Señora, her doctor said to her, you know that you have cancer, yes? Alma said, No, no, she didn’t have cancer, no one had ever told her that before, she’d seen many physicians for mysterious aches, for diabetes and dizziness and interminable coughing, for exhaustion.
But it was cancer—multiple myeloma, which attacks bone marrow. Its diagnosis is often a late-stage one, because it presents so vaguely. The scans showed 43 sites in her body where bone was beginning to deteriorate. Her jaw was beginning to crumble.
The cancer had likely been advancing for many years—years of making a life in Los Angeles as it had become increasingly blue, progressive even, as it had declared itself a sanctuary city in its refusal to allow local law enforcement to be utilized by federal immigration authorities.
Was it something else that had made her sick? The long hours at the sweatshop? Lead in the walls of the old homes where she’d lived? Something in the brown-gray air that sat heavy over the city when the inversion layer trapped pollution? Was it simply being too far from the air of her homeland in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, the void that opened before her upon hearing of her mother’s death there? Alma felt pain from her head to her toes; on her usual walk to church, she’d take off her shoes and go barefoot for relief.
This article appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
Just as she started chemotherapy, ICE and then the California National Guard arrived in Los Angeles, the first major enactment of the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy. Agents in gaiters and hastily improvised paramilitary gear swarmed car washes, Home Depots, bus stops, garment factories, and even the fashion district’s beloved Callejones, with its hundreds of small discount stores that looked every bit like a Mexican mercado. Nowhere felt safe: The Trump administration had rescinded the Biden-era “protected areas” policy. Theoretically, even the sanctuary of Alma’s beloved parish was vulnerable to a raid, and indeed, on a few occasions immigrants were detained in church parking lots.
Thousands of children stayed home from school. Small businesses catering to immigrants, especially restaurants, emptied out or closed altogether. Public transportation ridership plummeted. For immigrant L.A., it was a second lockdown.
But Alma’s cancer was stage III, and she was in critical need of chemo treatments.
One of her first appointments was on July 7, 2025. As she prepared to board the bus, ICE was staging an operation with 17 Humvees, four tactical vehicles, two ambulances, about 80 members of the National Guard, and dozens of ICE agents, including a phalanx on horseback. Their destination was MacArthur Park, for generations the heart of immigrant Los Angeles. The park was the halfway mark on the route between her house and the oncology clinic.
But just as had occurred during the pandemic, as ICE started surging in L.A., lo bonito, as Alma put it, the best of the community, rapidly emerged. Parishes prepared meals for families going hungry for fear of leaving their homes to go to work. Hyperlocal rapid-response networks were organized to track ICE sightings through apps and social media. She was not very digitally active, but her daughters certainly were.
As Alma boarded the bus, her daughters frantically called and texted, their feeds full of reports of the MacArthur Park raid. She turned around, missing her chemo appointment that day, and on at least a couple of other occasions as the summer ICE siege of Los Angeles wore on, as hundreds of thousands of Angelenos, mostly with papers, in allyship with those without them, took to the streets, threw up barricades, spray-painted the federal buildings, and held vigils at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Downtown, the carceral monolith built, with brutal symbolism, a couple of blocks away from the historic pueblo church affectionately known as La Placita, which had been a longtime site of sanctuary for the undocumented.
THE DIGNITY OF LABOR
Los Angeles is a city of laborers. It comes alive in the predawn dark, as the maintenance and domestic and construction workers and the hotel and restaurant servers and the retail clerks rouse their bodies and climb into their struggle buggies or growling work trucks or navigate the highly uneven patchwork of Metro trains, buses, and app-based Micro rideshares, trips that for a lucky few take less than an hour and for many more last much longer. Then an 8- or 10- or 12-hour day shift, followed by the ride home as long as or longer than the ride to work, just as the night shift army is getting ready to undertake its own commute.
Los Angeles is a city of laborers, and Alma is one among them. Alma is not her real name, and she cannot be identified in this article because she is undocumented, like nearly one million others in Los Angeles County, and thus many details of her life must be altered or withheld to render her story.
To tell of Alma’s nearly 40 years in this country, of the mixed-immigration-status family of five daughters she shares with her husband (also undocumented), of her labor, of where and how she’s lived, of her health, is to tell of daily life in a city under siege.
Alma is the center of her family and a pillar of her community, serving others with a whirl of energy, passion, and ambition in their quest for la vida mejor, the holy grail of the better life that spurred them across the border in the first place. And she is utterly vulnerable because she is brown, speaks Spanish (in addition to her Indigenous mother tongue), and has worked in jobs associated with undocumented labor (garment and domestic work). Alma checks all the boxes for a “Kavanaugh stop,” the U.S. Supreme Court seal of approval for racial profiling in immigration enforcement, named for the justice whose concurring opinion in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo clarified that race or ethnicity could indeed be a “relevant factor” in ICE sweeps. She will tell you that with faith, enacted through service, one can endure it all.
Her home village in the Sierra Norte is a place of powerful Indigenous identity, in her case Zapotec, a people who maintain much of the culture that flourished in the highlands long before the Spanish arrived. Indigenous migrants like Alma have become highly visible in Los Angeles.
She lives in a two-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood that was once majority Black and is now heavily migrant-brown, with incipient gentrification driving up rents in a city that ranks among the country’s least affordable for renters. Her two-story building is typical Southern California postwar housing, unvarnished modernism-for-the-people. It’s only the second home she’s had in her four decades here, and she’s lived in it for just four years. During late COVID lockdown, she was forced from her first home, in violation of a county ordinance prohibiting pandemic evictions. The tiny mother-in-law unit behind an old, squat Craftsman was close to the University of Southern California, the academic behemoth driving much of the gentrification in the area.
Inside Alma’s apartment, the spring light slants across the living room floor and bounces up to illuminate her altar, a veritable installation dominated by prints. The largest are the olive-skinned Virgen de Guadalupe’s miraculous appearance to San Juan Diego by Helguera (probably best known in the States for his sinewy Aztec figures on Mexican restaurant calendars); a Virgen de la Soledad (patroness of Oaxaca City) with gold crown and intricate cloak of blossoms and crescent moons; another, very light-skinned Mary holding the Immaculate Heart at the center of her chest; and no fewer than four Jesuses (the standout: a pencil-sketch rendition, beard and hair and penetrating eyes emerging from a white background). On a shelf below the prints are statuettes of Saint Clare of Assisi, the patroness of garment workers; the Santo Niño, Baby Jesus dressed in silky white; and Saint Francis, as well as a woodcut of the Holy Family. On the wall to the left of the prints is a small poster labeled, in English, “Family Rules,” the first being “Help Each Other,” followed by, among others, “Be Grateful,” “Dream Big,” and “Laugh Out Loud.”
She wears a short-sleeve beige knit blouse, simple but slightly elevated in style. She’s in her mid-60s, and her hair is still mostly black, her eyebrows thick, her face somewhat lined but a cleanly complected bronze, her hands only lightly spotted. She tells of a lifetime. Of the pueblo back home hidden in the beautiful pine-studded sierra, the hours of dirt roads to reach it in the old days. Of her eldest daughter’s serious eye condition and the conviction that only in the United States could the family earn enough money for her surgery. The beginning of the family’s journey.
Her husband went north first and, after securing restaurant work in Los Angeles, returned to Oaxaca for their eldest daughter and her younger sister for the second trip across the border. Then it was Alma’s turn to make the trek. She found work in a garment factory, sewing shirts, pants, and dresses from early morning until eight or nine in the evening for meager pay. There are hundreds of these factories in Los Angeles; they are infamously rife with workplace violations.
Three more daughters were born here, the first American citizens in the family. Now there were seven of them, sharing the small mother-in-law unit; Alma often slept under the kitchen table. They saw the city burn in 1992 after the Rodney King verdict, heard of corruption in the LAPD, but also were nourished by burgeoning Spanish-language radio and TV and by the cultural infrastructure the immigrants themselves were building—fiestas, restaurants, small businesses proffering the foods and textiles of home, churches revived by the newcomers.
But even as millions of undocumented immigrants received “amnesty” under the Reagan-era Immigration Reform and Control Act, Alma, her husband, and their eldest daughters missed the opportunity for legal status because they didn’t have the money to pay a lawyer who demanded $6,000 to file her case and whom she never trusted. She, her husband, and one daughter (the other later attained citizenship) would remain sin papeles, without papers.
But Alma’s three daughters who were born here hurtled into an American future through four-year colleges (majoring in sociology, psychology, and political science). This was a modicum of la vida mejor, paid for through the sacrifice of the elders’ bodies in labor. The family did not attend the first two graduation ceremonies together—Alma and her husband were loath to take time off from work, given their extremely tight finances. But they did walk alongside their youngest, who decorated her mortarboard with white and red roses and the words “Por Ustedes y Para Ustedes”—because of you and for you. Besides being a lector or singing in the choir at church, this was the most public moment of Alma’s life in the United States.
More labor. A job at a Black-owned factory that made hats for artistas—feathers, sequins, bands of silk, veils. She was treated much better there than at the sweatshop, felt genuine warmth for and from her boss that belied the stereotype of Black-brown tensions in the city. She delighted in the way her labor wove together beauty that would one day perhaps sparkle on a stage.
Later came domestic work for a young family with twin daughters. She nannied, cooing to the toddlers in Spanish and Zapotec, cupping their hands to pat the corn masa for quesadillas, strolling them to the park. She taught them to play a version of hide-and-seek from a Mexican children’s song that she’d tweaked by transforming the traditional human character into a friendly wolf who drank Oaxacan-style hot chocolate in a beautiful garden. Bath time was full of splashing and laughter. She’d get almost as soapy as the kids when she shampooed their hair and as wet as them when she poured water from a stainless steel bowl to rinse their bodies.
While the children slept, she threw herself into the washing and folding and scrubbing and mopping, sweating until strands of her hair stuck to her forehead. Alma continued cleaning even after the parents returned and urged her to go home and rest. Something deep in her drove her to perfection in her cleaning rituals—there was always one more spot, no matter how tiny, to attend to. It was often dark when she took two train lines and two bus routes home.
The work with the family waned as the toddlers grew older, and eventually, they moved out of town. The years went by, and her first grandchildren were born. After a couple of trips back home in the early years, the steady militarization of the border beginning under the Clinton administration’s Operation Gatekeeper brought news from fellow migrants of death in the desert and smuggling operations tied to narco gangs. The trip had never been easy, but now it was terrifying. A decade, then two decades passed without any returns, making for the inevitable piercing moments of losing loved ones far away. First, her husband’s mother. Never an emotionally expressive man, her husband curled up inside the closet to cry. Then Alma’s mother. The distance to the homeland became an impassable void. How could she grieve without a body to kiss one last time, without a procession to the cemetery, without hanging a black ribbon on the door of her old home?
She also feared what they would encounter if they tried to return. In many families, there were rifts between the migrants and those who’d stayed home, plenty of envidia, envy and resentment. Alma and her husband had inherited small plots of common land, the kind held in perpetuity in many Mexican Indigenous communities, but had no feasible way to pay the back taxes on them. Los Angeles had become the family’s only place to call home.
FAITH AND GRACE
You will not fear the terror of the night,
Or the arrow that flies by day,
Or the pestilence that stalks in darkness,
Or the destruction that wastes at noonday.
Psalm 91 was always Alma’s comfort. COVID tore into their mother-in-law unit, and it hit her husband the hardest. When he went to the hospital, he believed he was never going to return and said his goodbyes. He survived, but his restaurant job did not. He has not worked since.
But the pandemic also brought out lo bonito of her community. Women from the parish left baskets outside the door—caldo de pollo, herbal remedies, even consecrated communion wafers. This is the way of her people: When someone dies in the north and the body needs to be sent back home, a fiesta will be held to raise the funds. The body always returns.
After the pandemic, Alma took up a housecleaning job filling in for a friend from the parish. It was in one of the beach cities, a public transit odyssey of buses and trains that even included a stop at LAX. The family that owned the house was impressed with her fastidiousness and told her, through translation provided by immigrant carpet installers who happened to be there one day, that she could work for them anytime.
But in addition to the grueling commute, she felt that her physical strength was not as it used to be. Was it long COVID? Simply getting older? Pain here, pain there—suddenly acute in her jaw, which she couldn’t close completely because of the ache. She went to her dentist to have the tooth she thought was the cause extracted, but the X-rays showed something else. She was told to consult her general practitioner, who examined her and told her to go to another clinic, where she underwent more exams. That’s when she learned of her cancer diagnosis.
With ICE seemingly everywhere, her youngest daughter, the only one with a car, drove her to several chemo appointments and to church, where she continued to sing and pray and chat warmly with her brothers and sisters in the faith. Slowly, over months of treatment, she improved. The treatment slowed the disease and then stopped it from attacking her bones further, and they even began to strengthen with targeted medication. Still, her oncologist told her, you should not be exerting yourself physically any more than lifting a coffee cup to your lips.
But she felt she needed to work, cleaning the homes of others, even if her daughters were now paying the rent on the apartment. She went back to the home by the beach, working it with grit and pride. With her foot wrapped in a towel, she mopped the floor from side to side, finding dirt in corners that no one else would notice.
As winter turned to spring in Los Angeles this year, the number of ICE detentions in the city remained high, but there were fewer high-visibility spectacles like the MacArthur Park or Home Depot raids. She started taking the bus again, although her youngest daughter, a social worker with a caseload filled with the most vulnerable of the vulnerable—the houseless—still drove her when she could.
During Lent, she attended Stations of the Cross at her church, and she noticed that her feet didn’t hurt as much as before she began her treatment. It was the holiest time of the year, and more than anything else, she looked forward to Holy Thursday, with its epic narrative of betrayal, loneliness, and doubt but also lo bonito, Jesus, the master, becoming servant to his disciples, lovingly washing and kissing their feet.
This is what she’d aspired to most of her life, caring for and cleansing the bodies and homes of her family and others.
When she regarded the larger story of this moment and her place in it, Alma recognized the passion, death, and resurrection. She was very much alive, she thought, never more so than when she served alongside others.•
A native of Los Angeles and the son and grandson of immigrants from El Salvador and Mexico, Rubén Martínez is a writer, a performer, and a professor at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author of four books, including Desert America: A Journey Through Our Most Divided Landscape.
