4.29 Latinx Roundtable

Unexamined Stories of the 1992 Los Angeles Civil Unrest: Koreatown’s Latinx Voices

Koreatown Storytelling Program x Emerson College Los Angeles

In partnership with the Koreatown Storytelling Program, Emerson College Los Angeles students created a short video project in discussion with Latinx participants who lived in Koreatown during the 1992 Civil Unrest.

This project was part of Professor Soo Mee Kim’s IN 374 Fall 2021 course, “If We Build It: Communities of Color’s Struggle for Political Power and Change in LA.” The course was designed to explore and learn about struggles over power and change in Los Angeles and apply it to a course project. Framed through various works on power, race, anti-Blackness, anti-Asian violence, class, immigration, stakeholdership, and space, students will explore how communities of color have struggled for recognition as citizens and stakeholders of the everyday spaces they build and occupy.

In this roundtable discussion, five Latinx Koreatown residents reflected upon their thoughts and memories of the six days of looting, arson and violence in their community during the 1992 Civil Unrest. Historically, this incident was regarded in the media as a "Black-Korean conflict," while ignoring the perspectives of the majority Hispanic community that lived in the neighborhood. Some of the storytellers had recently immigrated to the United States, while others had been living in Koreatown for several years. The community members talked openly about how the political situations in their home countries—Guatemala, Mexico and El Salvador—affected their emotions and experiences during this time.

We hope that by sharing these first-person stories, we will educate the younger generations in our community about this history—and its implications to this day—from a broader range of voices.