Editor’s note: In anticipation of what we all believe will be a stellar UHA conference this October 9-12 in Los Angeles, we featured Los Angeles as our theme in May. With the conference still in mind, we want to continue to highlight the city in the run up to the event; you can see other posts from May 2025 as well as past pieces on the city here. In addition, check here for information on the conference, including accommodations.
By Dr. George Francis-Kelly
President Donald Trump’s decision to take control of the California National Guard to support US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) removal of migrants in Los Angeles marked a seminal act in our current political moment. The last time California’s National Guard was federalized was during the 1992 L.A Crisis, the most deadly and destructive instance of civil unrest in modern US history.[1]
My research explores the history of grassroots resistance and protest in L.A. in the years preceding and following the 1992 Crisis. Among the numerous movements that engulfed the city between the 1980s and into the early 1990s, one particular case highlights continuities in state violence towards immigrant activists. The L.A Police Department’s (LAPD) June 1990 attack on a picket line of striking Latinx janitors elucidates how demands to alter the economic and racial hierarchies of the city produced violent responses in defense of the status quo.
L.A’s reputation as one of America’s traditional arrival points for those entering the country has tended to shine a spotlight on the city’s immigrants, regardless of race. As George Sánchez has recently shown, this cultural plurality can create strong community ties and the potential for progressive politics. Yet the precarity created by immigration status, the instability of their rights, and the economic subordination faced by these communities have also produced myriad forms of reactionary state violence.
Forms of violence, whether expressed through police brutality or the slow violence of racial discrimination and economic exploitation, were shaped by political contexts occurring at many levels but often played out through the spaces of the city. Examples include the removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans from East Los Angeles and Little Tokyo during World War II, and the displacement of nearly 2,000 Latinx families during the construction of Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine during the city’s urban renewal in the 1950s. Such injustices fostered resistance, however, as Angelenos of all races sought to claim the city as their own and demand their rights. These confrontations provide us with the basis for L.A’s political and social history.
The L.A. chapter of Justice for Janitors (J4J) formed as an outgrowth of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 399 in 1985, during the union stagnation of the Reagan era. J4J was a national effort to tackle the declining bargaining power of custodians. This problem was urgent in L.A., as the dramatic restructuring of the city, shaped by the need for economic investment in the neoliberal era, polarized economic opportunities for the working class.
As deindustrialization obliterated secure blue-collar jobs, new offices and skyscrapers emerged as part of efforts to revive L.A.’s flagging urban core. These transformed Downtown L.A., heightening security and surveillance, privatizing public space, and projecting new visions of who belonged in these spaces and who did not. All brought new forms of violence, particularly to low-income people of color, as police and private security found new ways of distinguishing between a flourishing urban core and a “crisis” periphery.[2] New buildings needed people to clean them, and owners sub-contracted international firms that used non-union janitors. Such firms recruited from a growing pool of immigrant laborers from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, often at poverty wages. Hourly rates for janitors in L.A. halved over the course of the 1980s, dropping to only $4.50 per hour by 1988.[3]
J4J looked to inject vitality and direct action into the union movement, empowering workers in an industry that one J4J brochure described as “designed for abuse.”[4] The organization built trust and support by employing Latina janitors to conduct home visits in immigrant neighborhoods. They evaded detection by meeting in the city’s clandestine spaces, such as parking lots and toilet cubicles. They encouraged workers to claim spaces in the city as their own by conducting elaborate and theatrical protests. Demonstrators dressed as turkeys for Thanksgiving and Santa Claus at Christmas, and they occupied some of L.A.’s elite golf courses and restaurants to challenge building owners over their exploitative practices.
Crucially, J4J highlighted how neoliberal redevelopment had fostered inequality. The presumed benefits of high-density development and exclusive corporate spaces were retold through the perspective of the janitors who cleaned them for subsistence wages at night, often invisible to the wider public. Celebrated skyscrapers were remade as “towers of wealth and greed,” representing what the SEIU commonly phrased as “luxury by day, sweatshop by night” in their literature.[5] Gradually, J4J’s tactics gained traction and media attention, and by the end of the 1980s, both political support and the number of unionized Latinx janitors in the urban core had grown significantly.
L.A has a long history of police violence towards its Latinx population, from the 1951 “Bloody Christmas” beatings to the 1970 Chicano Moratorium confrontations, which killed three protesters. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the LAPD had become notorious for its brutal, discriminatory, and technologically sophisticated forms of suppression against communities of color. By 1990, several groups, including a coalition of informal street vendors known as the Asociación de Vendedores Ambulantes and the Pro-Active Organization Dedicated to the Empowerment of Raza (PODER) had worked to contest contemporary police violence, harassment, and intimidation of Latinx Angelenos.
Initially, however, challenging the LAPD’s malpractice was not at the forefront of J4J’s broad agenda to empower immigrants and tackle economic injustice. This would change as the janitors embarked on their first full-scale strike in Spring 1990. Their chosen target was Century City, a Midtown business district housing offices for financial corporations and the movie industry, which was served by a multinational cleaning firm, International Service Systems (ISS). The strike adopted a more confrontational tone, highlighting inequality in the city and turning direct action into civil disobedience.
Daily pickets were intended to disrupt the everyday activities taking place in the buildings that striking janitors usually cleaned. These protests drew police attention as union members sought to enter buildings and advertised a “trash-in” to deposit public garbage within targeted sites cleaned by ISS. As the LAPD sought to keep picketers out of Century City, one protester proclaimed to the Times that “you can’t wall off poor people and people of color…we’ll come here until we get justice.”
Still, these tensions could not have forecast what followed on June 15, 1990. During a weekly march through the city attended by 400 janitors, their families, and J4J supporters, the LAPD withdrew permission for the protest. Announcing that the march was illegal, officers demanded only in English that the crowd disperse within thirty seconds. Protesters linked arms, and the LAPD struck them indiscriminately with their clubs. One protester, who later testified to the Christopher Commission, the body set up to investigate the Rodney King beating which precipitated the 1992 Crisis, described officers attacking “men, women, old and young” in scenes reminiscent of “hitting a piñata”.[6]
Footage of the attack on local news that evening showed police clubbing demonstrators who had fallen to the ground, and following those who were retreating into a nearby parking garage. J4J also reported that janitors were subject to racial discrimination, with officers accused of demanding protesters’ identification documents and social security numbers, threatening them with deportation, and describing marchers as “stupid Mexicans.”[7] Forty of the protesters were arrested and taken to jail, while others were hospitalized. The list of injuries included a fractured heel, fractured jaw, fractured skull, internal bleeding, and ultimately a miscarriage after an officer struck a pregnant woman’s stomach with a baton.[8]
The violence, however, became a point of leverage, drawing negative publicity towards ISS and strengthening Justice for Janitors’ demands for recognition. The immediate backlash accelerated when the reviled LAPD Chief Daryl Gates commented in a TV interview that he “didn’t see anything that was horrible” and that “in the City of Los Angeles, we believe in keeping our streets peaceful.”[9] In response, one editorial in the Los Angeles Times described police as “Corporate America’s Security Guards In-Blue” and noted that the attack marked a “classic example of the use of police force to defend corporate interests against worker’s movements.”
Soon after, L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley personally called ISS executives to express his concerns. SEIU branches across the country threatened their own strikes. Two weeks after the police attack, ISS caved to pressure and signed a union contract guaranteeing improved pay and benefits for Century City janitors. Their victory paved the way for a revival of immigrant urban activism that has since been deemed the “Latinx-Labor Alliance.” This patchwork partnership’s victories included the emergence of the powerful Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, the election of former union organizer Antonio Villaraigosa as L.A. Mayor in 2005, and another remarkable Justice for Janitors strike in 2000 which brought the city to a standstill and secured a substantial pay increase as well as improved health benefits.
Almost forty years after the June 1990 attack, SEIU has again become a focal point of immigrant activism and state violence. David Huerta, the President of SEIU United Service Workers West, which represents over 45,000 janitors and other service workers across California, was hospitalized for injuries sustained during an arrest while observing ICE raids in L.A. on June 6, 2025. Unlike in 1990, confrontations between state power and immigrants are taking place in the quotidian spaces of the city, most notably parking lots of Home Deport hardware stores, rather than monumental skyscrapers. Nevertheless, these are again encounters shaped by national political prerogatives but unfolding according to the economic geography of the city.
A video of the confrontation between federal agents and Huerta–occurring outside a garment warehouse in the city–shows masked officers roughly push Huerta, handcuff him and drag him to a police car. His treatment by agents and subsequent detainment has again galvanized unions across California and the nation to confront state power and energized the continued protests in L.A. After being released on bond, Huerta used the platform afforded by global attention to the incident to urge people to “stand on the right side of justice.” As the story of Justice for Janitors’ early years illustrates, intersecting precarities surrounding immigration and economic status, urban economies, and discrimination can heighten activists’ encounters with violent state power. Yet they can also offer germinations: vital rallying points through which struggles for rights and respect can flourish in L.A’s cultural milieu.
George Francis-Kelly is currently a postdoctoral researcher at University College Dublin, Ireland. He is a historian of race, space, and social movements in the United States. His first monograph, Spatial Awareness: Race, Activism, and the Rodney King Crisis in Los Angeles explores protest over the meaning and use of the built environment in L.A. during the 1980s and 1990s, and is currently contracted to McGill-Queens University.
Featured image (at top): Los Angeles City Hall, completed 1928, is the center of the government of the city of Los Angeles, California, Carol M. Highsmith, photographer, 2012, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
[1] I use the term “Crisis” rather than “riot” or “rebellion” to acknowledge the political communication inherent in the actions, while also recognizing the deliberate forms of targeted racial violence which manifested in Los Angeles.
[2] Most famously, Mike Davis’ searing critiques in City of Quartz were predicated on this privatization of urban space and the violence it produced. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990), pp.221-264.
[3] Paul Schimek, From the Basement to the Boardroom…Los Angeles Should Work for Everyone, 7, Box 7, Folder 11, Service Employees International Union, United Service Workers West Records, UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library.
[4] ‘What is Justice for Janitors?’, Box 7, Folder 2, Service Employees International Union, United Service Workers West Records.
[5] ‘Luxury by Day, Sweatshop by Night’, 28 January 1992, Box 6, Folder 17, Service Employees International Union, United Service Workers West Records.
[6] ‘Memorandum of Points and Authorities’, 8, Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department Records, University of Southern California, Regional History Collection, Box 42, Folder 20, ‘Declaration of Rosa Aguilar’, 1, Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department Records, Box 42, Folder 23.
[7] ‘Memorandum of Points and Authorities’.
[8] “The Sacrifice Behind the Speeches,’ Los Angeles Times, 1 September, 1990, p.2.
[9] ‘Transcript of Daryl Gates Speaking via Telephone on Channel 9 TV 1990’, 15 June 1990, Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department Records, Box 42, Folder 21.
