AFTER THE LATEST IMMIGRATION RAIDS IN LOS ANGELES

by Carrie Farrar

 

Thousands of people rallied at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles on Friday [May 1] calling for legal protections and citizenship for immigrants and dignity for all workers. Janitors, stadium workers, car wash workers and educators stood shoulder-to-shoulder Friday with students, faith leaders and other community members for the annual May Day event, which is also celebrated around the world as International Workers’ Day. More than 125 pro-immigrant and social justice organizations mobilized their members under the banner “Solo el Pueblo Shuts it Down – No Work, No School, No Shopping,” according to a press release by the LA May Day Coalition. Photo by Martín Macías, Jr. —Los Angeles Public Press

They came as Michoacán, Jalisco, & Oaxaca,
feet tuned to rhythms of banda & norteño.
They came to roof houses in Inglewood & Watts,

to pick strawberries near Oxnard, to bus tables
on Figueroa, to fix rebar & copper in Compton,
to patch asphalt along Florence & Avalon.

They built drywall & scaffold
wedged into their place in South Central.
Decades of smog changed the skyline,

from oil pumps to cranes, & dream-footed
hard work rattled their bones.
They danced Zapateado. They lived

& died. Shrouded in flags, in unmarked graves,
in deportation vans idling at dawn again,
the headline already scrolling beneath the weather.

ICE owned them in neighborhoods of fear,
in alleys of Pico-Union where whispers
outlasted the sirens,

where this week’s footage loops
hands zip-tied outside a parking lot
no one will name twice.

Before developers arrived, bougainvillea
crept over chain-link & memory,
the scent of carne asada mixing
with jet fuel from LAX.

Did descendants & newcomers shoulder
the same dread, hauling drywall,
eyes darting at the low hum of drones?

Soon, footsteps of downtown’s marble lobbies
strutted overhead, back & forth
between old denials & new arrivals,

going from major to minor violence,
always on the go. The knock of boots,
the tap of a badge awaking the dead.

 

Carrie Farrar is a Los Angeles–based poet whose work explores labor, displacement, and the emotional architecture of survival. Her poems have appeared in several online literary journals.

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