In the Midnight Hour, the record shop at the center of the Valley’s ICE resistance

The soft hum of Chicano soul music bled onto the darkened street as a steady stream of people made their way into a record store in San Fernando, passing a sign in the window: “‘ICE, BIGOTS, MAGA’ are not welcome.”

Vendor booths replaced vinyl racks, some selling miniature lowrider replicas and Chicano-inspired artwork. Attendees crowded the center of the shop, dancing to live soul music. One vendor cut and styled hair into slicked-back pompadours and high bouffants.

It was a night inspired by pachucos, the 1930s-40s Mexican American subculture of zoot suits and ducktails, caló slang and jazz, that rebelled against discrimination as a form of self-empowerment and felt especially relevant since immigration agents began mass roundups of Latinos in Los Angeles.

On its surface, the Midnight Hour is a record store, its rows lined with hundreds of vinyls collected from around the world. But to the north San Fernando Valley, it has been a community lifeline and gathering spot since it first opened during the pandemic. When wildfires devastated Los Angeles early last year, the store transformed into a donation center.

And since the ICE crackdown began last summer, it has become a safe haven for the city’s immigrant population and the go-to headquarters for the resistance.

“It’s times like these that make you realize, this is community,” said Sergio Amalfitano, who owns the store with his wife, Alyssa Castro Amalfitano. “You know, this is having each other’s back when we are all struggling.”

He reflected on the parallels of today and 1943, when thousands of white servicemen and civilians assaulted pachucos and other young people of color in what came to be known as the Zoot Suit riots.

“Every decade or so, it pops up again and they start kind of questioning our belonging,” Amalfitano said. “It’s more important than ever to express yourself … that you’re not assimilating, you’re not going to give up on your culture or your people’s history.”

Amalfitano invites grassroots groups to use the store to organize, make posters and safety kits, hold “know your rights” workshops and run community watchdog groups for nearby Home Depot stores.

The Midnight Hour Records is a gathering place to celebrate music and culture.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

The storefront doubles as a concert venue, often for hardcore and pop punk shows. Other days, it’s an art gallery or a pop-up market. When the city is in crisis, the building becomes an activist headquarters. Its business model can be unconventional. The couple doesn’t charge small vendors to sell at the store during events and doesn’t take a cut of the merchandise that bands sell while playing at the venue.

“Everything’s political and everything’s connected,” Amalfitano said. “We live out of the motto of community over commodity. We want our community to thrive, and the only way that the community can thrive is if we all come up, right?”

But the community staple might not be able to keep its doors open past January, when the lease is up. The mom-and-pop store, like many across the country, battles rising inflation and an economy further destabilized by the rise in immigration enforcement.

Patrons browse through vinyl albums at the Midnight Hour Records.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

The Midnight Hour existed as a traveling record store long before establishing a physical location.

Amalfitano, who spent his career in entertainment booking and DJing, had long booked music shows in venues across Los Angeles under the Midnight Hour Social Club. He and his wife started selling some of his record collection during the pop-up events to pay for the night.

The San Gabriel Valley native had long run a silk screening business as a main source of income, a trade that he picked up from his father, who immigrated to the U.S. from Argentina with his mother in the late 1970s, fleeing a brutal dictatorship in the country.

When COVID-19 hit, live events came to a sudden stop. The couple had long dreamed of a permanent space in the San Fernando Valley, the region that Castro Amalfitano was raised in and where the couple had since settled and raised their three children.

With the world closed down, the couple took a leap, pouring all the money they got in stimulus checks into starting a brick-and-mortar business in the city of San Fernando.

The couple rallied friends and family together, and their vision quickly came to life. The bassist in Amalfitano’s hardcore punk band ACxDC helped build the benches that line the two stages in the store. Amalfitano’s dad stained the wood used for the stages. A friend in record producing set up the venue’s sound machines. A tattoo artist designed and hand-painted the store’s logo — a crescent moon and stars hugging antique font letters.

“We did not expect the kind of rush that we got the first day. By the second day, we were out of most of our stock,” Amalfitano said. “We had to just go into our personal collections and just sell part of our personal collections, because we needed inventory.”

Michelle Argote, the stylist offering her low-cost services on pachuco night, worked at various stores in the outdoor mall as a teen, and has frequented the record store since it opened.

“We’re all like on a boat trying to stay afloat,” Argote said. “We need to stay alive. We need to have places like this for the community, and we can’t lose that.”

On Feb. 5, Midnight Hour held an event to prepare students for walkouts scheduled across the Valley in protest of ICE the following day.

A Bad Bunny song floated through the speakers as about 50 high school students crouched over picnic tables painting and writing placards: “ICE out of our schools,” “Immigrants build America” and “Fight ignorance, not immigrants.”

Advocates gave a “know your rights” workshop and Amalfitano led a piñata bashing, what the store owner called “a communal form of catharsis,” encouraging students to let out pent-up emotions in a safe way.

“You’re part of history. You’re a part of the fight,” he told the students. “We just want to keep reiterating that you matter.”

The Midnight Hour’s stance on social justice issues was baked into the store’s ethos since it was established. The immigration raids last summer only became a driving factor to continue, said Michelle Elisa Lima, an artist born and raised in the Valley who partners with the Amalfitanos to coordinate community events.

In August, Lima hosted a benefit show at the store and raised $2,500 for families affected by ICE. She created an art installation titled “Raizes y Sueños,” or “Roots & Dreams,” and invited attendees to bring photos of their immigrant loved ones.

The art piece started with one photo of Lima’s mom and eventually, the entire wall was filled with pictures representing nearly 100 families. The installation was displayed at the San Fernando City Hall for Latin Heritage month.

“We start off trying to help people, and offer this safe space that allows people to do something other than just go on the street and protest, because not everybody is able to do that,” Lima said. “Everything just kind of has grown beyond our expectations, which further proves that the people here want this. They need it.”

While the store’s events are often bursting with energy, those moments are still tainted by an “underlying fear that is kind of like a dark cloud among our community,” Lima said. “If you speak Spanish and are brown, that automatically puts you in that bucket of fear.”

The Midnight Hour often makes just enough to keep the lights on, relying on vinyl and merchandise sales that have slowly dwindled as the economic crisis has intensified for people. Community and music events are run by friends who volunteer their time, and only about two employees are kept on staff.

Attendance for events at the store has risen, but sales have only slowed since the raids began last summer, Amalfitano said.

The store’s debt has only risen.

Outside the Midnight Hour Records, which is struggling to stay afloat.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

The outdoor mall had struggled to get foot traffic as families feared leaving their homes. And as people struggle to afford basic necessities, vinyls aren’t at the top of their lists, Amalfitano said.

“That is the reality that we’re all living in right now,” Castro Amalfitano said. “It’s hard being a small business in a world that just doesn’t cater to that.

“We’re kind of all just fighting to stay around.”