In Los Angeles, any performance by the experimental vocalist San Cha is an experience — the sort of event in which the singer might fuse the slow burn of a Mexican ballad with pop sounds and opera. You would typically encounter the artist, who has a penchant for combining ruffly corsets with goth eyeliner and dog collars, performing in one of the city’s avant-garde spaces.
But on a warm January night, I find her in a small pub called Distrito Catorce in a historically Mexican neighbourhood east of downtown, putting on a free concert to an audience of three dozen people sipping ale and snacking on taquitos. For “Paloma Negra”, a beloved Mexican ballad about a wayward lover, she draws out each searing note of the chorus. The crowd joins in.
Her performance is part of Irresistible Resistance, the first in a year-long series of pop-up cultural events in small businesses in LA’s immigrant districts, many of which have been struggling economically as a result of the raids by US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
According to a December press release issued by the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, 10,000 undocumented people were arrested in Los Angeles in the six-month period beginning in June 2025. For San Cha, whose parents hail from Mexico and were once undocumented, doing nothing is not an option. Shortly before stepping up to the microphone, she tells me, “If I can use my voice to help, I will.”
