A young couple split apart by immigration issues find themselves on different sides of a family feud in a Mexico City neighborhood filled with deportees from Los Angeles eager to recreate the city they once called home.
LITTLE L.A. is an hour-long drama that deals with the idea of reverse immigration – in other words, moving from the US to Mexico – and also with deeper themes of identity and belonging in today’s transnational world. Many deportees to Mexico who were raised in the US, suddenly find themselves chasing the American dream in reverse. Often, they land in the Colonia Tabacalera neighborhood of Mexico City, which has been nicknamed “Little L.A.” as a result. This truly bicultural enclave of Mexican and American identity is the inspiration for our show by the same name. When a brilliant UCLA PHD Mathematics student, ZOE, 20, gets caught up in an ICE raid on her boyfriend, L.T., 21, and his friends, she and her younger brother, IAN, 17, find out, to their surprise, that they’re not citizens of the US, though they’ve spent their whole conscious lives in Los Angeles. They’re deported to Mexico, where they begin to put down new roots in Colonia Tabacalera. Zoe works at her uncle’s call center while Ian follows in his long-lost father’s footsteps as an amateur boxer. However, when L.T. reunites with his Mexican relatives in order to be closer to Zoe, they must negotiate deep fault lines between the most powerful families in Little LA.
