Heidi Lepe
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How You Danced Through the End of the World
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It’s a hot summer night in Highland Park, and you find out real DJs still exist. They are two Central American men tucked in a corner booth of a barbershop bar on gentrified Figueroa Street who manage to scratch the itch in your ear for good music. You wave your millennial hands in the air as their mixes transport you back to a time in your tia’s living room when you battle danced your cousin over Daddy Yankee. The vibes tonight feel immaculate and early Y2K in all lens shades of purple, pink, and gold. You thank God places are still popping in the year 2025. You thank your little Corolla too—for surviving every pothole and getting you and your homegirl through the streets of Los Angeles, ready for a time outside.
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Thick burgundy pencil outlines your friend’s lips, which are lathered in shimmering gloss. Chunky black heels strap and secure her ankles as she steps in comfort. Together you move in unison and rhythm to the dancehall, reggaeton, and hip hop sounds the DJs beautifully orchestrate. Franceska’s Capricorn self brings comfort with her everywhere she goes, and she had been with you through the thick of it when shit went down earlier that summer. After you got the call, she acted quick—jumping in an uber to get to you as soon as she could.
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“They pulled them out of their homes. They knocked on the doors, forced their way in, and grabbed them. People are scared to go outside,” a source whispers to you on the phone.
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You and Franceska arrive at the scene, dropping off Know Your Rights resources and red cards in English and Spanish for families stacked inside outdated units stretched across miles between a wired fence. Some people still don’t think West L.A. has projects, too. You make your way across the street, covering the Latino grocery store, when a stranger walks up to you and takes the other end of your signage. He doesn’t say a word, only focuses on the task, plastering the sign with the tape Franceska supplies. His silence tethers the three of you together in survival under a new, grim reality unfolding in your city.
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“Take my hand,” Franceska says as bachata comes on queue. Beneath dim red lights and vape clouds floating all around you, you see Franceska for the friend she truly is. She has seen your world fall apart and now holds your hand through it as it ends once again for the both of you. You share the scars of surviving dead dads and seeing your communities in disarray—from the Angeleno under occupation to the threat of TPS ending for the people of Ayiti. Franceska guides you in a four step with all the rhythm she has by simply being Haitian and growing up with Boricuas and Dominicans in Boston. Tonight her heart is big enough for both coasts. In coordination, your bodies sweat, sway, and release as carriers of the angst held within. Grief exhales between your hips, and you come back to your own selfhood—feeling human and free again. You’re among a crowd—hot and heavy, channeling life in their vigorous movement and whine, and the joy is contagious. The dance floor becomes what it’s always been for your people: a sanctuary, a container, a sacred space keeping you all together through cruelty and hardship. Outside, masked men watch and infiltrate your neighborhoods from inside unmarked white vans.
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This was the year you saw the paletero man disappear from your block. The year vendors no longer sang in the Santee Alley. The year elote carts, tamale posts, and taco stands looked unnatural for the first time, standing stranded in the middle of sidewalks, their stovetops left on. You kept tabs on your mami’s whereabouts only to find out she had been stopped and interrogated while running an errand. You broke no contact with him, hoping he wasn’t going outside. “I'll figure it out if I get deported,” his slick ass once told you, reminding you of every Mexican man set in their ways of “no pasa nada.” You remember the local tia who went viral on TikTok for shaking ass so hard during a protest in downtown LA as if she were back in zumba. The graffiti on the 101 freeway, in spraypainted colors of white, green, and red that felt like chants, saying over and over again: FUCK ICE, MELT ICE, and VIVA LA RAZA. Every meal drop off, community watch group, and small business rallying to protect immigrants only settled you deeper in the LAnd.
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Maybe this is why it’s hard for you to leave this city. Maybe it’s more than pride as you hold in your sleeve the pink Cambodian donut boxes; the Mexican taco stands; the little tents in the Salvadoran corridor; the Nicaraguan landscaper in Beverly Hills; the Black, Asian, and Latine migrant vendors of the Santee Alley who clothed, fed, and watched over you. The people ready to follow Tupac’s lead and burn this bitch down if you ever get us pissed. You think about those before you, your ancestors, the Tongva soil rooted in struggle and bloodshed. How you are still here—resisting, protesting, taking up space, and doing it dancing. You hold the history, the street vendors, the tia, the tio, the cousin, the projects, the red cards, and Daddy Yankee while two worlds collide between a present-day regime and that of your roots. Between who you remember you are and what they tried to make out of us.
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It’s a chilly night in Highland Park in the year 2026. You park your Corolla in an East Hollywood neighborhood, turning your emergency lights on to wait for your friend to come out. With one hand on the steering wheel and the other signaling a shotgun in the air, over music blasting loudly from your stereo—you tell her, “We’re shaking ass tonight. We need this.” Franceska glides into your passenger seat nodding, “Yes, it’s time to let go.”
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Heidi Lepe (she/her/ella) is a Honduran and Mexican-American writer based in Los Angeles, California. She practices the art of storytelling by writing from her embodied experience as a daughter of immigrants. Her work has been featured in the Altadena Poetry Review and La Raíz Magazine, as well as Latina-led magazines such as HipLatina and FIERCE by Mitú. Heidi is a creative nonfiction alum of PEN America’s Emerging Voices 2025 Winter Workshop. She is also an advisor for the Central American Historical and Ancestral Society (CAHAAS) of California, committed to preserving and sharing Central America's history, culture, and art.