Column: In Honor of Amanda Torres, aka DandyMandie

There is no easy way to write this or find the poetry in these sad circumstances, but I know Mandie would want me to. My best friend in college was killed over the weekend and I think Los Angeles needs to make a mural in her honor and memory.

I’m sure she would hate that I’m blasting her government name, but when we would have serious chats back in the day, she, at times, would give me a pass mostly because I would say it in Spanish.

When I met her, she was already living in Los Angeles with her cousin, attending Los Angeles City College, trying to get out of the party scene, and focusing on giving more and more of herself to the community. She was a co-leader of the organization Lets. Give and was, honestly, a huge driving force in bringing people together to feed the homeless, give talks on self-love and was overall a political advocate for justice. She traveled to universities as a speaker, to share her poetry and connect with young girls.

Mandi made it cool. She made it punk and badass to care about your people in ways that not even Chicano PhDs could.

We would eventually start meeting up at the Dennys by her house to work on her college transfer applications. I’m lucky to still have the Google Doc files of her application. In her personal statement, she wrote:

At this time, she had almost 100,000 followers, but she would carry herself as if she wasn’t even online. So much of influencer culture, even Latino influencers, has been about pandering and posturing and, if anything, ego. Mandie never had an ego, even when she should have had one.

In the lead-up to her submitting her application, she told me she would shut down her Instagram. I’d tell her that her influence was so big it could be done for good, and we’d have heated debates about it but I eventually would understand why, and it was always for her own inner peace.

Every single time we’d all go to a backyard show or an event, especially in Los Angeles, she would get swarmed by young girls telling her how much she has helped them. It got to the point where it would be hard for her to truly enjoy herself, especially when it came to men who either felt rejected or threatened by her.

One of my most cherished memories con la Mandi was attending La Tocada Fest in Anaheim in 2017. We saw all of her favorites, from La Maldita Vecindad to Molotov to Panteón Rococó. Maybe it was because we were in Orange County, or maybe it was because the whole festival was pitch dark, and no one came up to her that she felt safe and truly enjoyed herself. Mandie and her cousin would eventually fall asleep in the backseat as I drove them home, and I can still remember looking in the rearview mirror and realizing I had truly made a good friend.

Mandie was a force, a real force. She had walked away from hosting backyard boogies called NightOfTheBlaxican and saw college as a way to heal.

A memory I still treasure from our time together is when she came with me to teach creative writing classes at a high school where I was working. Not only did the students love her, she realized that was precisely where she wanted to be.

She wanted a new life and kept activating and deactivating her account, mostly to try and find who she was for herself and not live up to the demands of what anybody wanted. In the new year, she began to get swarmed with acceptance letters to all the Cal States she applied to.

What shocked me, and many of those close to her then, was that San Francisco State was her top choice. She wanted to get away from it all. And so we packed bags, I hit up my friends who were attending the school up there, and we planned a weekend for her to truly get to see the area and the campus.

We would go back and forth on the aux. We talked about our traumas and dreams and even recorded a podcast on the way up. I interviewed her and learned that my friend from Hemet, California, lived in the music, in the joy of seeing people together but also in the hope of finding something better for her family, her community and most importantly, for herself.

She loved San Francisco, the Bay Area and the campus. While I, of course, wanted her to stay in Los Angeles, I got to know on that trip that this was about her living her life on her own terms.

But then she got her acceptance letter to UCLA, and her joy and optimism skyrocketed.

She immediately joined the summer transition program and deactivated her Instagram completely. She got involved with MECHA, practiced Indigenous ceremonies, did research, joined the honors program, mentored incarcerated youth, and so much more.

Our hangouts then became co-working sessions, lunches, brunches and just learning how to be adults. Every now and then, we’d find the opportunity to see a band we really liked, but as I graduated and she continued to finish her degree, we learned to communicate intentionally, and that was when I saw a completely different Mandie than the one I had met two years prior.

As she finished at UCLA, she left a relationship that wasn’t suiting her. She was now living alone, working at a high school doing transformative justice, and was genuinely happy. From a friend I had met through community organizing and the internet, in those few years, we quite literally grew up together.

I did a formal interview with her years later when writing an essay about mosh pits, and her quote truly encapsulated where her dreams and visions of herself were:

One of the last meals we shared was in Echo Park. We met at Stories, browsed the books and then walked over to Low Boy to have their smashburgers and cocktails. This was after I hadn’t really been keeping up with our texts and calling back like I used to. Far away from the UCLA days and mosh pits, we were full adults now.

She called me out on it. Mandie always kept it real, I knew that, but this time she was truly keeping it more real with me. She was disappointed in some of the choices I had made, she dared me to be better, to make choices that were truly going to make me happy and to be a better friend, son and brother.

As I write this, her family is still seeking justice for what happened to her in Downtown LA on January 26 at 1 am and the internet has blown up with thousands of stories on how Mandie impacted their lives.

It is truly still difficult to even process my friend's death. Learning that she had just gotten a promotion with another one pending has given me some peace but also rage, knowing that she indeed was getting closer to everything she wanted, but I know we all wanted her to achieve more.

We need justice for her. We also need a scholarship, a foundation, something more to honor what she truly wanted, to empower and liberate her people and community.