Reflection on the January 1, 2025 Pasadena Rose Parade

On January 1st, 2025, dozens in solidarity with Palestine marched (unofficially) in the 136th annual Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, CA. My Tempest comrade Nestor and I were among eight marchers arrested for “interference with a public event.” In recent years the Tournament of Roses Parade has  become a nationally syndicated television event akin to New York’s Macy’s Day Parade. It has also become of strategic interest to the U.S. national security apparatus. Armed with a ten-foot banner, signs, and chants, we delivered an alternative message of peace in protest of Israel’s U.S.-backed atrocities against the Palestinian people and in support of money for healthcare not warfare.

Highlights from the action are circulating on social media. It even garnered some press and elicited eloquent reflections from individual participants. For me this was a profound, albeit small, experience to participate in, especially with a group of people all driven to demand a break from business as usual at a very public, nationally televised, and heavily surveilled event. 

While you’re watching, bombs are dropping

Having already been familiar with collective action and civil disobedience, I wasn’t a stranger to the risks involved. I knew that police force might be wielded against me or my peers. As a big, brown dude, I’ve been harassed by police throughout my life and have intimately known what it is to grow up amidst state-sanctioned terror long before I ever learned about abolition and criminalization. The memories of my youth are littered with being profiled, stopped, frisked,and surveilled, sometimes not only by police. This included the threat of gang violence and getting “hit up” on walks home from school and knowing what streets to avoid to limit those kinds of interactions. 

Those experiences were with me in the hours leading up to our action. I was nervous but also proud, knowing that my peers and I were ready to collectively own this moment to oppose U.S.-supported genocide. My nervousness quickly faded and my resolve became concrete when the parade was christened with a fly-over by a B2 Stealth Bomber war plane.

The parade began, a signal came, the banner unfurled and we began marching and chanting in the street, keeping to the cadence of the floats ahead and the marching band behind us. By most accounts we were able to march with the parade for nearly one-and-a-half miles. There were jeers, especially by those who witnessed our disruption commence. But along the route people applauded, and some even chanted with us. 

Finally, while at a stop, a line of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputies entered the street in front of us with riot equipment and large guns. Another group of sheriffs lined up behind those of us holding the banner and began detaining and removing eight marchers off the street. We were escorted to a side street where we were hand-cuffed and searched in preparation for transport to jail. No dispersal order was ever given and no Miranda rights were ever read. Eight of us were taken to a Pasadena Police jail where we were processed, cited, and eventually released. By being released individually, each of us got to experience a loving welcome from fellow protestors who had stuck around, advocated for our quick release, and welcomed us with pizza and water at the jail exit.

Overall, the experience brought me closer to the activists I was already organizing with, introduced me to new, inspiring leaders that make up the fabric of the progressive movement in Los Angeles, and gave me an opportunity to reflect on the importance of practicing my politics in solidarity with others.

If you’re not already part of an organization, or if it’s been a while, I hope these reflections encourage you to make 2025 the year you deepen this practice. Belonging to an organization or an activist formation is critical if we are ever going to achieve any of our vision for a more just world. To do so, we need massive amounts of people practicing acts of solidarity and tactical disruption. 

Be ”in organization” with others

Few things are as important as organizing with a group in which you are making commitments to each other. Individual activism, acts of kindness, and self-directed learning and political growth are all great, but none of them are practice for collective liberation. Being in a group, with structure, where you work through decision-making together with others is a way to practice democracy and collective struggle. It allows each of us to learn how to be leaders and supporters, skills that are critical to making us stronger allies to social movements. 

Were it not for being active with the Los Angeles branch of Tempest, I would not have had the opportunity to participate in this action and meet the leaders and activists from other organizations that I was able to share this experience with, including Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, DSA, Code Pink, Queers for Palestine, Community Solidarity Project, and Anti US-Israel Imperialism in the Middle East. 

It’s also important to understand that, while there may be an abundance of organizations to join with, especially in places like Los Angeles, our left is deeply divided and being part of an organization is a critical step towards, eventually, being in coalition to further unify our movements and build our power. 

Restraint is deeply unnatural

As I write this, the balls of my thumbs are still in pain from having my hands cuffed behind my back. I had to sit for a while in that cop car,  waiting for the police to figure out how to get around the parade route and to the jail. The police cruiser didn’t even have a real back seat. It was just a large formed piece of smooth plastic. It felt like I was sitting on a toy slide with a speed hump in the middle. The seat forced me into a posture  somewhere between half-sitting and half-standing.My legs went numb. 

As I sat there, I couldn’t help but think about how much time and resources are given to producing all of the equipment that makes arrests torturously uncomfortable. I thought about how vulnerable it felt to have my chest out, open to anything, and to have no way of blocking my face or front from any road bumps or police violence. 

I was compelled to reflect on how often I had seen Black men and women beaten or murdered by police on social media and in the news. It made me grateful for the crowd, activists and National Lawyers Guild members who were watching how we were being treated. Focusing on my breath, clearing my mind and being patient were difficult tasks, but they helped me avoid freaking out while I was stuck there.

Care as solidarity

What was true on New Year’s Day has become more evident in the aftermath of the Eaton and Palisades fires and the smaller fires that continued to ravage Los Angeles as this reflection was being written: Our institutions only know how to wield control and violence. They’re barely able to meet the actual needs of working people let alone provide safety and care. These contradictions become especially apparent during emergencies. 

Personally, I experienced care and consideration from my peers who were honest with everyone about the risks involved in this action, and who then stuck around until each person arrested was let out. We had committed to this protest together and being together until the very end made me feel close to and supported by my fellow protestors. What I didn’t expect was a wave of sadness that came over me days after the arrest.I felt a deeply emotional hate for policing and sadness for what I could only imagine our Palestinian brethren have been living through for over 16 months. I’m grateful and fortunate to have had the time and space to process and reflect on these intense feelings that I didn’t expect to have. Sharing my reflections publicly and staying in touch with my co-colluders has also helped me process the experience.

Meanwhile, the U.S. war machine has given $26 billion in military support to Israel since 2024. But  the U.S. apparently can’t afford universal healthcare or free public college. Communities across the country continue to be poisoned by water contamination, subject to crumbling infrastructure, and constrained by growing wealth inequality. 

In Los Angeles, nearly half of our total city budget is dedicated to a militarized police force. Critical city positions and services have been cut if not outright eliminated. Under these circumstances,  why would anyone expect that there is enough public infrastructure to support families and communities facing displacement, rent gouging, and fallout from what’s become the most destructive fire in Los Angeles’s history?

Fighting imperialism and the police state means both supporting fire victims and supporting the Palestinian struggle against U.S.-backed Israeli settler-colonialism. . The weapons we use to wage this fight must be rooted in worker and community solidarity. This is how everyday angelenos have organized themselves in response to our failing public institutions. The largest relief effort immediately following the fires has been scarcely reported on, but it doesn’t come from the U.S. state. It has been a wave of mutual aid and autonomous self-organized support for people facing displacement and despair. Mutual aid networks are mostly being run by people outside of the public agencies and municipal departments that we’re supposed to be able to count on. We’re seeing what’s possible when organized groups of individuals create entry points for volunteers and activists to provide resources to people in need. 

We have a critical opportunity to educate and learn from each other about why we need the abolition of our highly carceralized systems and the replacement of them with actual, life-affirming institutions and robust social safety nets that will care for people and our environment. This moment teaches us about the importance of organization and the role that everyday people can play in creating the systems and networks that will become foundational to the future cities and world that we deserve. Let’s use this to build out the infrastructure of care that’s quick to rehouse, feed, heal and put people at ease, instead of our existing systems that are quick to jail, displace and institutionalize people in their greatest moments of need. 

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”