"Chinga Tu Migra"

Being in Los Angeles this past week has been a crash course in Mexican, Chicano, Latin American, and immigrant humor, joy, poetry, art, rage, and resistance. As Donald Trump's Brown Shirts--what else should we call plainclothes, masked, armed men who haul away parents and neighbors in unmarked vans?--wreak terror through communities, LA has risen up in its tricolor bandera glory.

Julio Ricardo Varela wrote, in a piece about why Mexican flags are ubiquitous at LA's immigration rallies:

Angelenos have seen it all before: vilification, fearmongering and false claims about un-American activities. All this anti-immigrant strategy has accomplished is to mobilize states like California to produce new leaders and justice movements that place immigrants first.

The most effective long-term strategy to counteract erasure and vilification is for communities to lean into the very identity that they are marginalized for, not to assimilate into the dominant culture. Assimilation is dilution. It is acquiescence to power. Because today's fascism takes aim at immigrant identity, immigrant pride is armor.

There have been continuous marches, rallies, and protests in Los Angeles against ICE raids since June 6 when federal agents began sweeping through immigrant-heavy, low-income communities and workplaces. On Thursday June 12, my kids informed me they had heard of a rally in Pasadena, where I live, taking place at City Hall. Home for the summer, they attended the rally, allowing me to tag along.

Hundreds of young people gathered as Los Jornaleros del Norte, the musical arm of the National Day Laborers Organizing Network (NDLON) belted out political Spanish-language tunes set to traditional music. This week, on Rising Up With Sonali, you'll hear from some of those young folks, including two high school students, a young teacher, and the leader of the Pasadena chapter of Black Lives Matter, Jasmine Abdullah Richards.

On Saturday, I joined an estimated 30,000 people marching through downtown Los Angeles (and thousands more in other Southern California cities), as part of the nationwide No Kings marches organized in opposition to Trump's DC military parade. Mexican flags flew alongside the US flag on Flag Day, and people marched from LA City Hall to Pershing Square, chanting, marching, drumming, singing, holding aloft signs, and displaying joyous rage.

The march took on a decidedly LA flavor as signs ranged from the ever-popular "Chinga Tu Migra," to the clever, "I'll take my horchata warm– "F*** ICE." More than 2,000 No Kings marches took place around the US, drawing an estimated 12 million people at events that were organized well before the ICE raids hit LA. Also on Rising Up this week, you'll hear voices from the LA "No Kings" march, and an analysis of how activists around the nation are navigating the Democratic Party's inability to offer solid opposition to the GOP.

Meanwhile, YES! Media, my erstwhile employer, also bid its readers a final farewell, and hundreds of you signed up to this newsletter in the past few days. Welcome, I'm absolutely thrilled you're here! Rising Up With Sonali is the living legacy of YES! Media, with one person--me--attempting to continue a multimedia version of YES! solutions journalism single-handedly. Within 3 weeks I've gotten a quarter of the way to my subscriber goal. When you sign up for only $4 a month, you're not only getting access to all of my video interviews and transcripts, you're keeping a very small, very independent media institution alive--run by an immigrant woman of color.

I came to the United States as a 16-year old on an F-1 student visa, a naive Physics freshman at the University of Texas at Austin. Today, as I see young people who look like I once did, I can't help but think of how much this nation has changed just in the past 25 years because of immigrants, and how much better it is for that reason.