Los Angeles is built on a shared promise. It is a mosaic of diverse communities bound together by creativity, innovation, and perseverance. We create great things… together.
But in the quieter stretches of the city, particularly within working-class immigrant neighborhoods, far from the Westside, that promise has felt increasingly fragile. Communities essential to our homes, schools, hospitals, and businesses now face unique pressures and disruptions from the uptick in immigration actions.
A recent conversation brought this reality home. I spoke with a Latina woman in Westlake. She is undocumented, living with her retirement-aged mother, her young U.S.-born daughter, and her chronically ill sister.
Each morning, her family’s priority is safety. She looks through social media feeds to determine where authorities may be active, assessing whether today is “safe enough” for necessities like work, school, medicine, or groceries. The normalcy we take for granted is a constant calculation for her family.
Despite the court’s restraining order, which the Trump Administration is already challenging, this is an ongoing challenge, and it is not abstract.
When immigration sweeps come through, authorities separate families in an instant, abandon children waiting at school, leave aging parents without their caregivers, and shatter the sense of security needed for community life. Our lively, rich community environment is part of what makes Los Angeles such a special place. When nearly 50% of our Los Angeles population adjusts their activity out of fear of being profiled or targeted, that affects the very fabric of life in LA.
What may be invisible to some is the daily reality for others.
The repercussions stretch well beyond individual households. Communal trust frays, local businesses struggle, and the ripples scatter across the city. We may not all notice when a household worker, a caregiver, or a beloved shopkeeper quietly disappears. Still, without them, Los Angeles loses much of what makes it vibrant, functional, and humane.
Trusted community organizations are wrestling with these impacts. Understanding that these challenges aren’t occasional or easily solved is crucial. For our neighbors and families, uncertainty is the new normal. There’s no “going back”. Resilience must extend beyond mere survival. People impacted must repeatedly find the strength to hold on to some shred of dignity in the face of these continuous challenges.
This need for resilience inspired the creation of the Fuerza Fund, a new community-driven initiative from the Alliance for Better Community (ABC), a Latina/o advocacy organization, designed to close persistent funding gaps and empower Latina/o-led and serving organizations. While the long-term vision was already underway, the Fund was activated in the wake of January’s devastating wildfires to support critical frontline work. It’s not top-down aid. It’s about partnership. We stand with our neighbors as they weather daily storms, providing financial support, coalition-building, and partnerships that help stabilize families and strengthen needed community infrastructure.
For Westside residents, including our Jewish, Asian, and interfaith neighbors, the moment calls for solidarity and beckons to our sense of shared destiny. LA’s story is one of resilience. We are a city built by Natives, immigrants, and refugees. From the forced internment of Japanese Americans and attacks on Mexican Americans by sailors and soldiers spurring the Zoot Suit Riots, to the searing pain of the Rodney King beating and the uprising that followed, and the persecution in distant homelands and reverberating echoes of the Holocaust that many Angelenos fled, we have endured and overcome. We have led the fights for civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and the rights of immigrants. We cannot and must not stand idle.
Together, every part of Los Angeles can meet hardship with imagination, love, and resolve.
Fuerza Fund provides the first-of-its-kind channel for this enduring commitment, welcoming individuals, congregations, businesses, and local leaders to learn more, get involved, and support authentic community solutions for our Latina/o neighbors. Together, we can reaffirm our values and belief in what Los Angeles is and what it could become. Our collective well-being doesn’t rest on any single community, but on the strength of the bonds between us.
Now is the moment for each Angeleno to engage in open conversations in your social circles, explore ways your community can learn and support, share our history and stories, and seek what may be missing from fleeting headlines. We can and must stand together with hope and conviction in the face of the daily terrors of too many neighbors. The future of our city depends on it.
Vanessa Aramayo is the CEO of Alliance for Better Community LA. She is dedicated to advancing equity and amplifying the voices of our community’s most marginalized families.