Party Crews: The Untold Story

Latino USA

My Cultura, Futuro and iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture

4.9 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2023

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week’s Latino USA we’re bringing you an episode from the newly released podcast series Party Crews: The Untold Story.

For many Latinx kids in the ‘00s, the party crew scene was a safe space to express themselves as they came of age in the grit and glitter of Los Angeles. A space to make friends, forget about your problems, and dance the night away. But the scene wasn’t always physically safe. There were shootings and police raids. Many adults saw the scene as gang-adjacent and the media-fueled negative stereotypes of kids who were out of control. One of the teens who got caught in that easy narrative was Emmery Muñoz, after she was murdered in 2006.

Host Janice Llamoca goes on a Y2K-filled journey back in time to her own party crew days to find out what this scene meant for teens like her and Emmery, and why – to this day – Emmery’s case remains unsolved. From IHeart, VICE, and LAist Studios as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network.

You can subscribe to Party Crews: The Untold Story here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, hey, hey, what's up? What's up? What's up, dear listener? So today on Latino USA, we're
0:11.7	going to share with you a new podcast hosted by someone that we know pretty well. That's
0:17.5	our former producer, Janice Yamoka. The new show is called Party Cruise, the untold story.
0:25.0	In the 1990s and 2000s, Latino and Latina high school teens in Los Angeles organized themselves
0:31.7	into groups or cruise. And they threw these massive parties out of their backyards or
0:39.0	empty warehouses. They would design flyers, DJ the parties, run the door. It was their
0:45.7	way of escaping from the pressures of having immigrant parents and of some pretty harsh
0:51.3	realities. Janice, who today is an audio producer advice, was a member of one of those party
0:57.5	cruise. But as she grew older, she left that scene behind until last year when she learned
1:05.2	about the unsolved murder of 14 year old Emory Munoz. Emory's body was found in a warehouse
1:13.3	that authorities claimed was used for throwing those parties. The case would pull Janice back
1:20.0	into her old party cruise days. Here's episode one of Party Cruise, the untold story.
1:26.0	We're on what? March, April, May, June. So we're going on the fourth month of quarantine,
1:41.4	of the pandemic. I'm an audio journalist. And a few years ago, I decided to do this assignment
1:47.8	with some friends. It was a kind of assignment where we had to turn around a story in 24 hours.
1:54.1	We were talking on the phone, just spitballing ideas, and just overall talking about how
1:58.4	we were feeling in 2020. I was only recording my side of the conversation, so all you hear
2:04.7	on the tape is me. And there's one thing I haven't done in so long that I completely miss.
2:14.6	And that's dancing. Like I had moved in this like grinding dancing way, which sounds
2:26.1	really weird to say out loud. And then one of the people I'm talking to brought something
2:30.9	up I had mentioned in passing about my time in a party crew. I haven't really talked
2:37.2	a lot about it. When I do talk about it, it's usually like a, haha, I was part of this party
	...

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