On Monday, July 7th, Carlos González Gutiérrez, the consul-general of Mexico in Los Angeles, was about to start his weekly audiencia pública when he heard a helicopter flying overhead. He began as usual, greeting some twenty or twenty-five community members, who had shown up on the third and busiest floor of the consulate to share their concerns and ask questions. These days, they almost all want to discuss immigration raids in the city and what the consulate can do to protect Mexican citizens. As the gathering went on, González Gutiérrez heard, on top of the helicopter, loud voices and a general commotion outside. He kept talking, standing in front of a Mexican flag and a bright-orange wall emblazoned with the official seal of Mexico.

When the event concluded, his deputy consul-general approached him and held up his phone, which was playing videos of beige military trucks, federal officers on horseback, protesters shouting them down, and Mayor Karen Bass saying that the officers needed to leave. González Gutiérrez realized that the melee was taking place in MacArthur Park, directly across the street from the consulate. He walked back up to the microphone he had used for the audiencia and said that an immigration raid was occurring. He didn’t want to cause a panic, but he invited everyone inside the building to stay there, and everyone outside—people waiting in line for their appointments, venders selling food and small Mexican flags—to come in. They would be safe there, he told them. The consulate is inviolable under international law, a sanctuary within the city of Los Angeles.

While federal agents were still in the park, González Gutiérrez went back up to his office on the fifth floor, where a wall of windows offered the best vantage point for watching what was happening in the streets below. News teams were on the scene, broadcasting to viewers across the country. So were activists, who’ve been trying to document every raid and have been posting videos and photos on social media.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement had apprehended hundreds of Mexicans in Los Angeles in recent weeks, but it didn’t take a single person that day in MacArthur Park, suggesting that its presence was intended as a demonstration of force. The federal agents announced that they were leaving soon after Mayor Bass arrived. González Gutiérrez found the whole episode “astonishing,” he told me. “I never expected to witness an operation such as the one everybody saw in MacArthur Park—because of what MacArthur Park represents, because of what Los Angeles represents, because of the deployment of forces by the Border Patrol.”

González Gutiérrez, who was born in Mexico City, has spent twenty-eight of his sixty-one years in the United States. After graduating from El Colegio de México with a degree in international relations, he enrolled at the Instituto Matías Romero, the foreign-service school that Mexico’s aspiring diplomats are required to attend. While he was there, he received permission from the Foreign Ministry to enter an international-relations graduate program at the University of Southern California, where he studied with an expert in U.S.–Latin American relations named Abe Lowenthal. The year was 1988. The Dodgers defeated the Oakland Athletics in the World Series. González Gutiérrez became a fan of the city and its baseball team.

Lowenthal gave him advice that shaped the rest of his professional life, González Gutiérrez told me. “If I were you,” he recalled Lowenthal saying, “I would try to focus my career on the Mexican community in the United States.” The conflicts in Central America, the strength of the peso, the severity of the drug-trafficking problem: all of these would fluctuate over time, Lowenthal predicted. But Mexican communities in the United States would always be at the top of the list of Mexico’s foreign-policy priorities. That’s pretty much how events have unfolded.

When González Gutiérrez finished at U.S.C., he returned to Mexico City to complete the program at Matías Romero, and he became a junior foreign-service officer. Not long into the job, he got a phone call from the Foreign Minister, Fernando Solana Morales, who told him that Lowenthal was interested in having him continue work on a research project about connections between California and Mexico, so he would be headed back to Los Angeles, to help his former professor and become the first consul for community affairs. González Gutiérrez also believes he was sent to Los Angeles because the United States and Mexico were negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement: the Foreign Ministry knew that Mexico needed to build up its consular network in the United States. González Gutiérrez has a memento from those years hanging on the wall in his office, alongside paintings of bullfights and photos with U.S. and Mexican dignitaries: a ticket to the perfect game thrown by the Dodger phenom Fernando Valenzuela, the left-handed screwball pitcher from Etchohuaquila, Sonora, against the St. Louis Cardinals, on June 29, 1990. Valenzuela had signed it for him.

During this period in Los Angeles, González Gutiérrez told me, “you could see how important Mexican communities were going to be, or were already, for the social fabric of the city. But it was nothing like it would become.” In November, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which included a so-called amnesty provision that gave undocumented people, including Mexicans, a path to citizenship. Nearly two and a half million Mexicans gained legal status as a result of the I.R.C.A., including more than half a million in Los Angeles County. By the mid-nineties, the Mexican population of Greater Los Angeles stood at an estimated four million individuals, making it the largest outside of Mexico.

The new immigration law made many Mexicans feel as if they had a more stable footing in Los Angeles, allowing them to settle down. As a 2011 report by researchers at U.S.C. explained, Mexicans who arrived in the late seventies and early eighties, and applied for legalization through the provisions of the I.R.C.A., made up an increasing share of the Los Angeles labor force, graduated from high school at higher rates than earlier generations of Mexican immigrants, bought homes in increasing numbers, and had higher median incomes.

According to González Gutiérrez, it is the Mexican immigrants who, for a variety of reasons, were not able to benefit from I.R.C.A. who have been most affected by the recent ICE raids. Their U.S.-born children and grandchildren are leading the resistance against the roundups. “They are the ones protesting to protect their parents and waving the Mexican flag to honor that part of their identity,” he told me.

A few years after the signing of the I.R.C.A., González Gutiérrez witnessed the riots sparked by the beating of Rodney King. He recalled the racial tensions of this period, including between African Americans and the recently arrived Mexican and Central American immigrants who were moving to South Central. From the Mexican consulate, he said, he could see “fires everywhere, five or six columns of smoke rising into the sky at the same time.” González Gutiérrez also witnessed the campaign, in 1994, to pass Proposition 187, a ballot initiative that sought to cut off public benefits to undocumented immigrants. (The measure was approved by a wide margin—nearly sixty per cent of voters supported it—but blocked by a federal judge.) On October 16, 1994, the Los Angeles Times ran a photograph of the protests against the ballot initiative, showing Cesar Chavez Avenue, named after the co-founder of the United Farm Workers union, jam-packed with Angelenos flying Mexican flags. Exactly thirty years after the photograph was published, González Gutiérrez held a ceremony at the consulate, in which he unveiled a large, framed reprint. He said that the anniversary was special to him because it marked California’s dramatic turnaround: “a state that was the vanguard of the anti-immigrant movement had become the vanguard of the pro-immigrant movement in the United States.”