Electric Lit | October 16, 2025
When I explained my dad’s new job to my girls-only club members, I told them what he had told my brother, sister, and me.
Dad said that it was the responsibility of every single teacher in this country to give kids a good education. He said that some teachers were assholes, that they didn’t want to give a good education to all kids. He said that these bigots discriminated against the children of migrant farm workers and that it was basically his job to force these racists to do their jobs.
Prism | September 22, 2025
Meet Yamilet Galvan, the trauma-informed voice of a generation. Like many youth across Los Angeles County, the 11-year-old Chicana has plenty to say about Trump, ICE’s racist raids, and the many failures of grown-ups who voted for the mess young people find themselves in.
Yamilet’s family belongs to Los Angeles County’s immigrant community, and like most girls her age, the 11-year-old Chicana worries a lot about her friends. Some have undocumented parents and grandparents who chose to repatriate rather than take their chances with the roving bands of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents that have become familiar sights at car washes, grocery stores, Home Depots, and construction sites.
LA Taco | July 13, 2025
On the morning of June 19, federal agents stormed a bus stop where laborers waited to be transported to construction sites in nearby neighborhoods devastated by wildfires. The agents wore masks and brandished firearms. The laborers clutched cups of coffee and baked goods. Agents abducted one man while he held a glazed donut. “These gentlemen were filling their stomachs to be able to work,” says Pasadena Mayor Victor Gordo, himself an immigrant.
Places Journal | March 16, 2025
This January, a blaze began in Altadena’s Eaton Canyon. From my porch, I watched as the brightest orange overtook the San Gabriel Mountains, turning them the same color as the marigolds that I brought to the cemetery in November. Santa Ana winds moving more than 100 miles per hour carried embers into neighborhoods where wooden bungalows ignited, palm trees combusted, and coyotes panicked. More than 9,000 buildings were destroyed. To quote Butler, we were lucky with the fire. When I evacuated, I took a small bag with me. In it was a small jar filled with plants harvested from the forest that was now burning. This was my small way of trying to save the forest by preserving her seeds.
Places Journal | October 16, 2024
A youthful obsession with Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother turns to frustration over how its subject, Florence Owens Thompson, an Indigenous woman, has been misperceived.
A drunk named John Steinbeck wrote a lot about California. My father had given me one of Steinbeck’s novels, Cannery Row, which I preferred to The Red Pony, another Steinbeck novel given to me by my sixth-grade teacher. Cannery Row did something that no other novel I’d read had done: it mentioned my hometown. ‘Doc didn’t stop in Salinas for a hamburger. But he stopped in Gonzalez, in King City, and in Paso Robles. He had a hamburger and beer in Santa Maria – two in Santa Maria, because it was a long pull from there to Santa Barbara.’
Joyland | August 5, 2024
My dad threw out his mom’s long-neglected magazine collection after it began to squeak. Mice had invaded the pulp, causing it to teem with newborn rodents. In her dementia, my grandma Hope had forgotten about the cardboard boxes stacked in the back of her garage. The collection spoiled by the mice had been one of Hope’s prized possessions, a bilingual true crime archive that took her half a century to build.
Alta | July 2, 2024
Because Long Beach, California, is a place where a moonlit Marine can easily find a muscle queen willing to kneel in the soggy sand and fellate him while foghorns and ship horns bellow in the distance, certain residents refer to it as Schlong Beach. My girlfriend, best friend, and I learned this tasteless sobriquet upon moving into a ground-floor condo in the middle of the city’s gayborhood. A fat masseuse rented the unit to us. She insisted that we pay her in cash and that we keep the potted ficus moping on her veranda alive. The landlady also imposed a rule that made our home feel unlike a home: no hanging anything on the walls.
We agreed to her terms, but the emptiness soon grew oppressive.
Our home felt like a generic coffin.
LA Times | February 15, 2024
Adulthood had given Mike a power he was eager to exploit; he could buy alcohol legally. Since my underage friends and I relied on people like Mike to supply us with Boone’s Strawberry Hill, we used caution around them. Mocking these losers could endanger our access to saccharine wines. It also could endanger us.
Mike gestured at my face with his half-empty bottle of Zima and asked, “Anyone ever told you you look like Buh-Jork?”
“You mean … Björk?”
Mike ignored my correction, instead asking, “What are you? You’re so … exotic.” He rambled on about Buh-jork’s “kind-of-Asian-hotness” until friends came to my rescue.
LA Times | November 14, 2023
Henry awed and terrified me. He had wanted to be a paleontologist. Instead, he became one of countless young Chicanos drafted by the U.S. government to fight the Viet Cong. The U.S. Army trained him to kill and exercising these murderous skills had destroyed him. He left his sanity in Asia and returned to his childhood home a crazed and haunted man. I understood that Henry had undergone his own apocalypse.
Truth Dig | September 29, 2023
As Angelenos countdown to the creepiest night of the year, many U.S. news sources continue their creep to the right. By handing her the microphone, reporters give a dangerous person … Read more
the Rumpus | September 1, 2023
On the night that I escaped from my abuser, a five-letter word broke his spell, helping to set me free. My abuser had stalked me to the safehouse where a … Read more
LA Times | August 10, 2023
Texas naysayers who found the Edgar troubling tried outlawing it. At an El Paso high school in 2021, these activists circulated a petition calling for the prohibition of “Edgar Cuts,” … Read more