Rubén Martínez

Roberto Flores, co-founder of the Eastside Café, saw a potential solution to the housing crisis in the vacant state-owned homes of El Sereno. He draws on lessons from Indigenous communities in Chiapas to organize for community control and stable, dignified housing.

In the personal essay below, Rubén Martínez, host of Excavating the Future, reflects on individual and collective experiences over the past two years since the World Health Organization declared COVID a global pandemic on March 11, 2020.

Odilia Romero, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Comunidades Indigenas en Liderazgo (CIELO), talks about how traditions of mutual aid have helped Indigenous immigrant communities survive the pandemic.

Erin Aubry Kaplan explains how historically Black L.A. neighborhoods are pushing back against gentrification. She envisions using the pandemic's "pause" to shape a better future.

Black Lives Matter co-founder Melina Abdullah shares how the past can inform efforts to reshape public safety.

MacArthur Fellow Cristina Rivera Garza spoke to us from her home in San Diego to contemplate the U.S.-Mexico border, something first conceived in the imagination — which means that the imagination can also be erase it.

Joseph Rodriguez’s photographs of the LAPD in 1994 is a deeply personal, political act that still resonates in today’s political climate.

In the spirit of variedades shows of early 20th century Mexican Los Angeles, writer Rubén Martínez and an eclectic crew of all-around bohemians have conceived of an unusual history lesson-slash-variety show you won't soon forget.

Rodney and Mike are existential neighbors, both subjects and critics of succeeding Western regimes of boom and bust and busted heads, of magical and haunted encounters with the land.

The walls that have been constructed to divide — make them ours. Turn them into productive forces, dream them and tear them down.