Los Angeles, CA – La Cita is a storied music venue in downtown Los Angeles, often featuring Latino artists and dance events that pull in a diverse crowd. The long front bar faces a small stage and a large dance floor. The dim red lighting and decor are all at once color and vibe and glow. It’s like you’re one drink in before you reach the bar.
On Saturday, October 3, I was there for the launch of Contra-ICE, a collective of artists who have come together to raise money for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and Unión del Barrio, two non-profits that serve immigrants and work to protect civil rights.
LA native Dali Colorado is the founder of Build Art Make Change (BAMC), the organization behind the album. Colorado, along with artist Lalo Alcaraz and Ozomatli’s Uli Bella, is at the helm of Contra-ICE. Under their leadership, a roster of 30 musicians, comedians, and performers has made a compilation album. A few of the artists on the debut album took to the stage, including Daniel French, Los Abandoned, Angelo Moore of Fishbone, 2Mex, Las Chorizeras, and David J (Bauhaus).
Eight-time Grammy nominee, Laredoan Adrian Quesada, is a contributor to the album.
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About a year or so ago, I found myself standing in the middle of a busy commercial kitchen, at a stainless steel work table, choking back tears. At the time I owned a small artisanal pie company in suburban Washington, DC. I was on a break from making pies and had watched a video on my phone of masked ICE agents cracking the window of a car and dragging the driver by the shirt collar through the window. It had happened on the streets of the nation’s capital that morning.
Months earlier, when Donald Trump issued his birthright citizenship executive order, I read it thoroughly. I texted my stepdad: “Morning … do u know whether my mom got her papers fixed while she was with you?”
My mom died eight years prior and, because we were estranged off and on, I never knew whether she had become a U.S. citizen. She crossed the border into Laredo in the 1960s and was undocumented for most of her life. My stepdad texted back, “Why? Are you worried about being deported?”
I’ve lived my entire life in the U.S., and the executive order concerned me enough to read every word of it. But my real worry is for my aunts and uncles and cousins who could be racially profiled, even though most of them are citizens. I worry for my former law practice clients. My friends who work in kitchens and bars and restaurants. I’m scared for people I’ve never met.
After I watched the video, I began to talk with other small business owners about how to protect staff and colleagues should ICE agents appear at the kitchen door. Stories of immigration detentions — chefs and waiters, delivery drivers and dishwashers — came across my radar. I talked to close friends about the risk of using my pie brand and social media platform to bring awareness to the ICE raids at home and around the country. As a business owner, I fretted. As a writer, artist, and first-generation daughter of an undocumented Mexican immigrant, I fumed.
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This summer, I closed my business and moved to California for a fresh start. But the truth is I’m also here in search of solace and solidarity. A place that was once Mexico. Where my mother’s relatives live. Where the art and music and people feel like home.
And that’s how I found myself at La Cita last Saturday night, sipping mezcal and singing along to Los Abandoned’s punk rendition of Selena’s Como la Flor.
Check out Contra-ICE Vol. 1: ICE OUT, featuring Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, the Beastie Boys’ Ad-Rock and Money Mark, David J of Bauhaus, comedians Fred Armisen and Al Madrigal, and many more.
(Dini McCullough Amozurrutia is a writer, artist, and attorney with more than 25 years of public interest legal experience, including work at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She has family roots in Laredo, where she spent part of her childhood. The founder of Origins Literary Journal and former owner of Dini’s Divine Pies, she now lives in Los Angeles and writes about food, identity, and culture at The Quiet Kitchen on Substack. You can also find her on Instagram at @dinimcamo_art.)
