The 1931 La Placita Immigration Raid

Downtown LA tour Launch & 1931 La Placita Immigration Raid

“When the songs faded away, Mexican Americans buried their trauma.”

Our first Los Angeles tour, Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá, is about Mexican Americans in the 1930s. It is set in the heart of LA — taking you past the stalls of Olvera Street, across La Placita, and right into Union Station. Though it’s set in the past, as you’ll hear, it’s a story that still resonates right across the US today.

The story begins in February 1931 in La Placita Olvera, at the very moment when a quiet spring afternoon was interrupted by police arriving to carry out one of the first public immigration raids in the United States. The La Placita raid marked the beginning of a campaign to force the city’s Mexican population out. Over the next decade more than a million Mexican Americans — the majority of whom were US citizens — were coerced into leaving Los Angeles and sent across the southern border.

Ninety-three years later, this dark chapter in American history is all but invisible. When you visit La Placita Olvera in downtown Los Angeles today, you see a rainbow of papel picado fluttering in the breeze. People are dancing and tamales are still for sale. But the only monuments in the plaza celebrate the European Kings and colonists who arrived here in the 18th century.

It’s not hard to understand why we would prefer to forget the 1930s Repatriations. The events were shameful, and the history is complicated. Yet it’s more important than ever to tell the story of the 1931 La Placita raid and the coerced returns that followed. In the current political climate, when we are hearing extreme policy suggestions about what to do with migrants in the United States, this story is bleak proof that outrageous and unconstitutional claims about immigration sometimes become ad-hoc policy.

Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá is a story about LA— but it’s also a story about the much bigger questions we need to keep asking:

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Who is a “real American”? Which histories do we remember, and which are we encouraged to forget?

Narrated by activist Karla Estrada, Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá weaves together the many characters of Olvera Street — “mother” of Olvera Street Christine Sterling, David Siqueiros’ America Tropical mural, Casa California business owners Norma and Val Garcia, the 1931 La Placita Raid — with Karla’s own family immigration story.

The self-guided audio walk begins in La Placita Olvera in downtown LA. Start here to explore the tour in Downtown LA or virtually with our interactive 360 video.

Both the audio walk and the 360° video include special augmented reality scenes that help visually immerse you in the story: Olvera Street’s bustling opening day in 1930, a policeman in the middle of an interrogation during the La Placita raid, and crowds that gathered at Union Station to bid farewell to the repatriation trains. You can preview these scenes on mobile here.