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Paper short abstract

During ICE raids in Los Angeles, grassroots groups provided food, health, and housing support through trust-based networks. Using CBPAR, this paper shows how informal care systems operate as urban welfare infrastructures and alternative forms of governance.

Paper long abstract

Informality is a defining feature of urban life across the Global South, shaping housing, livelihoods, and service provision where state systems are absent, exclusionary, or coercive. This paper brings that scholarship into conversation with a Global North case, asking what Global South theories of urban informality reveal about informal welfare infrastructures in immigrant neighborhoods of Los Angeles. The paper does not equate Los Angeles with the Global South; rather, it uses informality as an analytic to examine how marginalized communities govern survival in a context of public disinvestment and intensified immigration enforcement.

Drawing on community-based participatory action research conducted during the 2025 ICE raids, the study documents how grassroots organizations, faith groups, and mutual aid networks deliver food, health navigation, childcare support, housing advocacy, and crisis communication through trust-based, non-bureaucratic systems. These practices operate outside formal state provision yet are deeply shaped by state power: surveillance, enforcement, and policing pressures constrain movement, fragment access, and restructure how assistance circulates. In response, community actors adapt service routes, communication channels, and partnership networks; forms of collective action that resemble, in mechanism, informal service provisioning documented in Global South cities.

The paper argues that informal care networks constitute durable infrastructures of urban governance and alternative visions of progress grounded in dignity, reciprocity, and belonging. By extending Global South informality frameworks to a North American city without collapsing contexts, it contributes to debates on grassroots agency, co-production, and equitable urban futures.