Los Angeles, California.

February 26, 1931.

The plaza they called La Placita sat in the oldest part of the city,

a stone's throw from where 44 settlers of Mexican, and Spanish descent had founded the Pueblo

de Los Angeles 150 years earlier. On a warm Thursday afternoon in late February, close to

400 people filled its benches and walkways. Vendors sold food. A mariachi group played. Soapbox

preachers competed with one another for the crowd's attention,

and old men argued politics the way old men do everywhere with great conviction and no authority.

It was, by all accounts, an ordinary afternoon in the beating heart of Mexican Los Angeles.

At three o'clock, it stopped being ordinary.

Immigration agents, some in olive

military uniforms, others in plain clothes, appeared at the edges of the park. They moved fast. Within

minutes they had sealed off every exit, barricading the two entrances so that no one in La Placita

could leave. Officers from the LAPD's anti-communist Red Squad

joined them. The agents ordered everyone to line up or remain seated on the benches. Then,

one by one, they began demanding papers. The first people arrested were three Chinese men and a

Mexican man who happened to be driving past when

the barricades went up. A department store employee named Moises Gonzalez tried to cross the

siege line. He was grabbed immediately. When he produced documents proving he had lived legally

in the United States since 1923, the agent looked at the papers, sneered, and stuffed them back

in Gonzalez's pocket. Several people who tried to run were beaten by police. The raid had been

ten days in the making. Federal agents had assembled from San Diego, San Francisco, and as far away as

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