Since some months comrades of the People’s Revolutionary Defense Units in Los Angeles develop work with the mostly immigrant street vendors around Exposition Park in the south of the city. In the past, time and again arbitrary attacks and harassment occurred there through the hands of the Integration and Customs Enforcement – ICE, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (responsible for example for detaining and returning of supposedly "illegal" workers) and the Cops. After the most recent attacks against the streets vendors and especially the detention of a activist for the struggle against the harassment a number of actions were carried out in solidarity.
Close to a hundred street vendors, mostly with Mexican background, work and sell their wares around the area close to the stadium and the university in LA that is called Exposition Park. In the past years, cops and other bodies of administration frequently carried out raids, confiscations, arrests and other racist assaults against the masses working there. Hence, since some month comrades there organize the People’s Revolutionary Defense Units, or Unidades de Defensa Populares Revolucionarias – UDPR, among the masses working there. Since then, the agencies and cops were prevented to take carts and wares of those working there and to arrest vendors. Especially through organizing solidarity among one-another and through political mobilization, but also through masked units regularly patrolling the area, assaults could be prevented in the most recent months that led to a situation, in which the bodes of administration fear to enter the area without support.
After the targeted attack of the cops against a leading activist of the streets vendors and a sympathizer of the UDPR the week before last, that led to a arrest and charge, for she supposedly hit a pig, now a number of Dazibaos and wall paintings haven been made by activists of the UDPR to call of solidarity and further organization.
