The city of Los Angeles has long been a canvas for civil discourse. Its streets, billboards, and even fashion providing powerful statements. From the Chicano Moratorium’s dissent against the Vietnam War in 1970 to recent women’s rallies at Pershing Square, LA doesn’t only take to the streets – it crafts defiance. This year, that spirit of resistance has found a new catchphrase: No Ice. As government immigration incursions have amplfied throughout the metropolis, artists, designers, and neighborhoods have responded with stirring lucidity. The slogan ‘No Ice’ is popping up ubiquitously: on handmade signs posted on food cart walls, in large simplistic font at vigils, and even digitally. It’s not an organized campaign; it’s a communal sigh of resistance.
At the forefront is the Crenshaw Dairy Mart, a coalition of artists and an art gallery with a mission to change the distressing circumstances caused by poverty and social injustice. Noé Olivas, a co-founder, reworked the striking Ice logo, commonly seen on gas station chillers, into a grand mural. With audacious typography, he commanded the former dairy mart’s exterior. Its magnitude and ubiquitous nature are impossible to disregard. The emblem uses the legible outlined letters, frost-covered as a symbol of protest, inviting people to act. Extending its Summer of Resistance, Crenshaw Dairy Mart also welcomed artist and altarista Ernesto Rocha to join the cause.
Rocha brought forward the concept of erecting an altar made from ice paying tribute to the countless individuals who had fallen prey to Ice till then. Altars symbolize sorrow, loss, and memory. His work, titled ‘How to Melt Ice’, encouraged viewers to interact with it directly: by breaking it, observing it, heating it, and dismantling it in harmless ways. The altar, erected by Rocha, was built with 20-pound ice blocks stacked over a dry ice base to form a chilling barrier around the other offerings.
Beyond this icy barricade were delicate flowers, metaphorical symbols representing disrupted families and lives. The community uniting to demolish the icy shield was metaphorically protecting them, unveiling the flowers as if casting a shield of protection. Rocha integrated deep cultural sentiments by engraving the words ‘Families are sacred’ in an Old English font, a typographic style widely recognized in the Chicano culture of LA. The instructions for participants were designed in the same font, echoing pride and acknowledging the Mexican American heritage.
The protest’s visual elements extend all throughout LA and have adapted well-known symbols, like that of the LA Dodgers logo into signs of dissent. This is more than a nod to city pride – it’s an ominous echo. The Dodger Stadium was constructed over Chavez Ravine, previously the dwelling of a working-class Mexican American community devastated by eminent domain rulings and political maneuvers. The imprints of this brutal, forced displacement are still evident today.
Counterbalancing these poignant moments some artists employ lighthearted visuals. Oversized hand-sewn masks depicting the middle finger, for instance, channel Claes Oldenburg’s replicas of everyday objects. A human-sized pink Labubu figure recently attended a protest. Skywriting above downtown LA read ‘No Cages No Jaulas’, which was an artwork by Beatriz Cortez, part of a nationwide Independence Day demonstration. Its bilingual message effectively calling out the cruel detention facilities.
Los Angeles’s history is rich with visual symbolism used as tools of defiance. During the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, young Mexican Americans became the targets of US servicemen in Los Angeles, as their distinctive clothing – outsized jackets and trousers, seen as threats to American fitting. The zoot suit, a style influenced by Texas’ Pachuco culture, was seen as a statement of youthful rebellion – a disdain of ‘Juan Crow’ racial policies that curbed Mexican American freedom and rights.
California has a dark history of mass imprisonment. After the Pearl Harbor incident, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were put behind bars without a fair hearing under Executive Order 9066. One of the well-known protest images of the time is a photo by Dorothea Lange of a store in Oakland displaying a sign that read ‘I am an American.’ Yanked up the day after the bombing, the shutter came down on the store soon after and its owner, an American-born University of California graduate, was packed off to an internment camp.
Decades later in 1978, Frank Fujii, a Seattle-based graphic designer and a previous detainee at Tule Lake in California, conceived the ichi-ni-san logo symbolizing the Japanese American redress movement. The design portrayed three figures embodying Japanese migrants over generations, encapsulated in a circle of barbed wire. Fujii expressed concern about anyone who could lose rights without due process as they did. ‘Every one of us in this country is a hyphenated American, and this could have transpired to anyone,’ Fujii cautioned.
Fujii’s fears are manifesting themselves on the streets of LA in the harsh light of day. Signs that assert ‘No One’s Illegal on Stolen Land’ reference America’s long-standing history of exploiting laws to facilitate imprisonment, deportation, and destruction. The inauguration of immigration laws in the US with the 1790 Naturalization Act restricted citizenship to ‘free white persons’ or immigrants who had been residents for two years. Indeed, history is repeating itself.
Art and culture serve as catalysts of direct actions; they pave the way for profound engagement, says Rocha. During the ‘How to Melt Ice’ installation, Rocha recalls a poignant interaction with a 10-year-old girl named Laila. ‘What are you doing, Laila?’ he inquired. Pushing her hair back, she responded, ‘I’m smashing it because they are abducting people off the streets!’ The message is crystal clear. Straight. Cutting. Unchallengeable.
The outpouring of creativity observed this summer is not mere artistry. This is visual communication in times of distress. Artists are stepping into the breach where systems have fallen short. As the communities of LA stand their ground, they are concurrently constructing their own visual language – that doesn’t seek validation for its existence. In a city where helicopters continually loom overhead and sirens ring out, every makeshift paste-up, every altar, every handwritten note saying ‘No Ice’ is more than a piece of dialogue. It’s a definitive boundary line.
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