The play-on-words title “Boyle ICE” touches on both place and purpose: a student-organized punk show set in Boyle Heights, a Los Angeles neighborhood with a large immigrant population, and an explicit stance against Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“Boyle ICE: Anti-ICE Benefit Event” is scheduled for 7 p.m. on Wednesday at The Paramount. All proceeds will go to charities that support documented and undocumented immigrants.
Organized by five USC music industry students, this punk show is both a class project and a political statement. The group, known as Ugly Flower Productions, consists of Vincent Vasquez, Ariane Villanueva, Aadi Pitre, Kai Tano and Michael Tringale.
“The presence of ICE and the excessive use of their force is something that we were all very on board campaigning against,” said Pitre, a third-year and the group’s communications manager.
For Pitre and his teammates, most of whom are descendants of immigrants, the decision to center the show around anti-ICE advocacy felt very personal and necessary to the community.
“Being in L.A., we’re seeing ICE raids consistently attack our neighborhoods,” said Vasquez, an L.A. native and the group’s director of communications. “I have experienced, seen, and know of people who’ve been affected by these raids.”
To amplify this message, the group intentionally turned to punk as the genre for the event.
“The whole punk ethos is to be against the man, and against the oppression of marginalized people in society,” Pitre said.
Punk has historically been tied to political resistance, especially in epicenters for the genre like L.A. According to a 2022 analysis by the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, early 1980s punk movements challenged dominant politics and rejected materialistic culture through grassroots organizing.
“Punk is a very rich music genre in L.A.,” said Vasquez, “It has a huge underground scene that I am very tapped into.”
Vasquez was able to secure the show’s headliners, Spunk, American Women and Integra Pink, bands he describes as “up-and-coming” and align with the event’s message.
The event began as an assignment for USC’s Music Industry 425: Live Music Production and Promotion course, where students were tasked with producing their own show from the ground up.
For the project, students were responsible for booking talent, securing a venue and marketing to the audience. For the team behind “Boyle ICE,” that meant not only coordinating logistics but investing in the event itself. Each member contributed $200 out of pocket to cover early costs, from venue booking to promotional materials.
Ugly Flowers Productions decided to split 100% of the profits equally among The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of L.A. (CHIRLA), L.A. Taco and Mad Collective.
CHIRLA fights to “advance the human and civil rights of immigrants and refugees.” Ugly Flowers Production is specifically donating to a CHIRLA fund that provides scholarships to undocumented and documented immigrants who want to attend university.
L.A. Taco is a media outlet that publishes stories that go unheard in L.A.’s most marginalized communities, such as Boyle Heights. MAD Collective is a nonprofit organization that provides meals and essential resources to underserved communities.
“I come from a family of immigrants, Armenian parents,” said Ellen Petrosyan, a third-year music industry major, who is planning on attending the concert. “So the whole mission of the show really hits close to home.”
Petrosyan stated that it is rare to see music events supporting the anti-ICE cause, and it is crucial to be politically active in this day and age. She expressed her gratitude for the Ugly Flowers Production team.
“I’m so proud of them for taking the hard route, being loud, being disruptive,” Petrosyan said. “It’s so important what they’re doing, and they’re not afraid.”
Pitre said that, for the event organizers, music was an important form of resistance because of its ability to connect people.
“You can be of any background, any religion, any sex, any creed, whatever identifiers you have,” Pitre said, “but if you all like the same music, you can kind of bridge the gap between all those disparities.”
Tickets are still available for $15 up until the 8 p.m. show on Wednesday.