L.A. After Hours
L.A. has a whole night, and nobody covers it unless something goes wrong. This is AfroLA’s podcast about Los Angeles after dark — the food, the culture, the nightlife, and the people who keep the city running.
L.A. After Hours
Night Markets: L.A.’s food scene after the raids
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You can find night markets in neighborhoods all over Los Angeles, and they are a small version of the food scene in one of the great food cities in the world. Then the immigration raids came through in 2025.
A year later, foot traffic is still down and workers are still nervous. Myron Kaplan spends an evening at El Gato Night Market with vendor Natalie Leonardo and cook Antonio Simon, and talks to Amada Armenta of UCLA’s Latino Policy & Politics Institute about what her team found: of 75 Latino small business owners surveyed, 59% reported sales drops of more than half, 68% closed temporarily or cut hours, and 95% were still under financial strain nearly a year on.
The story of whether the markets come back is also the story of whether this part of L.A.’s food culture survives.
In this episode
- Natalie Leonardo, vendor, El Gato Night Market
- Antonio Simon, cook, El Gato Night Market
- Amada Armenta, director of the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute and associate professor of urban planning
Places
El Gato Night Market, 941 S. Union Ave., Los Angeles
What we read
- The Cost of Fear: The Impacts of Immigration Enforcement on Small Businesses and Latino Entrepreneurs in LA County (UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute, July 2026)
- Inclusive Action for the City, a community lender working with L.A. street vendors and a co-publisher of the study
One thing worth knowing about the numbers: The study’s dollar-loss figures cover storefront businesses and leave out street vendors, food trucks and home-based operations — which is most of the night market economy. The people hit hardest are the ones hardest to count.
Hosted and produced by Myron Kaplan.
Produced and reported by Marina Peña.
Edited by Dana Amihere.
Theme music by Myron Kaplan and Nico Del Castillo.
L.A. After Hours is from AfroLA, a nonprofit newsroom covering Los Angeles. [Get our newsletter] · [Support our reporting]
Look at all the different ways.
Myron KaplanIt's a warm night in July, and my producer, Marina Peña and I, are walking through the many stands at El Gato Night Market in the Westlake neighborhood, trying to land on a decision over what to do.
Market soundBuñuelos, churro trio, platano fritos, churro cup, just plain churros.
Myron KaplanWe have so many options, and I haven't had dinner yet. But whenever I see churros, I turn into a small child. Fortunately, there are plenty of solid meal choices available for whenever I decide to snap out of my dessert trance. Westlake is home to a large Latino community. There are foods from Mexico, Guatemala, and Colombia. Also, burgers, spaghetti, sushi, chicken kebabs, juices, and ICE cream. My immediate favorite stand is Mr. Cat, where cooks are tossing three pans of sizzling pasta in front of a large banner of a cat in a top hat who could sell me anything.
Myron KaplanIt's a Friday night, and we're here right around the time you'd want to fuel up before your big evening plans. There are all sorts of people. Big families with children of all ages, couples holding hands, friends cracking jokes. Marketeers have sample plates loaded up with bite-sized cups in front of the registers, and are making enough eye contact to be inviting, but not evasive. Music competes with other music everywhere: banda, reggaeton, '80s, Top 40.
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Everything is in abundance. A market flooded with options in one of the greatest food cities in the world. I can't take that for granted. I try to hone in on something I don't eat a lot and can't get in a lot of other places. Marina and I settle on the biggest arepas I've ever seen. More for breakfast later.
Speaker 2We're able to navigate the aisles pretty comfortably without really bumping into anyone. You could say business is healthy, but if you go back a few years, you wouldn't have been able to walk around with so much of a spatial radius around you. There was more foot traffic, bigger crowds, more business. Just ask the vendors.
Natalie LeonardoEver since the, well, ICE. Really? Yeah. Yeah.
Myron KaplanSo it's been quiet since then, but, like-
Natalie LeonardoYeah, I think so.
Myron KaplanThis is Natalie Leonardo, who works at Arepano Colombiana.
Natalie LeonardoUsually summer, it tends to be good. We've been doing this for three years.
Myron KaplanShe says business has dropped since last June. Many of her customers, who are mostly Latino, are still afraid to come out. And this isn't just a problem here. This is a reality affecting night markets across L.A. This is L.A. After Hours, where we tell stories about what goes on in our vast city at night, mostly in places we overlook. I'm Mylan Kaplan. Tonight we're hanging out at the night markets serving our neighborhoods and sharing how vendors are enduring in an uncertain climate.
Myron KaplanWe have a lot of night markets in L.A. You can find some of them open one or a few nights per week, like the Wednesday night market in El Sereno, or the Monday and Tuesday night Thai Market in Thai Town. There are also seasonal markets, like Little Saigon Night Market in Westminster. El Gato Night Market runs Thursdays through Sundays, gets going around 5: 30. and wraps around 11: 30. Plenty of time to roll through no matter what your evening plans. The market opened in 2022 and was going strong, and then ICE began its aggressive raids.
Myron KaplanAntonio Simon works at Mr. Cat in the market. Marina spoke with him about how the market has changed over the past three years since he started working there. He says everything is good, thank God. But when Marina digs a little deeper and finds out sales are low, she asks why. It's because of the rent. People are trying to save money because so much of it goes toward rent.
Antonio Simon (translation):It's because of the rent. People are trying to save money because so much of it goes toward rent. Business is especially slow toward the end of the month. It affects things a lot. People no longer want to go out. People are scared and worry about whether they'll be able to return home. I hope things get better. Business is especially slow toward the end of the month.
Myron KaplanMarina is our enterprise reporter, mostly mining stories from community members' top concerns. She also covered immigration from many other outlets before joining Afro LA. Hi Marina.
Marina PeñaHey.
Myron KaplanSo you did a story for Afro LA about a woman who was working as a tamale vendor in the Pico - Union neighborhood and she was detained by ICE officers. Can you tell me a little about it?
Marina PeñaSo for privacy reasons and to protect the identity of the woman that was detained, we decided to omit her name in the story. She was detained last year around July. Three ICE officers came at her and another vendor that she sells with. She's been selling tamales for more than 10 years in the area. And yeah, all three of them came at her and took her to a detention facility in Downtown L.A. Towards the end of last year, I found out that she was back in the neighborhood selling tamales. Everything she was earning was going to supporting her family, paying rent. She also has a daughter, a young daughter, she was supporting. She told me that when she returned, her earnings were cut in half because people hadn't seen her for so long, and so they weren't going back to that corner of Venice and Vermont to buy tamales from her anymore.
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I see her out now, but I think it's it's not the same, like, anymore. She's much more protective of herself. Like she doesn't stay long hours. Also, her business isn't doing the same still. She's not there as much as she used to be.
Myron KaplanIn June 2025, the Latino Policy and Politics Institute at UCLA conducted a study examining the effects that increased immigration enforcement activity had on Latino-owned small businesses. The study found the ICE raids had what researchers called a chilling effect, which means fewer customers and declining sales.
Myron KaplanThis is Dr. Amada Armenta, director of the Institute, and an associate professor of urban planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, where she specializes in the areas of race and ethnicity, immigration, and crime and justice.
Dr. Amada ArmentaFor you know, entrepreneurs who rely on selling their products in parks or on in markets or on sidewalks, many of them felt extremely vulnerable during last summer's enforcement surge. And so many just stopped working for weeks or months at a time. In fact, one woman that we spoke to who had, um, previously sold food on the street said that she had never returned. Like, she just stopped, she never went back because she just feels so unsafe.
Myron KaplanDr. Armenta report focused on the effects of ICE enforcement on Latino entrepreneurs examining foot traffic and other mobility data. All 75 local businesses surveyed reported significant losses. Fifty-nine percent of businesses reported that half of their business was lost. Sixty-eight percent temporarily closed or reduced their hours, and more than half of respondents reported that staff missed work out of fear.
Dr. Amada ArmentaThe outdoor food scene is really central to Los Angeles, and Latino entrepreneurs who are part of that food scene were part of, um, our sample, some of the entrepreneurs and business owners that we spoke to. And they included everyone from like the neighborhood hot dog vendor or a frutero or paletero to brick - and- mortar restaurants, to barbershops, but also like taco stands. And so when I think about the informal vendors, the people who work selling their wares on the streets or like on the sidewalk, for them, their success in their business depends on public visibility.
Dr. Amada ArmentaThis is why, for example, fruit vendors have those colorful rainbow umbrellas. We all know what that means. But that visibility, which people need to attract business so that people know where to go to find what they the food that they want, is also what put vendors most at risk. And so we can think of someplace where there were ICE rates close to like popular vending locations.
Dr. Amada ArmentaOutside of a Home Depot, for example. They took a lot of vendors, food vendors, or they also— there was also a rate of a swap meet where there were a lot of vendors selling both, um, products like that you can buy, but also food. So people are definitely back out and selling, including at markets. But I think that, you know, by and large, people describe just having less business than they did a year ago, and business being far more uneven.
Dr. Amada ArmentaOver and over in interviews, people would tell us that they used to be able to predict when their heavy periods were and when their light periods were, and what kinds of sales they could expect, 'cause there was, like, a regular cadence. Now they describe it as not making any sense. One day we'll be great and they'll think things are getting better, and then the next day no one will come. And so mostly they describe more uncertainty, more volatility, certainly with some hope, because I think any any entrepreneur has, like, this hope of success and obviously a resilient and entrepreneurial spirit. But I also know that when we interviewed people, it was almost a year after the ICE rates, and 95% of the business owners we spoke to were still very much financially struggling. Um, around 40% said that they were earning enough to just cover expenses as it related to their business, but without really anything extra. And then the other half said that they were not earning enough to consistently cover expenses.
Myron KaplanTo put a quick number on that, within two weeks of the start of the raids, businesses lost an estimated $3.16 million.
Dr. Amada ArmentaLast summer, many of the markets, night markets, festivals, they shut down because there was fear of putting both vendors and the public at risk and patrons. Because if you remember last summer, the city felt like it was under siege, right? There were like all the people with the ICE and the National Guard and all the other agencies, and they had like horses and they would, like, ride through the street and they would do all this staging in public locations. And so, you know, I can think of a lot of markets that shut down during that time out of fear, and that created, you know, a lack of opportunity for vendors who depend on those places to stay open and sustain their businesses.
Myron KaplanEl Gato vendors have a lot to maintain in their setup. Some have trucks and prep their food inside. Others cook their food in front of you, like the pasta at Mr. Cat. Imagine paying for food, energy, and staff after only taking home $50 for the night.
Dr. Amada ArmentaFor some of the entrepreneurs that we spoke to, something that was really sort of devastating for them is some of them had pretty successful enterprises, and they had made investments in their businesses that they were excited about. I'll tell you about two of them that I can think of. Um, one was this woman who sells birria, which I can attest to is very delicious, and her family invested in a truck after they had been serving just on the sidewalk for a long time. So when the ICE raids happened, they're having to pay, um, on this large loan for the truck while they weren't able to earn any income because the night markets closed. And then even when they would go out to try to sell, no one would buy from them. I mean, they would describe these days where they would make $50 of sales, which is not enough to even operate your truck because they rely on so much gas. And so for this particular entrepreneur, she described it as really devastating. The stress from trying to know that you have to pay this loan with the stress of knowing that there's not enough customers. But also she described feeling really torn about even trying to sell anything at a time when so many people are economically struggling. There's another vendor that I can think of who sells milkshakes, who had just bought, like, a, a van for, and like, new blender equipment that again they were paying for at a time where they weren't selling anything because all of the places that they relied on had shut down.
Myron KaplanIt's been over a year since the report was released, and business is trying to heal. But it's taking a while. This past summer things were still being canceled.
Dr. Amada ArmentaIf you think about summer, June 2025 in L.A, many night markets, summer festivals, or community events that we usually have in the summer in L.A., they didn't happen last summer. People canceled them, or if any chose to continue, there were far fewer people in these places than there were before. And some of the reporting at the time said that Latino communities in L.A. were avoiding places that they interpreted as Latino spaces because they thought those spaces were the ones that made them the most vulnerable.
Dr. Amada ArmentaOn the flip side, for some vendors, they talked about shifting strategies from in the past maybe working on a street by themselves to actively looking for markets and night markets or festivals moving forward because they felt more safe with, like, the infrastructure that comes with the night market, right? Lots of patrons, but also a community of other businesses and entrepreneurs that they get to know and grow with.
Myron KaplanIt'sEl Gato Night Market has moved locations since Marina and I first visited. It's a lot on Broadway, about 10 minutes east of its former Union Street location. I wandered through the new spot with William Jenkins, AfroLA's photographer. We got there around 5: 30 and hung around until the sunset. It was substantially less crowded than when Marina and I last showed up. There were a few reasons factoring in, like the market's recent move and a severe autumn heat wave. Even so, William and I agreed, there should have been more people out. The food is good, there's plenty to see, and the vendors are carrying on.
Marina PeñaDo you think things will get better?
Natalie LeonardoI hope so.
Myron KaplanThe show is made by AfroLA, produced by me and Marina Peña, and edited by Dana Amihere. Support from Ethan Ward, Jessica Bethel, and William Jenkins. The music by me and Nico Del Castillo. Visit AfroLANews.org for notes on this episode , and L.A. journalism you won't find anywhere else. Thanks for listening.