💌 A Love Letter to Los Angeles

To the City That Holds Its Own

Seventeen years ago, I arrived in Los Angeles with a suitcase full of vision and a spine made of borrowed stars. I didn’t know then how this city would become a spell I never stopped casting - how it would burn me down and build me back again. Over and over.

Los Angeles is not for the faint-hearted. She’s a cracked altar of contradictions: glitter in the gutters, holy water in liquor stores, prayer beads tangled with power lines. You don’t just live here - you witness her. To belong to her without ever owning her. You surrender to the spectacle, the ache, the alchemy.

LA carved a new language into me. It offered the kind of space only a city this wild and sprawling could provide. It didn’t raise me. But it met me where I was, and let me become more.

This city is a contradiction wrapped in jacaranda blossoms and asphalt. Sun-soaked and shadow-laced. We mourn, we meme, we organize. And when it matters most—we show up.

I’ve danced in abandoned warehouses, found soul family in backyards, created in artists’ lofts, wandered through the dreamscape of Chinatown galleries. Had my crown tended to in a Compton salon, where stories and scissors shared the air. Lived carless for a decade, rode the Metro like a prayer. I've chanted on canyon trails and wept on curbs. I’ve loved artists who couldn’t pay rent but painted galaxies onto alley walls. I’ve been held by strangers and kissed by friends under jacaranda trees in June. I’ve sat at tables sharing pupusas, ceviche, picadillo, Korean BBQ, and tacos that taste like someone’s grandmother blessed them.

This is a city stitched together by a thousand immigrant tongues and sacred contradictions. And I carry my own bloodline in that braid.

My mother fled Cuba at sixteen, landing in Miami with nothing but her spirit and raw talent. She taught herself English, went to high school and college; an artist, a fashion designer, and an interior designer for hotels, shaping the backdrops of other people’s dreams, even when hers had been interrupted. My grandmother helped raise me, made sure I was rooted even as I grew wild. She reminded me that endurance runs in our veins, that women like us don’t break. We transform. I come from women who don’t flinch. Women who reimagine.

Los Angeles called me west like it called so many of us - artists, filmmakers, musicians, mystics, misfits. Not just to dream, but to remember who we are when the dream breaks. We didn’t come here to be safe. We came here to be seen.

And in January, when the fires turned the sky the color of old wounds, we organized. We gave rides. We cooked meals. We made GoFundMes stretch like miracles. That’s the part they don’t see on postcards: Los Angeles takes care of its own.

I’ve witnessed strangers lift each other out of wreckage. I’ve seen neighbors hand out masks and meals during fires. People who start over. People who build from ash. People who say, We’ve got you.

We are not untouched by struggle - unemployment, industry collapse, gentrification, and homelessness still scream in the background. But we’re not numb to it. We don’t walk past it without feeling it. This city doesn’t look away—it organizes. We take care of our own, even when the system doesn’t.

And no one resists like LA. When cruelty tries to dress itself as policy, when violence hides behind uniforms, when silence tries to suffocate truth—Los Angeles marches. Speaks. Queer and trans siblings take the mic. Brown girls bang drums. Black mothers hold space. And artists paint the grief into murals that won’t let you forget.

We don’t just post hashtags. We pull up. We feed, we shelter, we scream when screaming is sacred.

We are the city of layered histories— of Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Cuban voices. Of Black resilience and Korean BBQ. Of Armenian markets and Jewish delis. Of Filipino breakfasts and Persian stews. Of Chinese bakeries and Vietnamese phở. Of Indigenous roots and Irish echoes, queer legacies and Muslim prayers. We are Russian immigrants and South Asian aunties. We are every language and flavor that dares to dream in heat and hustle.

LA is flawed. She’s messy, expensive, and often impossible. But she’s also magic. She’s the song you hum after heartbreak. The stranger who texts you the number for a healer. The improv actor who gives you their last granola bar. The backyard DJ who plays cumbia and Björk in the same set.

This isn’t a postcard. This is a calling. To the artists who haven’t given up. To the queer elders who paved the way. To the activists still handing out water bottles. To the muralists, the mariachi, the movement-makers.

Los Angeles is a mirror with a thousand faces - and when she reflects you back, it’s not always flattering. But it’s always real.

I wasn’t raised here. But I became more here. And that, to me, is love.

With fire, tenderness, and something worth becoming,
- Franceasca

P.S. If this piece stirred something in you—leave a comment, share it with someone who knows LA’s magic, or tell me what city shaped you.