Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet

On Friday nights the stalls of the Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet stay open until eleven, and music from the stage carries down the aisles. The grounds cover over 17 acres at Alondra Boulevard and Valley View Avenue, by the owner’s count, and the Santa Ana Freeway runs directly south of the property. The owner lists more than 475 vendor spaces, selling collectibles, clothing for the whole family, toys, crafts, household appliances, electronics, tools, and shoes. A 2023 piece in Talon Marks, the Cerritos College student paper, added sports jerseys, blankets, music CDs and records, many Mexican flags, and an art area of drawings and paintings of athletes and musicians. Rosalie Ceballos of Norwalk told the paper her favorites were the posters of rappers, “all the legends from Cali.” The Los Angeles Times wrote in 2020 that the outdoor swap meets of south and southeast Los Angeles County resemble a Mexican tianguis, with food stalls and a central stage. LA Public Press added serapes and other cultural wear to the inventory.

The week runs in two parts. From Tuesday through Thursday the parking-lot swap meet opens at 7 a.m., closes at 2:30 p.m., and charges no admission. From Friday evening through Sunday the inside swap meet opens, and the paid admission covers the live music. The grounds are closed Mondays. Newport Diversified, Inc. runs the meet, along with Broadacres Marketplace and the Cypress College Swap Meet. Its slogan is “Come for the bargains, stay for the fun.”

Menudo, micheladas, and churros on the perimeter aisles

The snack bar stands next to the picnic tables and the stage. For breakfast it serves menudo with warm tortillas and breakfast burritos, and for lunch cheeseburgers, tacos, burritos, chicken wings, pizza, and french fries. Across from it is the beer bar, where the owner says the michelada is the drink people order. A seltzer station by the pizza counter rims its cups with chamoy and tajín.

Out in the lettered rows, the stalls go by space number. The quarter-pound bacon-wrapped hot dogs are grilled with sautéed onions and peppers at B-19 and P-26. Teriyaki sticks of chicken, beef, or pork with fried rice have been sold at S-27 for over 25 years. La Cocina de Maria, at G-15, builds a torta from any three of asada, pastor, pollo, milanesa, chorizo, carnitas, and jamón. Tropicalizimo, at F-04, serves the hollowed pineapples that shoppers carry around hung with fruit and paper umbrellas, along with bionicos and fruit waters. South of the stage, Reventaco sells Baja-style shrimp and fish tacos. Tio Pepe’s churros are sold hot on the perimeter aisles, and the owner calls the churro the swap meet’s signature item.

In 2019 the entertainment area was overflowing every weekend, so the owners rebuilt it. They added a new stage, a new beer bar, and a covered seating area, and they remodeled the snack bar. The owner’s page counts the screens over the seating two ways, as 12 large HD screens and as fifteen 70-inch sets, and they show ballgames while the bands play. Rick Landis, the meet’s director of business development, told the Times in 2020 that the owners had put millions into the stage and patio. He said that on a Friday night there you could not hear your own words in a conversation.

The stage has hosted lucha libre and Metalachi, a band that plays metal on mariachi instruments. It has also booked tribute bands to Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, Social Distortion, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. A Saturday Night Concert Series runs from March through November. The October 2026 calendar lists a tribute to Cage the Elephant, Arctic Monkeys, and the Strokes on October 9. On October 10 a Rage Against the Machine tribute, Renegades of Rage, plays the afternoon, and Los Originales de San Juan, Los Cuates de Sinaloa, Oro Norteño, and Los Morros del Norte play the evening.

People at the stalls

Maria Osorio, an immigrant from Jalisco, had kept a stall of paper goods, disposable plates, and cleaning supplies there for 25 years as of March 2020. That month, as the pandemic closures began, she sold out of toilet paper. “My $5, $15 and $18 packs are all gone,” she told the Times. Some sellers had pushed the price of a 12-pack to a dollar a roll, and Osorio refused to raise hers. “It’s blackmail, pure robbery,” she said.

Claudio Eclicerio, of Boyle Heights, had sold fruit there for 28 years by 2020. On weekdays he drives to farms near Fresno, Santa Clarita, and Santa Barbara, sometimes picking the fruit himself, and he takes none that is not close to ripe. “Every person I talk to has a story,” he said. “Thanks to them, I’m here.”

Jesse Herrera’s start is told two ways. The Times wrote in 2020 that he came from Mexico as a teenager and worked at a churro warehouse in Vernon. Seeing the profit in churros, he quit to run his own churro stand at Santa Fe Springs. The San Gabriel Valley Tribune wrote in 2025 that he bought his first churro cart at 25, set it up at Five Points in Whittier, and then opened stalls at the swap meet. Both papers agree on where it led: dozens of food stands across several swap meets. “I achieved the American dream at this swap meet,” he told the Times. His children Jessica and Robert help run the family’s huarache store.

Manuel Hernandez came from Mexico City at 19 and worked in a Hanes T-shirt distribution center before opening a sports clothing store at the meet, which he had run for 27 years by 2025. His employee Jesus Alvarez, hired at 15, works the store while studying biology at Cal State Fullerton.

A drive-in in Dairy Valley

According to the owner, 18 acres were bought in 1948 and construction began on the La Mirada Drive-In Theatre. The land then held a dairy and an orange orchard. The area was unincorporated and known as Dairy Valley, and the city of Santa Fe Springs did not yet exist, so the theatre took the name of La Mirada, the nearest city. Talon Marks, in 2023, dated the land purchase to “63 years ago.” The drive-in opened in 1953 with room for more than 1,000 cars, and the first night’s features were Wings of the Hawk and Golden Blade.

The designers reserved ground between the screen tower and the street for walk-in theatres, restaurants, or other future projects. The owner’s history says there was even speculation about a heliport, with helicopters to carry executives from La Mirada and Downey to downtown Los Angeles. “For whatever reason,” the history says, “this idea never quite materialized.”

The swap meet came later, and the sources give two dates. The owner says the La Mirada Swap Meet opened in 1965, with the dirt field in front serving as parking. A 1989 Los Angeles Times obituary credits Jay Dauley with founding the La Mirada Drive-In Theater Swap Meet in 1964, the year he moved to La Mirada.

Dauley was born in Fort Worth. In the mid-1950s he moved his wife and six children to California, where he worked odd jobs and as an electrician before opening his first swap meet in Modesto. Within five years he had flea markets from San Francisco to Los Angeles and in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Florida, and Illinois. The Wall Street Journal named him “King of the Flea Markets.” By the obituary’s account, the La Mirada meet drew more than 20,000 buyers and became the largest weekend swap meet in Southern California. His Swap-O-Rama empire declined in the 1980s after some investments failed, most notably an air show in Arizona. He moved to San Antonio in 1985 and died there of heart failure on November 21, 1989, at 66.

The owner’s history says that over the years 700 vendors a day and more than 1,500,000 customers a year became common. On weekday mornings the drive-in served commuters as well. On May 1, 1974, the Southern California Rapid Transit District opened a Park and Ride lot at the La Mirada Drive-In. It had 500 spaces at 25 cents a day or $2 a month, and Line 58-E buses left for Los Angeles every 15 minutes during the peak hours.

Under the lights

Multiplexes drew audiences away, drive-in attendance fell, and the swap meet grew. In 1990 the owners closed the daily drive-in, keeping it only for special events. They installed stadium lighting and opened what they call the first outdoor night-time swap meet in the Los Angeles area. In the early 1990s the name changed to the Santa Fe Springs Drive-In Theatre and Swap Meet, after the city where the grounds actually lie.

The meet has also drawn police. In August 2006, Whittier police and Investigative Consultants, a private firm, raided 11 booths over five hours. They arrested five people and seized counterfeit Disney and Warner Brothers T-shirts, handbags, and CDs that police said might be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. On October 17, 2014, a dispute over a parking space ended with Elizabeth Yanez of La Mirada stabbed to death in front of her two children. A jury convicted Reggie Cervantes of manslaughter in August 2015, and in 2016 he was sentenced to 13 years.

The pandemic stopped the music in March 2020, and refunds went out for a planned La Septima Banda concert. When the gates reopened, a guard checked shoppers’ temperatures. Landis estimated that about 75 percent of vendors and 60 percent of customers came back. He put the vendor count at about 450, down from 700 more than 50 years before. “Interestingly, sometimes during a recession the business goes up,” he said. “People are looking for bargains.”

June 14, 2025

On the afternoon of Saturday, June 14, 2025, federal immigration agents entered the swap meet. Accounts of their number differ. The Tribune reported about 100 ICE agents. Jesse Herrera recalled about 40 vans in the lot and a helicopter overhead. His daughter Jessica, then 17, said more than 80 percent of vendors had already left for the day, and she watched the agents gather at the stage. Witnesses told LA Public Press that at least two people were detained and possibly dozens. The Department of Homeland Security said two people were “administratively arrested.” Management said the two detained were Colombian nationals, not the 40 or 50 reported online. It also said it had received no notice and that “at no point did our team consent.” A música mexicana concert set for that evening was canceled.

Larry Zeledon, who had been coming since the 1980s, was there that day. “It’s my birthday and Father’s Day weekend and I wanted to come here and enjoy myself, have a beer, just hangout,” he said. “The people that I see here all the time – they’re not here.” On Sunday most of the shops stayed shut. A few hundred people came to dance to a funk cover band, on a holiday that vendors said usually brought thousands. “It’s destroyed the business. It’s destroyed everything,” said Carlos, who had sold general merchandise there for more than 25 years.

On September 3, about 50 employees and vendors attended a Know Your Rights training held with David Gonzalez’s Hispanic Outreach Taskforce. Hernandez said his sales fell about 60 percent after June 14. On October 24, the night of the first game of the World Series, a crowd in Dodger blue watched from the seating area, far short of the thousands of past years. Herrera said customers were asking him to cut a hot dog in two so a family could share it. “It’s a graveyard,” he said. “We can see it again. We’re waiting for the raids to stop.”