Unified School District is looking for a new operator to handle a major after-school program following the city of Long Beach’s decision not to participate in an attempt to save money.

Since 2002, the city’s Parks Department has helped anchor the initiative, known to families as WRAP. It provides free programming for hundreds of transitional-kindergarten through eighth-grade students across seven local campuses: Garfield, Edison, King, Grant, Lafayette, Burbank and Herrera.

Long Beach Unified officials stress that the vital student services will continue under a new operator this fall. It’s not clear yet who it will be and what, if any, changes they’ll make.

The city’s quiet retreat from the program has sparked deep anxiety among three full-time and 80 part-time municipal workers who now face potential layoffs.

Workers say they were first notified of the decision during a June 15 staff meeting with a city superintendent, where they were told their employment with the program would conclude on Aug. 15.

“Everybody was kind of caught off guard,” said one 13-year city employee based at an elementary school, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her position. “I mean, again, I’ve been doing this for 13 years; we had people there that had been doing it over 20 years that had never moved sites.”

Today, the before- and after-school services are paid for primarily through the state-funded Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELOP), a combination of California’s After School Education and Safety (ASES) grant and specific ELOP apportionments.

Historically, the city was granted this funding by the school district without a formal bidding process, typically receiving roughly $15 per student plus administrative fees, which it supplemented with allocations from its own general fund.

This year, however, the school district was forced to overhaul its grant-funding process and consider bids to meet tightening state mandates for the program’s ELOP funding.

Shortly after, the city informed the school district it would not bid on the program.

City spokesperson Jennifer De Prez said the decision “was made so that the department can focus its limited financial resources” on other programs it runs.

The city is facing an estimated $61 million budget shortfall in the upcoming fiscal year — a deficit that top administrators warn makes citywide reductions inevitable.

The city could not immediately provide numbers on how much money it expected to save by ending its participation in the WRAP program. Last year, the city provided $193,254 of in-kind-services at its own expense on top of the program’s grant-funded budget, according to documents provided by De Prez.

Meanwhile, the school district went ahead with a bid application for a replacement operator on May 22. Proposals were due June 12 and are scheduled to go before the Board of Education for consideration at its July 15 meeting.

District officials emphasized that the state funding remains fully intact and that student services will continue without interruption.

The district and the city are also working on a joint letter to families detailing the transition, which is scheduled to be sent out soon.

But for the frontline staff, the transition has been destabilizing and abrupt.

These part-time employees, who work between 20 and 30 hours per week depending on the season, rotate through campuses where individual site enrollment ranges from 85 to 160 students.

The employee who spoke with the Post said that despite directives from supervisors to keep the changes quiet until future plans solidified, she chose to notify parents so they would have time to prepare.

“As a parent, I would want to know if it’s not the same people that I’ve trusted my kids with for years,” she said.

The long-term fate of the workforce remains unresolved, forcing many to look for employment elsewhere.

“As far as employment opportunities, they didn’t lay us off, they didn’t fire us, they just basically told us the contract with the schools will be done August 15,” the anonymous employee said. “Past that, we have no idea what’s going to happen.”

City officials say they will soon meet with representatives of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) union to discuss the workers’ future.

“We are committed to ensuring this process is transparent, informed by complete information, and focused on protecting both employees and the quality and continuity of the vital services the WRAP program provides to the Long Beach community,” said Sashi Muralidharan, a spokesperson with IAM 947.

Editor’s note: This story was updated with more information about the program’s cost to the city.

A community organization in Los Angeles is criticizing how the FBI enforced a strict no-drone policy around World Cup venues after federal agents disrupted a community gardening event in South L.A.

The incident took place the first Sunday of the tournament, while crowds were watching matches at the FIFA Fan Festival at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Nearby, the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site.

Then someone flew a drone to photograph the moment. Minutes later, Department of Homeland Security agents and Los Angeles police officers were on the scene, according to Bz Zhang, a project manager who was helping run the event. Soon the FBI arrived. They confiscated the drone and fined the person operating it.

The Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site when authorities arrived.

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Wendy Salvador

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" We were unknowingly in violation of federal airspace, and we were told that we were a threat to national security," said Zhang, who witnessed the encounter.

The drone had violated temporary flight restrictions implemented for the World Cup. The Federal Aviation Authority has banned unauthorized drones within "3-nautical-mile radius and up to 3,000 feet above ground level" around stadiums on match days and also prohibited them around certain fan events, like the one at the Coliseum.

Since the tournament started in L.A., federal authorities have seized dozens of drones near SoFi Stadium and the Coliseum, according to the FBI. In total, more than 600 drones have been confiscated across the country.

The crackdown is part of an effort across all 11 U.S. host cities to identify and remove unauthorized drones from the skies around World Cup venues and fan events. Ahead of the tournament, FEMA awarded host cities $250 million specifically to combat drone usage.

"We knew we needed to act quickly to keep the World Cup safe from the rising threat of unmanned aircraft systems and that’s exactly what we did,” said Karen Evans, FEMA's acting cdministrator, in a statement announcing those funds.

But Zhang said that the incident at the garden represented the unintended consequences of hosting mega-events like the World Cup for ordinary community members.

" It's one thing to be aware of construction. … It's another to be expected as residents to know, to the 10th of a mile, that I'm in a particular zone and that, to the hour, I need to be in compliance," Zhang said.

Laura Eimiller, FBI spokesperson, disagreed. She said drone operators are responsible for knowing the rules and that every person in L.A. who had a drone confiscated during the World Cup also received a fine.

"There's been a zero-tolerance approach," Eimiller said.

Hiding out among the luxury beachfront condos in the Newport Beach neighborhood of Corona Del Mar is an outpost where scientists have been conducting important marine research for nearly a century.

And you can go check the place out for yourself.

A ‘magical’ marine station 

With its Spanish style architecture that includes a central tower and red-tiled roof, Caltech’s Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory looks like it’s been teleported in from another time and place.

Originally built as a boat and club house, it was purchased by Caltech in 1929 for use as a beachfront science outpost.

Victoria Orphan, James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science at Caltech and director of the Kerckhoff Marine Lab, said the place is one of the oldest running marine labs on the West Coast.

“There’s something just really magical about marine stations. They’re rustic, so it’s not like you’re going into a fully polished clean room. But that’s part of the charm and you really feel the history,” Orphan said.

One of her favorite spots? The tower. That’s where Orphan said some famous papers were written.

“Sometimes when I have writer’s block, I’ll go and sit in the tower and try to channel the scientists of old,” she told LAist.

That would include the work of Wheeler North, one of Orphan’s heroes. From 1962 to 2002, he conducted pioneering research on the ecology of kelp forests. Orphan said North’s work was instrumental for learning how an imbalance in the sea urchin population can decimate kelp forests.

These days that important research continues, with scientists at the lab looking at how microbes can capture carbon dioxide, mitigating global warming. They even have a 4-foot, bright yellow autonomous vehicle that scans the seafloor so scientists can learn more about seagrasses, which are important for oxygen creation and carbon capture, serve as fish nurseries and help protect the coastline from storm surge.

Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory in Corona del Mar

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Courtesy Caltech photo archive

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“In areas where you have seagrass, you get less sediment erosion [and] a little more protection of the property on land, which people who live on the coast care about,” Orphan explained.

Engineers from Jet Propulsion Laboratory are also interested in using autonomous vehicles in cooperation with the lab to see how they can help study the deep ocean right outside the harbor.

You can visit the lab to learn about all of the science going on there, with free open houses on Tuesdays and monthly ‘Science and Sunsets’ events that include dinner and cocktails at the historic outpost.

A pop-up book that’s seeking to break the world record for size has unfolded at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles.

The art piece is 31 feet wide, more than 11 feet tall, and weighs in at 1,800 pounds.

Luceros y Penumbras, which roughly translates to “starlight and shadows,” is rooted in L.A. artist Daniel González’s experience visiting the library and his family in Mexico as a child.

“It's a knowledge tree that's been shaped by all these different things that I've learned at the library, about myself, about the city I grew up in, [and] about the town where my family's from,” González said.

The nonprofit Library Foundation of Los Angeles collaborated with the library to commission the piece as part of the Central Library’s centennial celebration.

The project is inspired, in part, by the library’s Toy Movable collection, an archive of more than 2,000 pop-up books.

“Normal pop-up books … they seem so simple, but something amazing pops out when you open the page,” said Todd Lerew, the foundation’s director of special projects. “That sort of childlike wonder that you feel that's persistent, even as an adult, is something that was really important to capture and dial up to 11 with this project.”

The origin of 'Luceros'

The foundation asked González in June 2025 to create a book that told the story of his personal relationship with the library. As González pondered questions including  ”What did the library do for me as a young person?" and "Why was I so attracted to it?" he thought about how knowledge was passed down in his family through the generations.

His grandmother told him stories about the stars above her farm near Teúl, Zacatecas, in Mexico. She said those that emerged at dawn — luceros — were among the most special because they signaled the start of a new day.

“ I looked at those stars … and the histories that my grandparents were sharing with me as these guiding lights,” González said. “Just like the library is a guiding light for many people.”

Daniel González's maternal grandmother, Isabel Gómez, told him stories about the creatures that lived near her farm, including owls, that could teach healing.

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Courtesy Daniel González

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González grew up blocks away from the Benjamin Franklin Library in Boyle Heights.

“ I spent summers there because it was literally the coolest place to be,” González said. “It just gave me the opportunity to explore anything that I had an interest in.”

Daniel González, as a child, after an unsuccessful attempt to make a kite after a trip to the library.  "My dad's like, 'I'm gonna take a picture of you so you can see what you look like when you get grumpy,'" he said.

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Courtesy Daniel González

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Later, he’d visit the Central Library during a middle school field trip and return on the bus to wander the stacks and ask the staff questions.

“ I'm really lucky that I met the people that nurtured that curiosity,” González said.

From sketches to ‘paper engineering’

First, González sketched the images, carved them into linoleum, printed them with ink and digitized them to add color and other details.

A few of Daniel González's tools. In the future, he plans to sell prints related to "Luceros y Penumbras."

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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Matthew Reinhart, children’s book author, illustrator and “paper engineer,” was tasked with translating the images into three dimensions.

“ My job is really making mistakes,” Reinhart said. “Making mistakes, figuring out where they are and solving them and — of course — making them look good.”

The construction and the fabrication of the book took the work of more than 30 people over a series of months. At least a dozen people using giant poles capped with cushions turn the pages.

Luceros y Penumbras is four pages that open to create two scenes — one of the Central Library building and another of a sprawling tree with an I Spy-like collection of creatures and images throughout. The featured pages will change throughout the exhibition, which is open until mid-November.

There are at least a dozen different symbols throughout “Luceros y Penumbras."

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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The sea turtle at the base of the tree is a reference both to the creatures that live in the San Gabriel River and to the original inhabitants of the L.A. basin. The Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe tells a story that connects the region’s earthquakes to the turtles.

“When we think of sea turtles, we think of these faraway places where they live, like tropical places,” González said. “But they exist here and they've had to adapt to a changing climate, a changing environment, and find places to call home, just as people do.”

Other images include:

• A star resting in an outstretched hand in honor of Octavia E. Butler, the science fiction writer who also spent time in the library. 
•  Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent Aztec deity and a frequent motif in East L.A.’s murals. 
• An owl, a symbol of knowledge associated with the Greek goddess Athena and the Roman goddess Minerva. 

González said the goal is for viewers to create their own narrative about what they see.

“ I just hope that people carry with them a sense of curiosity to further explore the things that I present, but also maybe something within them,” González said.

Visit the pop-up book

Central Library Centennial Festival

On display