This is part of our “LA Views” series — commentary that provides perspectives on our neighborhoods and the issues facing them.
The marketplace along Degnan Boulevard has been running for decades, long before Instagram Reels and content creators existed. Vendors set folding tables before sunrise, regulars know which stall has the best Jamaican patties, kids run between legs while their parents catch up with people they’ve known for years. It’s the kind of South LA ritual that doesn’t make the news because nothing about it fits the role South Central LA usually plays in movies and the media.
It’s no wonder people here were upset when Barrio Athletics, a clothing brand that emphasizes its South Central roots, planned a 5K street “takeover” through the Leimert Park African Marketplace and Drum Circle without taking the time to understand our history. Within days, the story traveled from Instagram comments to reaction creators, local television, elected officials and national news. By the end, a scheduling dispute had become Black versus Brown.
I run South Central Run Club and have spent eight years building Black and Brown solidarity and working-class solidarity, so I felt that friction personally. I reached out to Barrio Athletics founder Henry Gallardo — who went by Chatz5 on Instagram before deleting his account — to understand how the conflict spiraled and to get his perspective. He did not respond by the time of publication.
But weeks later, I’m still reflecting on what happened because it highlighted something important: Who gets to speak for South Central Los Angeles, and why does it matter?
A brand or a run club?
Barrio Athletics began with apparel, then expanded into community fitness events and run meetups. That distinction matters not because commerce and community are opposites — run clubs sell shirts, take sponsorships and work with brands all the time — but because it changes what the gathering is for.
Running is something you can do alone. A run club is what happens when people decide not to. At its core, the culture is about witness and companionship: People return to the same places, move alongside one another and hold each other accountable. Some women join because companionship makes it possible to run at night. Others come for friendship, safety, accountability or simply because moving through a city feels different when somebody is moving beside you.
Over time, those repeated gatherings create relationships not only among runners. Businesses expect the group. Neighbors recognize faces. The elders know you.
Ideally, the merch and events resource a community the club has built — helping organizers bring people together more deeply and fund the work of sustaining it. The community isn’t simply an audience for the product.
That difference became important in Leimert Park. The controversy wasn’t really about a race route. It was about what happens when an activation arrives before relationships.
I’ll say plainly that I have bias and a stake here. So do Youth Justice Coalition and Community Coalition. So do Latinos Run LA, Keep It Run Hundred and Movement Runners. So do the neighborhood councils, the businesses, the vendors and the residents who were already there.
Lizette Annette Aguiñiga, founder of Chisme Pace Running Club and an ambassador for Latinos Run LA, had already been running through Leimert Park with Latinos Run LA for years before any of this happened. Their original route took runners down Obama Boulevard, onto Degnan Boulevard and into Leimert Park.
“The elders who play backgammon and chess … would cheer us on the whole time,” she told me. “They know us. They would high-five and come speak to us when we’d take a break at the park.”
Doing it for the content
The social media comments about the Barrio Athletics event came fast and furious. I watched a Black person say online that they’d call ICE if Latinos pulled up to Leimert Park. I want to be clear: This is part of us, but not all of us. These are specific people in pain, responding poorly to each other.
A local culture page covered the dispute by asking how people would react if another racial group treated Latinos this way — a framing that helped turn a local conflict over relationship and cultural space into a Black-versus-Latino story.
Once the conflict became content, online attention started functioning like authority. Visibility, engagement and reach gave people influence over a story regardless of how deep their ties were to South Central.
And relationships matter because being from South Central doesn’t mean knowing all of South Central. The point isn’t that you arrive already knowing everything. It’s that relationships give you people to ask before you move.
As the controversy spread, some suggested a Black-and-Brown unity run.
It made me think about the unity work already happening inside Los Angeles’ running community.
Movement Runners founder Kitwana John, Kit for short, started his run club in 2014 and held his first Unity Run in 2017 at Centinela Park in Inglewood. The idea was to bring different run clubs together and introduce runners to communities they might not otherwise know. At his most recent Unity Run, runners from groups including Compton Run Club and Run West Adams joined in.
“I don’t think it’s about Black and Brown,” he told me. “It’s just about just being respectful and mindful of where people are already doing their thing.”
There’s supposed to be an inventory-taking before you plant a flag: What’s already happening here? Who has been holding it down? What does it mean to the people who live here?
The organizations I talked to don’t always agree with each other. Still, we move with regard for one another because we feel the impact when somebody makes a solo move.
Who gets to speak about South Central
As the story spread, specificity disappeared and racial meaning expanded. People invoked “gang behavior” and “prison politics.” Those aren’t neutral metaphors in South Central, where incarceration and gang violence have separated real families. Turning those histories into shorthand for dysfunction means spending somebody’s family history to win an argument about a 5K.
It helps to remember what race was built to do in these neighborhoods in the first place — it organized where Black and Brown people could live and what resources reached them. Even as those explicitly racist policies recede, the landscape they set up persists. Neighbors end up negotiating a scarcity that institutions have far more power to relieve, while racial difference becomes the most visible place to locate the threat.
Assemblymember Sade Elhawary spent more than a decade organizing at Community Coalition, where Black and Brown solidarity was something people worked at intentionally, not something assumed because communities lived alongside one another. When I asked what gets erased when a conflict like this is flattened into Black versus Latino, Elhawary also spoke to the fear of Black erasure: “How can Latinos better understand the need for Black folks to feel like this is still a community that they belong to, that they are a part of, and not feel like they’re erased?”
A Black future in South Central can’t just mean murals, festivals, and acknowledgments of what Black people built here. It has to mean Black people can still live here, work here, own here, and survive here. And that is where a conversation that looks racial on the surface starts running directly into material conditions.
Employment is one place that tension becomes racialized. Black residents already have the highest unemployment rate in LA County, and some Black residents will tell you Latino business owners don’t hire Black people. That grievance is real, and it matters. But it shouldn’t be residents fighting business by business over jobs when the state could expand employment programs, enforce the antidiscrimination laws already on the books and shape where investment goes.
While the Barrio Athletics story was traveling, roughly 108,000 LA County residents lost CalFresh since last summer, and nearly 260,000 more could lose it under new work requirements that took effect in June. County Health Services is projecting a $662 million decline in federal funding. Public Health already ended clinic services at seven locations after a separate round of cuts.
None of that trended. What trended was Leimert Park. What trended was people accusing Black or Brown people of being the problem. Residents inherit the consequences of underinvestment and cuts, then get handed the blame.
The best of South Central
If you want to see the best of South Central, skip the comment section and go stand in a Dollar Tree line. It’s long, and everybody in it is making do with what they can afford, usually on a time crunch, surrounded by strangers doing the same. Somehow, people still make room for each other in that line — joking, accommodating, reading the room for who’s having a hard day.
These are the people who live with whatever racial tension everybody else manufactures, amplifies or monetizes. They do not get to turn the camera off when the segment ends. They have to go home here.
This is what gets erased when cameras descend on spectacle. Look across South Central, and you’ll find Zapata-King Neighborhood Council, named for Martin Luther King Jr. and Emiliano Zapata, is doing the actual, unglamorous work of the solidarity South Central is suddenly being called incapable of.
There’s the Avalon Mile, open mics at Cafe Calle, block parties, Hank’s Mini Market, The Plant Plug — which has spent years teaching residents to garden — and Prosperity Market, which built relationships among vendors while opening up access to healthy food.
A handful of people arguing over a 5K became the story that defines South Central, while Leimert Park itself — home to roughly 12,000 people — got reduced to the backdrop for everybody else’s argument.
Saying it one more time for the people in the back: Virality is not legitimacy!
So — who gets to speak for South Central? No one person does. A place speaks through its residents, its institutions, its contradictions, its histories, its relationships, and the people accountable enough to one another to understand that their actions land on everybody else. South Central doesn’t need somebody appointed to speak for all of us. It needs people willing to listen closely enough to notice we’ve been speaking for ourselves the whole time.
