Guadalupe Rosales is an artist and the creator of the popular Instagram accounts “Veteranas and Rucas” and “Map Pointz,” which focus on the fashion, the music, and certain latino subculture of the 1980s and ’90s in Los Angeles. She herself was part of the so-called party crews of the time, or groups of young people who attended house parties together, sometimes even sharing a uniform. To keep this moment alive in history, she continues to leverage her now collective 328-thousand followers by asking them to send in photographs of themselves or loved ones from that time to continue to build the archive. 

“There’s something I noticed through the work is also that a lot of people that don’t understand the Chicana or the brown woman that grew up in LA.” said Rosales. “Just because we were brown with thin eyebrows and red lipstick doesn’t mean that we were in a gang.”

Guadalupe Rosales’ new memoir, East of the River: A Memoir of Los Angeles Girlhood, which released on September 8th, 2026, tells the tale of her adolescence living in this unique moment: the parties, the vibrancy, as well as the dangers of the time, and how sisterhood played a role in her survival. 

Maria Hinojosa sat down with Rosales and her collaborator, Eddie Ruedacava, who photographed the parties as a teenager, to talk about why party crews and their history mean so much to them.

This episode originally aired in 2019.

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