DANGER AROUND EVERY CORNER
Generations of immigrants found their footing in L.A.’s Lincoln Heights. Now, facing a federal crackdown and economic upheaval, many fear they’re on shaky ground.
First of four parts
The boy looked tentative as he took his seat at the sixthgrade graduation. Bone-thin with thick glasses, Jose turned to look for his parents in the auditorium.
Moments like this filled his father, Pascual, with a combination of pride and dread. Watching from a few rows back, he studied his son’s body language. “Hey, champion,” he called out. Jose, 11, smiled and relaxed. The boy, who is autistic, still depended on his parents to get through social events in their Lincoln Heights neighborhood. That made his parents anxious, but the unease was compounded by a secret they guarded.
They were living in the U.S. illegally, and the boy they had raised since he was an infant was not, in the eyes of the law, their son. They had always been too scared to enter the court system to formally adopt him, but these days they regret not having done it before, during what felt like more lenient times.
Jose, born in Los Angeles, is a U.S. citizen — and any day he could be taken from them.
Across the country, the presidency of Donald Trump has put immigrants who lack legal status on edge.
In Lincoln Heights, a neighborhood of more than 28,000 just northeast of downtown Los Angeles, that tension has become a part of daily life. A team of Times reporters spent months there last year to capture how one of California’s oldest ports of call for immigrants has wrestled with the changing tone of the national debate — and made adjustments in day-to-day life.
Lincoln Heights was the city’s first suburb and the landing spot for a succession of immigrants — English, Irish, French, Chinese, Mexican, Italian and, more recently, Central American and ethnic Chinese from Vietnam.
It became a hub of the Chicano civil rights movement. Lincoln High School played a central role in the 1968 “blowouts,” when hundreds of students in predominantly Latino high schools walked out of their classrooms to protest inequalities in education. Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers movement used the Church of the Epiphany on Altura Street as its Los Angeles base. La Raza, the newspaper for the Chicano movement,
[Displaced, was printed in the church basement.
Today, 70% of Lincoln Heights residents are Latino.
Trump’s inauguration last year brought anxiety to a community already buffeted by economic changes that had ripped away many of the toeholds that immigrants once relied upon to start new lives.
Rising rents pushed longtime tenants out and brought young professionals in. Online shopping siphoned revenue away from storefronts where newcomers worked. Local factory and garment jobs had been disappearing for years.
As Lincoln Heights became attractive to a wealthier demographic looking for an up-andcoming, walkable, affordable place to live, low-income residents were beginning to doubt whether they could still make a life here. With Trump in the White House and anti-immigrant rhetoric getting a boost nationwide, those doubts were becoming widely shared.
Like many immigrants without legal status in Los Angeles, Pascual and his wife, Josefina, have altered their routines, hopes and plans since the 2016 presidential election, fearful of the white vans and unmarked black cars that might come for them with any missteps.
They avoid parts of the city, drive with extreme caution, scan parking lots for what might be federal law enforcement vehicles.
They, like many others in this story, asked that their last names be withheld, fearing that they might become targets of immigration officers.
In Lincoln Heights, that fear was real. A 48-year-old father of four was detained in February 2017 while taking his daughters to school.
After that, every parent without papers began to see danger in everyday activities: driving, going through airport security, disputing an eviction, speaking Spanish in the wrong place, getting a driver’s license, even applying for legal residency.
Lincoln Heights, established in 1873 as Los Angeles’ first suburb, looks much like it did when it was filled with rail workers who built and repaired steam engines at the Southern Pacific shops off Mission Road.
There are more barred windows, chain-link fences and cheap apartment blocks. But many of the fretted Victorian mansions and Craftsman bungalows remain, cracked with age. So do the Broadway storefronts, the brick churches, the bucolic Lincoln Park and its algal lake, the railroad tracks and Piggyback Yard, the San Antonio Winery, the shuttered city jail, the warehouses, the factories — even the dry grass hills where coyotes roam and cattle once grazed amid scattered black walnut trees.
Less than two miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles, Lincoln Heights sits on a densely packed 2.5 square miles that extends from the rutted industrial streets along the L.A. River channel to quiet ravines that feel far removed from the city.
Median family income is just above $33,000 here, about half that of Los Angeles County as a whole, and three-quarters of households are renting.
When Pascual and Josefina came to Lincoln Heights in 2001, they found a century-old shingled home by the freeway that the landlord rented for $1,000 in exchange for Pascual’s helping to fix it up — replacing windows, painting, building a staircase and storage.
Pascual was working his way into management at a metal fabrication company in South Los Angeles. After 12 years in the country, the peasant farmers from Mexico’s Zacatecas state, who had walked across the border without papers, seemed to be on a path to their dream.
Jose arrived as an unexpected blessing, born of tragedy. In Mexico, Pascual’s niece was raped by a bus driver and became pregnant. She had numerous complications during pregnancy, and the baby needed medical treatment not available there.
Josefina and Pascual, who had not been able to conceive their own child, agreed to raise him in Lincoln Heights. “God didn’t want us to have a child of our own, but he brought us one,” Pascual said.
But without legal status, their life was built on a fragile limb.
When Pascual lost his job during the recession in 2008, he left quietly, without the severance pay others got. He didn’t want to speak up for fear his boss might call immigration authorities. He started working odd jobs — painting, building fences — to get by. Then in 2014, the owner of their home died, and the man’s son decided to sell the house.
The new owner gave the family 60 days to leave.
Pascual researched his options. He could have hired a lawyer to fight for more time and relocation costs. But he decided it wasn’t worth the risk to his family. They packed up and moved to a cramped backyard apartment a 10-minute drive away, and took on a roommate.
They returned to their old neighborhood often, though, to visit family and neighbors, attend church, buy groceries and eat at their favorite cheap Mexican restaurant, Llamarada.
The forced move reminded them how tenuous their situation was with their son. Although they raised him, and his biological mother gave her blessing for them to adopt him, they hadn’t filed adoption papers because of their illegal status in the country.
Now, with the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants, they felt they were in an impossible predicament. Because Jose had been born in Los Angeles before his biological mother returned with him to Mexico, he was a U.S. citizen. They were not. If they were deported, they knew, they might not be able to bring Jose with them.