A week after devastating fires left Los Angeles in shock and despair, El Sereno’s Eastside Café, like many grassroots organizations, transformed into a makeshift distribution center with water, diapers and other essential items at the ready.
In between assisting volunteers dropping off donations and answering countless text threads, Angela Flores, co-founder of Eastside Café, described how, for the past 23 years, the space has fostered community resilience and self-sufficiency.
“We’ve been a mutual aid space for many years,” said Flores, 44.
Eastside Café is not a literal cafe, but a collective and community-driven hub for social change.
Since its inception in 2002, the modest building at the corner of Maycrest Avenue and Huntington Drive has been much more than a gathering spot. It has served as a hub for cultural preservation through art, from son jarocho to Danza Azteca, and a stronghold for resistance against housing and education inequities. Inspired by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) movement, the Eastside Café has long been a symbol of Indigenous solidarity and anti-capitalism, becoming a model for autonomous, non-hierarchical community spaces.
“We practice a lot of values from Indigenous people. One of them being solidarity with all oppressed people,” said Flores, who co-facilitates the space with collective members. “This is a safe space for people of color to preserve arts and culture, incubate projects and uplift one another.”
Rooted in Zapatismo
Eastside Café was named after MacArthur Park worker-owned cooperative Luna Sol Café and the Westside Café, which Flores’ father, activist and academic Roberto Flores, co-created as assistant director of Chicano Latino Student Services at Loyola Marymount University.
Roberto, who grew up picking strawberries in Oxnard and attended UCLA, received a Fulbright scholarship to study the Zapatistas’ practice of horizontal governance to resist oppressive neoliberal policies threatening their land and sovereignty in Chiapas, Mexico. After a year immersed in Zapatismo, Roberto returned home inspired and, in 1997, helped organize 120 Chicano artists from L.A. — including his son Quetzal Flores’ band Quetzal, Felicia Montes of Mujeres de Maiz and members of musical group Aztlan Underground— to attend an encuentro in Chiapas.
“The artists came back to L.A. with all of this experience and knowledge,” said Roberto, who co-founded the Eastside Café with his daughter Angela and other community members. “We started having events throughout the Eastside to talk about autonomy as an alternative way of governance.”
Taking action with community-based governance
At the heart of the Eastside Café lies a commitment to reclaiming land and empowering the community through non-hierarchical decision-making. This ethos is reflected in its collectives, including Son Jarocho, WOC Sister Collective, Solsinmotion Capoeira Angola Collective, Danza Azteca Xiuhcoatl, Alcoholics Anonymous, Food Justice, ESL and Mercado Del Pueblo Co-Op. The space also houses a free fridge and pantry.
To meet their financial needs, the Eastside Café relies on monthly dues from their collectives, recurring donations, and funds from events, workshops and classes. More recently, the collective began applying for grants.
Its programming is intentional, collective members say. Son jarocho, for example, is taught by community members who traveled to Veracruz to learn from elders, with a focus on cultural preservation. The Son del Sereno collective is guided by a group of local and international mentors, hosting an annual Earth Day huapango that highlights son jarocho themes like land defense and environmental justice.
“The space provides an opportunity for Latinxs to build national and transnational social networks while learning how Afro-Indigenous communities have preserved traditions despite colonization, neoliberalism and state-sanctioned violence and displacement,” members of Son del Sereno said in a collective statement.
A Danza Azteca Xiuhcoatl rehearsal at Eastside Café on March 17, 2025. (Photos by Susanica Tam)
Beyond cultural programming, the Eastside Café is deeply invested in grassroots action. Inspired by the community-run South Central Farm that emerged after the 1992 L.A. uprising, the Eastside Café helped transform an empty Caltrans-owned lot into the El Sereno Community Garden. During the pandemic, the Café supported the “Reclaimers” movement, which organized takeovers of Caltrans-owned homes to provide shelter for those displaced.
When gentrification threatened the sale of their building in 2017, Eastside Café members took action. They raised money for a down payment, secured East L.A. Community Corporation (ELACC) as a fiscal sponsor and successfully blocked a developer from purchasing their space. Soon after they bought the building, the collective co-founded the El Sereno Community Land Trust to combat displacement in the broader El Sereno community. Most recently, the Trust acquired the storefront next door to the Café.
The goal, Angela says, is “not only to transfer the building to the community in perpetuity but the land trust model allows community members to have decision-making power to determine what and how to handle the property and give direction to staff and [the Land Trust’s] board.”
A model for autonomous spaces
Long before pop-up artisan markets became a trend in L.A., Eastside Café founding member Laura Palomares was hosting anti-mall mercados in backyards. In 2004, she brought them to Eastside Café, inspired by the encuentro she attended in Chiapas. This laid the foundation for the Mercado Del Pueblo Co-Op, a marketplace selling goods by local artisans.
The co-op is now housed next door to Eastside Café, and coordinated by a collective of community members who have goals to expand it into a grocery cooperative. “We want to create a place where we can nourish our community with native foods that nourished our ancestors,” said Xochitl Palomera, who is part of the Mercado Del Pueblo Co-Op collective. “There’s healing in that, not just physically, but on a cellular level.”
The Eastside Café has inspired similar autonomous community spaces, such as El Monte’s Peoples’ Cafe and Boyle Heights’ Corazón del Pueblo, a volunteer-run arts, education, and social justice incubator. After being displaced by gentrification in 2014, Corazón del Pueblo moved its programs—including WOC Sister Collective, open mic nights, Zumba, and Danza Azteca—to the Café, Palomera said.
“We always acknowledged the teachings and lessons of the Eastside Café,” said Palomera, a former Corazón Del Pueblo board member. “We wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for our sister space that created a blueprint for community members to come together, envision and create spaces for us, by us.”
The Eastside Café also influences organizations like Northeast L.A.’s LA Más. The organization takes women from its programs on field trips to the Café and El Sereno Community Garden to witness alternative community-building in action. Inspired by the Eastside Café’s mercados, LA Más’s Somos NELA night market aims to support working-class people by creating spaces for them to earn income within their communities.
“A lot of that is based on the mercados the Eastside Café hosts,” said Miguel Ramos, director of community economies at LA Más. “It really shaped my understanding of what a space can offer…It’s a place to connect with like-minded individuals about alternative ways to live and apply it to our own communities. That’s the teachings of the Zapatistas.”
Remaining steadfast in those teachings is key for the Eastside Café’s collective members, even in the face of adversity. For Angela, who moved to Ventura in 2019 after being priced out of her El Sereno neighborhood, working alongside her father and other families has shown her the power of intergenerational work and collaboration.
“Octavia Butler wrote the book [“Parable of the Sower”] after doing a lot of research,” said Angela. “That’s what we’ve done – education alongside the resistance – making sure we have resources to confront issues people of color face.”