Policing Punk and the Surveilling of Difference

Abstract

In 1979, a punk rock benefit concert at a former Elks Lodge in Los Angeles ended with dozens of arrests and injuries at the hands of police. This essay situates the Elks Lodge police riot within the punk rock and sex industry subcultures of Hollywood in the 1970s and 1980s and police surveillance of these spaces. The concert was the first and perhaps largest event in which LA Chicana/o punk youths participated in a scene that they created with other queer and trans people and people ofcolor. Yet narratives of the riot tend to be situated within punk studies and focus on white bodies being victimized by the LAPD. I argue that the event should be viewed in the context of the aftermath of the FBI’s COINTELPRO and of continuous policing and surveillance in Southern California. I emphasize the potential and portability of Chicana feminist research methods, specifically a trans-disciplinary method I call “intellectual dumpster diving,” which makes use of obsolete or unlikely ephemera to fashion intellectual archives. By combining the punk praxis of zine art with the Chicana artistic praxis of domesticana, I bring together art, ethnography, and prose to reconstruct an interdisciplinary, intersectional archive of the Elks Lodge police riot.