Introducing: Party Crews: The Untold Story

All episodes coming March 14, 2023. For many LA Latinx teens coming of age in the 2000s, flier parties and the party crew scene were an escape from the pressures from immigrant parents and the harsh realities of the world. From VICE and LAist Studios as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, a series that explores what happens when your safe space isn’t always safe. Hosted by Janice Llamoca.

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's a Saturday night in two thousand three, eleven pm,
and when the coast is clear, I sneak out of
my parents house in the San Gabriel Valley waiting for
me and my friends and a few hundred other l
A teens. Is a party, A hot, sweaty, grinding party.

(00:26):
Would like everybody and their mother in the car, like
in the trunk, like everybody got smashed into like two
or three cars. We would come in like ten fifteen,
twenty girls deep at a party, all magic blocks of
grinding and lass and boody shaking, working music bangings out
the freon our dream. I don't even know how we

(00:49):
got the alcohol. Who knows. Welcome to the world of
party Crews. I'm Jane Amocha and when I was a
team in the mid two thousand's, I was part of
an underground party scene made up of hundreds, maybe thousands,
of mostly Latin X teams all across l A. We

(01:13):
called ourselves party crews, and we were on a mission
to have a good time here. We made the rules.
The party cuisine was our safe space, a place where
we could be ourselves without judgment. Just close your eyes

(01:33):
and just listen to the music and just dance away
with your friends just like you're free. But for other
people looking in, they often saw us as criminals. The
people who throw these kind of parties are called party crews,
but police say they're very similar to gangs. The parties
could get intense, sometimes even dangerous. Around the time I

(01:58):
was a part of it, the scene got blamed for
a murder of a fourteen year old girl named Emory Munos.
They made it more about the parties than her actual
murder and disappearance. To this day, her murder remains unsolved.
We want answers. We need to know why and and who.

(02:21):
When I started looking into Emery's unsolved case, it put
me on a journey to try to understand the bigger story.
And I also found myself going back to a time
in my life I had otherwise blocked out from my heart.
Michael through a podcast network Vice and Elliott Studios. This

(02:42):
is Party Crews The Untold Stories, a podcast about coming
of age and what happens when you're safe. Space isn't
always safe. Listen to Party Crews The Untold Story. That's
c r e w S The Untold Story on the
I Heart Radio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts