As President Trump ordered At least 2,000 members of the National Guard in the County of Los Angeles on Saturday, some of the most active demonstrations against the region’s immigration raids took place near a home deposit in Paramount, a small town about 25 miles south-east of the Hollywood panel. The police officers used flash-bang grenades and drawn rubber bullets on demonstrators.
The atmosphere had been tense in the city since Trump took office for the second time with promises to deport thousands of undocumented immigrants.
“Since January, people have lived in fear,” said Jose Luis Solache, a state legislator who represents the region. “We have seen a drop in the attendance of our schools, we have seen a drop in people going to work.”
The County of Los Angeles includes rich enclaves like Malibu and Beverly Hills, but also many communities like Paramount which for decades attracted Latin immigrants who clean up the hotel rooms in tourist districts, made clothes or work in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
Paramount is one of the two dozen cities that sound the southeast border of Los Angeles, collectively known as ” Passerel cities. “Some 82% of the more than 51,000 inhabitants of Paramount are Hispanic and around 36% were born abroad, According to census data. His median household income is $ 70,900; In the County of Los Angeles, this number is around $ 87,800.
“All these cities – Bell Gardens, Bellflower, Paramount – They are full of Latinos workers who may have had a piece of the middle class,” said Hugo Soto -Martinez, a member of the Los Angeles municipal council who previously worked as a work organizer in the region. “They are like Latino suburbs.”
Trump administration officials said the federal government’s repression of immigration will focus more and more on workplaces.
Angelica Salas, Executive Director of Chirla, a group of immigrant rights in Los Angeles, said that the dense concentration of immigrants in the paramount region, especially undocumented migrants, has probably made a ripe target for immigration application raids.
“They do not care to go to a workplace or have mandates,” said Salas about the federal immigration application. “They just care that the brown are there.”
Paramount and other gateway cities were not always destinations for workers’ families. At the beginning of the 20th century, they were agricultural areas.
The two villages that would be combined later to form were known as “the Los Angeles milk hangar”, according to a City History on its website. In 1948, the city, which was not officially constituted until 1957, was appointed Paramount for a main street which crossed the city.
The area was developed in the decades that followed. The factories and warehouses spread, alongside houses. According to the history of the city, in the early 1980s, a reflection group qualified Paramount as “urban disaster zone”.
But in recent years, Paramount was revitalized As children of immigrants have sought more affordable and open houses. Now young people catch up to develop horchata And coffee concoctions in Horchateria Rio Luna and stop their favorite songs during Karaoke nights in Casa Adelita.
