Gen Zin: DIY fliers find new life as a form of resistance against Trump | US News

On a cloudy Saturday afternoon, the Los Angeles Central Public Library was bustling with nearly 100 people making zines: little DIY journals made from a single piece of paper. There was folding and laughter and helping with wounds. Titles such as Narcan 101, Free Palestine and American Zain, filled with illustrations and tips, line a table down the hall.

While this may seem like a scene from the 1980s or 1990s — when music zines were popular as a form of countercultural expression — this was a workhouse setting in contemporary Los Angeles, where immigration raids and federal threats have left residents anxious and fearful.

Zines have resurfaced in recent months as communities seek to share information, such as how to protect each other from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or how to resist the Trump administration outside of No Kings protests. Just this week, 404 Media announced it would print a 16-page magazine featuring its reporting on ICE. People of all ages and from all regions make, print, and distribute zines on the streets, in libraries, and in local gathering places.

Zine makers and enthusiasts say people are likely to embrace the pen-and-paper medium again because of social media censorship, surveillance, defamation, and the alleged suppression of certain topics on algorithms.

“There’s a freedom that people crave because they feel so constrained, surveilled and, frankly, threatened in so many other areas out there,” said Mariam Kaba, co-founder of the Black Zine Fair in Brooklyn, who has been making zines since the 1980s. “You can print it out cheaply, copy it, turn it into something, and then you can distribute it by the thousands to people in your community. There’s no barrier to entry, and it makes a difference.”

In particular, Capa pointed to Brooklyn illustrator Megan Piontkowski’s “How to Report ICE” series of zines, a simple one-page black-and-white PDF document that requires four folds and a center cut to aid in folding. This zine has gone viral on Bluesky and Google Drive, where Piontkowski has more than 70 copies of her booklet in English and Spanish with local rapid response hotlines and resources for cities and states across the United States. She makes these zines in her spare time — receiving dozens of requests for other sites — to use her art to provide support.

“I really hate feeling helpless when terrible things happen around me,” said Piontkowski, who was inspired by Capa to make the magazine. “It’s something I can do, and it’s also something other people can do. If they’re very vulnerable, sick, have a visa, have a young child and can’t protest, they can still fold some magazines. You can do it at home, hand them out to your friends or people you know at the grocery store or a coffee shop.”

Zen folding parties have also become popular in recent months. After ICE launched Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago in September, resident Emily Hellerin saw local posts on social media where people filled in whistles with a Pilsen Arts and Community House magazine about fending off ICE, called Form a Crowd, Stay Loud. Hilleren began gathering friends at a local bar called the Nighthawk to fold tinsel and pair them with whistles. The bar soon promoted the events via social media, and other bars in Chicago began asking Hilleren to host fold-over parties for them. It has hosted seven events across the city — most of which are at capacity — and has helped people organize two more.

“People have seen the whistle and zine groups in person, realize it’s a good and useful thing and see an opportunity to contribute,” she said. “The social aspect of it was also attractive. Everyone I talked to said, ‘I have to do something.’ I can’t sit at home and look at my phone and read all the bad news. “I have to go out there and be with the people and do something tangible.”

Magazines have always been social and political in nature, ever since they began as science fiction-centric “fanzines” in the 1930s, the first of which was known as The Comet. Fanzines shared opinions and viewpoints often expressed in letters to the editor rejected by publications.

“Science fiction is very political fiction, because it imagines different worlds and new worlds, so the transition to politics happens very early,” said Stephen Duncombe, a professor of media and culture at New York University and author of Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture. “Popular magazines are starting to respond to mass culture, and part of what people want to respond to in mass culture has to do with politics.”

In the 1980s, during the punk rock movement, “second” music was born, according to Duncombe, and gave rise to “berzine,” or personal music of conveyed experiences and opinions. Around this time, zines became more social – before social media – with review publications, such as Fact Sheet Five by Mike Gunderloy, which indexed hundreds of zines, and became a place where people could learn about and request zines, and discover new ones in communities they identified with, such as queer, riot grrrl, and Afropunk.

For example, Duncombe recalls an old letter published in the queer magazine Homocore from a gay teenage boy living in Montana who loved hardcore music. “For this kid, this is pre-internet, and he lived in this world of rural, Western masculinity, like straight men,” Duncombe said. “this [zine] It was as if the world had just opened up to him, and music magazines have always had that role for people.

According to the Zen community, the medium has always sought to inform the audience. Kaba recalled reading magazines in the 1990s that published little-known information about the abortion drug mifepristone and herbal abortions.

“Suddenly, through magazines, you learned how to manage your own miscarriage,” she said. “Every generation has information that is relevant to the cultural space they are in, and magazines will always talk about that, because these people who are on the margins are looking for ways to connect.”

Magazines have long been a safe space for marginalized communities to express themselves. Nova Community Arts in Los Angeles hosts a weekly Queer Art Hang workshop, where people from the LGBTQ+ community can create and trade decorations together, in person, without censorship or social media bullying.

“Being able to sit in front of a piece of paper in a safe space, among friends and community members, is frankly healing for queer people, who have had, all our lives, people telling us what we’re supposed to do, what things we’re supposed to put out there, what we’re supposed to look like,” said Rosie Mayer, co-director of Nova.

Although people often associate music magazines with Generation After ICE raids and protests broke out in Los Angeles earlier this year, 16-year-old Victoria Echirekwahiri hosted a healing workshop for victims of the raid and continues to lead youth zine events around the city under her stage name, DJ Mariposa.

“There’s no right or wrong way to do it, and people can let out their creativity,” she said. “A lot of people were thanking me and they were happy, because writing about political things is heavy, but it’s also a release, knowing that this magazine could be useful to someone, or it might open someone’s eyes.”