Running While Black, Latino, or Asian American — Under Trump

This article was produced by Capital & Main. It is co-published by Rolling Stone with permission.

In a fast-food parking lot in an area that became world-famous as South Central Los Angeles, I shuffle around in the dark.

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What am I doing outside the Jack in the Box at the intersection of Slauson and Vermont Avenues in South Los Angeles? It is the heart of winter — at least the version we get in Southern California — just a little after 6 a.m., and I am trying to stay warm despite dressing in 3.5-inch running shorts and a thin windbreaker.

I am alone, cold, and anxious about the state of our divided country. My anxiety has been soaring, connected to some key events in recent months and years: Jan. 6, 2021, when supporters of Donald Trump attacked the Capitol to try to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election; the divisive 2024 presidential campaign, culminating in Election Day on Nov. 4; and this year’s Jan. 20 Inauguration Day. Since then, my mental state seems to worsen every time I plug into the national news cycle.

But heading into this February day, I am surrounded by runners who are excited, talkative, and dressed in sleek, short-sleeved nylon running shirts. I’m not sure what’s going on inside their heads, but most of them, like me, are here to run the Hood Half Marathon to the Pacific Ocean.

Running is one way I manage my anxiety, a strategy backed by psychiatric research. I am not the first person, Latino or otherwise, to be stressed out by Trump’s disruptive words and actions as a candidate and now, again, as the nation’s president.

Latinos nationwide experienced heightened anxiety from his messaging that sometimes felt like it targeted us, according to a peer-reviewed 2019 study by Bradford Jones, a professor of political science at the University of California, Davis, and other researchers. Trump’s recent push to intensify federal deportation efforts has only spread more anxiety in the community where I live.

The study analyzed a pair of nationwide surveys of more than 1,000 Latina and Latino respondents and concluded that “exposure to information about Trump’s immigration policy significantly increased anxiety levels for citizens and noncitizens, for English-only, bilingual, and Spanish-only speakers, and for all skin colors.” 

Latinos felt anxiety over deportation regardless of whether or not they were born in the United States. In mixed-status homes, where some residents are in the country without legal permission and others are citizens, children — even adult children — feared the potential need to follow a deported family member to a country that is not their home, according to the study. “If a family member goes,” the study said, “they too may have to go.”

“Not Like Us” at the Starting Line

At around 6:45 a.m., Hood Half Marathon founder Kitwana John, who asks everyone to call him Kit, brings us together to stretch. I look over at the Jack in the Box; employees are staring through the glass storefront at us — dozens of Latinos, Blacks, and Asian Americans in concentric circles in running gear, bending at our waists and stretching to our toes. Kit asks Devon Shorter, the founder of Fearless Run Club, to offer blessings for our safety and wellness. Then, Kit reminds runners that their vehicles will be towed if they leave them in the lot. Kendrick Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us” blasts from wireless speakers as about 150 of us take off on the start of our 13.1- mile journey to the sea.

As a group, we’re more women than men; mostly Black and Raza — our local community synonym for Latino — and Asian American. Some are in sleek technical gear; vests with built-in water packs and shoes with thick running soles. Others wear sweatshorts and the pirate-like Raiders jerseys of our city’s former football team. Different neighborhoods receive callouts on shirts and long-sleeved windbreakers: Run West Adams, Koreatown Run Club, Compton Run Club, Watts Running Club, and South Central Run Club. Previous generations of young people from many such neighborhoods might have inspired fear among — and conflict with — each other. Now we run together.

We spill out onto Slauson Avenue, and I realize I need to pay careful attention to where my steps land on the cracked and uneven sidewalks and streets. Runners ahead of me point with exaggerated gestures to warn us of holes, puddles, and anything that might trip us up. Some runners avoid crowding the sidewalks by running into oncoming traffic.

It might make sense for us to run on the concrete pedestrian path nearby — but it has been blocked off by a chain-link fence for the three years since its groundbreaking. Kit tells me he has given up waiting for that 5.5-mile path to open.

As I run, I warm up and eventually begin to sweat out sources of my tension — the campaign promises and executive orders that implicitly or explicitly targeted immigrants, regardless of their legal status. Gone from the front of my mind are the federal policy changes that seek to remove our loved ones from workplaces, social settings and our country as a whole.

The Black people running are about five times more likely to be unfairly stopped by police. In 2024, Trump took to telling campaign audiences that “illegals” — in this country built on immigration — are poisoning the nation’s blood. He and many of his social media followers on Truth Social and Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) blamed ethnic, racial, and gender diversity workplace programs for the insufficient emergency response to the Pacific Palisades and Eaton Canyon fires, some of the worst in California history. Similarly, all the dead had not yet been pulled from the icy Potomac River in Washington, D.C., when Trump, despite a lack of evidence, scapegoated diversity-at-work initiatives for the deadliest air crash in this country in decades.

There’s a mean-spirited irony to the ways that federal policies place us in their crosshairs even as we jog through blighted urban corridors with insufficient infrastructure that are underserved by the federal government.

From the Crenshaw Wall to Obama Boulevard

After 2.5 miles, we reach the highest point of the route; it comes early in the run, while our legs still feel strong. After the incline, I take in the milestones of our route and their larger significance. 

There is the intersection of Crenshaw Boulevard and Slauson Avenue, where the entrepreneur and Grammy-nominated rapper Nipsey Hussle was shot to death in 2019. He made his disdain for the leader of MAGA — and solidarity with Mexicans — clear in his featured verses on the 2016 YG song “FDT (Fuck Donald Trump),” which became a slow-burning hit. Hussle was killed in front of his Marathon Clothing store and memorialized with a 26-mile funeral procession around South Los Angeles — with tens of thousands along the route, according to local accounts. Hussle’s face remains ubiquitous in murals around L.A., often alongside Lakers legend Kobe Bryant.

I run alongside what is known as the Crenshaw Wall, a block-long, 10-foot-tall mural of Black history. A portrait of civil rights leaders, including abolitionist Fredrick Douglass, looks down on us, as do those of Black Panther Party members, Harriet Tubman, and historic freedom fighters.

I pass Leimert Park, a center of Black Los Angeles art and culture. John Singleton, the late director of Boyz N the Hood, called the neighborhood the “Black Greenwich Village.” The sudden cancellation of the annual Juneteenth festival here last year prompted Kendrick Lamar’s now famous Pop Out show, in which — to quote his song “Reincarnated” — he “put 100 hoods on one stage.”

My legs feel the resistance as I reach the Target store that was once a co-op famously looted for items such as diapers and later burned during what the world came to know as the L.A. Riots, but that we refer to as the 1992 uprising. It followed a decision by a jury in conservative Simi Valley, about 50 miles away, that found four white police officers not guilty of assaulting Black motorist Rodney King even though we all saw video evidence to the contrary. Fury erupted on the streets, which quickly devolved into burning and looting.

On our run, there are no Hood Half Marathon signs to guide me — just trust in other runners and volunteers passing out water and food every three miles. I’m concerned about getting lost on this trek to the sea, leaving me in search of a sign that I am on the right path. That’s when I see a runner draped in the flag of Mexico. Following behind that flag, I know I have found my compass. 

About nine miles in, I am on President Barack Obama Boulevard, talking with Scott, a Black runner who trains with Movement Runners in the city of Inglewood to our south. We are both surprised as we realize how far we’ve come. The past six miles seem like so much less than that. I am lost in the action, the steady rhythm of placing one foot in front of the other; I have stopped thinking about the things I cannot control.

At mile 10, I keep pace with a trio of women. From bursts of short conversation I learn that three of us, including Dee, a Mexican American runner from the nearby West Adams neighborhood, are parents. We talk about the challenges of making time for running amid our children’s routines, whether before they wake or during lunch breaks. Meanwhile, the Mexican flag continues to guide me forward.

But at this point, I am tired. My knees are starting to lock up; with each swing of my thigh, it’s getting harder to extend my foot. I’m 45, and this is my first half-marathon. I adjust my stride to stretch a bit in an attempt to ease the stiffness. In the past, I have ignored the feeling and run through the pain, but that’s how I injured myself in the Homeboy 5K race last September.

I eventually got back to running, but the fires in January turned thousands of homes and entire neighborhoods into toxic ash and left schools outside those zones closed due to dangerous air quality. Like other runners across the city, I stopped training. Now, I feel that absence of training.

I have also been feeling it in my spiking anxiety. The week I resumed running — just 10 days before this half-marathon — my mother asked me to start carrying a copy of my passport.

She was born in Guatemala but has lived in Los Angeles since 1964, although she didn’t become a citizen until 2001. California is home to roughly one in every four of the 1.8 million Guatemalans, or chapínes, living in the United States, and the largest number are in Southern California. Many came to this country to flee the civil war in their homeland, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, but my family’s arrival was somewhat atypical. Early in the war, which began in 1960, my uncle Jorge was flying a reconnaissance mission on an American plane for the Guatemalan Air Force when he was shot down and died. Marked by his death and in search of safety and stability, my family left for the U.S. When I was later born, my parents named me George, the English-language version of Jorge.

My mother’s Guatemalan roots give her a distinct perspective on Trump when he calls activists and Democrats “radical Marxists,” deems MS-13 gang members “animals” and encourages police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to be “rough” on people they detain. “This is how they sound in my country,” she has said, speaking of authoritarian-minded leaders under whom she previously lived.

The same day my mother called about my passport, my nine-year-old daughter, Quetzal, said she dreamed that someone came to our house and took me away.

Her expression of fear reminded me of when I was about Quetzal’s age and my mother told me stories about Guatemala’s secret police disappearing her neighbors. She would warn me as a child not to talk about politics in public. Not coincidentally, my family members in Guatemala were uncomfortable with my decision to become a journalist; they live in a country that was, and remains, unsafe for journalists, according to Reporters Without Borders.

But like my daughter, I was born in Los Angeles, in Hollywood, and we have always been U.S. citizens. Still, as our fears and dreams attest, we feel somehow suspect — especially now.

Days before the run, a Latino father was detained by ICE in the parking lot of East Los Angeles’ Lincoln Park, near where my daughters study ballet and baile folklorico, regional Mexican dance.

And students at the elementary school where my wife teaches have been kept at home by parents who told school staff they are deeply afraid of being deported and their families being separated.

Immigrant advocates estimated that more than 2,000 children were split from their families during Trump’s first administration, and 1,360 children remained separated years later, according to an April 2024 Homeland Security task force report. Such separations, which have even involved infants and toddlers, can cause lasting psychological harm to children and irreparable damage to their brains, according to a report by the American Psychological Association.

Such fears affected attendance and academic performance of immigrant students and resulted in jumps in dropout rates and bullying on school campuses, according to a 2023 report from the University of California, Los Angeles’ Center for the Transformation of Schools, Latino Policy and Politics Institute and Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles. 

In addition, Latino and Asian immigrants in California avoid accessing health care out of fear of encountering immigration officials, according to health researchers at the Universities of California in Los Angeles and Merced and the Harvard Medical School. (Capital & Main previously wrote about a particularly grave effect of this during Trump’s first term.)

From South L.A. to the Sea

Unlike higher profile runs, the Hood Half Marathon doesn’t shut down the streets, so we wait while running in place or standing and huffing at a stoplight with a few miles remaining. There are no safety signs, barricades or police escorts to protect us. Volunteers — friends, family and other runners — support us along the route. The race is community-driven, DIY, “rasquache” — a Chicano term that has come to mean inventive and resourceful. As Kit said earlier, “the Hood Half Marathon is for us, by us.”

That doesn’t mean it is easy. Dee counts down the miles, reminding us: “You can do it.” When we finally reach the boardwalk at Venice Beach, there is no finish line, no arch to pass under to officialize our accomplishments, no clock to tell us how fast we have run. There are just other people who have completed the same route, welcomed by loved ones. Folks on the Venice boardwalk could be forgiven for mistaking us for a large group of picnickers. They don’t know where we’ve come from or what we’ve overcome.

But there, I find my cheering family. My daughters leave my wife’s side and run to me. They place the finisher medal over my neck: It’s the interlocking “L.A.” of a Dodgers baseball cap. In search of their impression, I encourage my daughters to appreciate the moment and tell me what they see. Quetzal notes that there aren’t any white people in our diverse group.

Before we leave for home in East Los Angeles, I once again cross paths with Dee, the woman I met along the way. Still breathing heavily, we hug, and I thank her for running with me.

My family and I walk back along the last part of the route, crossing other runners who are about to finish. I see Scott and Will, another Black runner I befriended along the way, and cheer them on as they run across one last intersection. We were strangers; now we are fellow travelers cheering each other on this journey.

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