Los Angeles is a Tianguis

As Los Angeles faced down a government assault on our migrant communities the last two months, bringing out the best in all of us, all races, genders, and communities to protest and fight for true justice, democracy, and peace, I was honored to be one of the featured poets in the extravaganza called “If I Awaken in Los Angeles,” performed on August 1, 2025, at Los Angeles’ famed Ford Amphitheater.

Produced by Get Lit Players, where I’m an advisory board member, founded and headed by the amazing Diane Luby Lane, the production featured a powerful band, DJ, dancers, a chorus of singers, poets, and a video screen with ongoing images of this extraordinary city.

The renown Gina Belafonte, a marvelous artist in her own right, and daughter to the late great Harry Belafonte, directed this massive effort with much love, skill, and experience.

We had hours of rehearsals just prior to our time on the stage. So many moving parts had to be threaded like a fine tapestry, and Ms. Belafonte proved up to the immense challenge.

Also featured were Sekou Andrews, poet extraordinaire; the L.A. Youth Poet Laureate Samantha Rios, Get Lit’s own Monique Mitchell, and so many others I can’t name all here (they were all brave and bold). The show featured representations of the Black Community, the Chicano/Mexican/Central American Community, a highly energized focusing on L.A.’s five Asian “towns”—Chinatown, J-Town, Koreatown, Thai Town, and Historic Filipino Town. There was also a section honoring the mostly white folk troubadours, rebels, and cultural innovators of L.A.’s magical places like Topanga Canyon, Hollywood, Venice, and more.

Members of the original peoples of the land, the Tongva/Kizh peoples, did the land acknowledgements with words, song, and instruments.

Some 1,500 attended—a full house. And the whole event was well-received with applause after applause. A true “love letter to Los Angeles.”

A few refrains stood out, including “Before there were borders, there was belonging.” It also had a refrain I contributed: “The land remembers us.” Here’s the poem I had to memorize and perform, which was done as an elder speaking to the people, walking from steps upstage, greeting the young and outstanding poet Jazmin Minchez, who performed a memorable piece before me, and then me sitting on a stool in front of the large audience.

The whole presentation had high energy moments, but the rhythm also required just listening to the words, taking in the concepts, a still but vibrant section of the whole show.

Below is my poem of reimagining the idea of “marketplace” where people gather to share, to exchange, to learn and teach. Not to exploit or profit, as we currently think of markets, especially in the capitalist sense. But the way ancient peoples understood them.

This poem is my contribution to imagining a new Los Angeles, a new California, a new “America.”

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Los Angeles is a tianguis,

a marvelous marketplace,

where people from everywhere

exchange flavors, food, and flowers:

items as well as ideas.

Where poetry blossoms

in the sacred spaces called marketplaces,

which should always be centered

by the four elements: air, water, earth, and fire,

where the timebound meets the timeless,

the sacred meets the profane,

where things are not just transactional,

but relational,

and ultimately transformational.

Tianguis is a Nahuatl word for open-air markets

that dotted Mexican and Central American

villages and cities in the pre-conquest.

People arrived from the wilderness of their lives

to the order of their civic societies.

It’s exchange as sharing, not profiting,

a holy act of enriching everyone

with a soundtrack of ranchos and milpas,

canyons and deserts, volcanos and jungles.

Los Angeles is a tianguis,

not as private property or corporate markets,

but human interaction of essentials,

where wisdom, song, and teachings

go with the tamales and created artifacts.

Where gold and silver only mattered when they were shaped.

The creation gave them value, not the substance.

Los Angeles is a tianguis,

where art is alive on the walls

on skin

and cars,

alive in our hearts and our voices.

Creativity as heritage and legacy.

In Los Angeles you hear this in musicians

born here: Ritchie Valens, The Doors, War,

Charles Wright & the Watts 103^rd Street Rhythm Band,

Hiroshima, Motley Crue, Los Lobos, and Quetzal.

Los Angeles is a tianguis,

where lowrider cars become moving museums,

and hydraulic lifts make metal and glass hippity-hop

while painted Goddesses spirit them into a new kind of heaven

and the bass-heavy sounds inside them turn you around

Los Angeles is a tianguis

where the Spanish speaking has inflections

from la ciudad de Mexico, Puebla, Jalisco, Zacatecas…

but also El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras…

and idioms such as Mixteco, Zapoteco, Yoeme, Raramuri, Pipil, and K’iche Maya,

joining with the Tongva, Tataviam, Chumash, and original peoples

from across the vast expanse of this land.

Los Angeles is a tianguis

of tongues, sharp and mostly sweet,

but be careful of the maldiciones,

the curses—we’re good at those too.

And don’t forget la chancla,

a mother’s weapon of choice,

with aerodynamic sharpness

and laser-focused accuracy,

better than the highest-tech drones.

Here we are not “Hispanics” or “Latinos,”

but Chicanx, cis and queer, gendered and trans,

he, she, they, them, and us.

Where we celebrate Mexico—desde los charros hasta los jarochos,

but also, los Guanacos, Chapines, and Catrachos

that are now integral to our barrios and our families,

where a Wepa Cumbia share sounds with an oldies rola

and where the Indigenous, Black, white, and Asian

hold hands, share traditions,

as Mexica huehuetl drums gather energies

to start a day, a year, a life.

We are Los Angeles:

the meeting place,

the holding place,

the dreaming place.

A tianguis for all to belong

to flower in the soil.

From the land,

the land remembers us.