The lasting community legacy of a legendary Californian boxing gym

Coachella Valley has become shorthand for the festival that shares its name, where for a few weeks each year the Southern Californian desert fills with music fans from across the globe. Yet long before glowsticks and canned cocktails, the valley’s character has been shaped by waves of Mexican immigration. That history runs through the sweat stained canvas and concrete floors of Coachella Valley Boxing Club.

Run by the ​‘godfather of boxing’, Lee Espinoza, the gym dates back to the 1980s, when Espinoza’s son needed somewhere to train. After five years, it relocated to the old fire station next to Coachella City Hall, where, despite its confined quarters and lack of institutional funding, it has survived on donations ever since. 

The Southern Californian club has acted as a second home for generations of local families, producing multiple world champions along the way, including Randy Caballero aka ​‘El Matador’ and the Diaz Brothers.

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Photographer Darren Vargas grew up moving between cities, but would spend his childhood summers with his Mexican grandfather, Esmael, in Coachella. Early on, he remembers being taken through the grainy desert and stopping for breakfast with his grandfather and brother, passing the towering roadside dinosaurs, Dinny and Mr Rex.

When Vargas’ grandfather passed away in 2020, he was left grieving his relationship with his grandfather and the Mexican culture he experienced with him. Five years later, Vargas was first introduced to Espinoza through Jocelyn Camarillo, a boxer who trains at the club. Facing the deep-set wrinkles of a man who had shouldered a community with no expectations of reward, he was reminded of his late grandfather. 

“I couldn’t help but notice this overwhelming feeling of home,” Vargas says of walking into the gym for the first time. ​“Similar to when you walk into an old relative’s house – the one you get along with the most but haven’t seen in years, who listens to you. The smell, the textures, the feeling.”

Vargas slowly began to document the gym, exploring the community within it, while shining a light on the area that, for 50 weekends a year, is largely overlooked. It eventually led to the photographer’s first show and book, Moretón, the Spanish word for bruise.

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The images of the club and Espinoza, while linked to grief, also tell a tale of the community which Lee has built. ​“Lee allowed me into his house, to spectate and document, and asked for nothing in return. I am grateful, and I hope this book can help remind Lee that he is appreciated for his life’s work.” It’s a debt that Vargas is trying to repay in a direct way too, with a percentage of Moretón sales going back to the boxing club.

Espinoza’s gym is a museum of the area’s rich boxing history. Banners of past champions line the walls, next to newspaper cuttings marking Lee’s achievements. Title belts sit behind glass. Whatever space is left between posters and boxing cards spanning 50 years waits to be filled by the next generation – nothing here is thrown away, because everything on the walls is a record of who came through the door.

Vargas’s camera moves from that history into quieter moments. A family sits together on the mat. Two children stand for the camera, posed like a school photo. Against the noise of the trophies and the sparring, these portraits give the space its communal side, closer to a family album than the flashy, adrenaline-fuelled imagery usually associated with boxing.

Similarly, Mexican culture runs throughout the book: boxers inked with Chicano-style script tattoos, papaya fruit smashed across the concrete, and a cross earring hanging from a sweating child. The photographs speak to something more than boxing: they document the Mexican-American life woven through this part of the desert. Vargas captures the landscape his family came from, generations of boxers finding a home in the gym, and the Catholicism that runs through the community.

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“This place does not just hold meaning for me; it holds legacy,” Vargas says. ​“One of the immigrants is building something for themselves, for their community, and their families. To me, Coachella Valley is a representation of what it is to make it from nothing and still build everything around you.”

Some of those same boxers, now retired, still give their time to the gym Espinoza built, training the next generation the way they were once trained themselves. ​“Parents that I’ve met now with their kids that go – those parents used to go when they were children,” Vargas says. ​“You have this long legacy of people growing up in this space. It’s the same concept. It’s the same values.”

The gym’s doors remain open to local children for free. Vargas sees it as a place where young boxers can train alongside professionals, build discipline and find a community. ​“Kids from all over the desert go to that gym. To train, to participate, to examine, to meet the pros that train in that ring alongside them. To build themselves up. To stay out of trouble. To reconcile and sometimes with themselves,” he explains.

At the heart of this is Espinoza, who spent four decades building a place for the community around him. ​“Lee has sacrificed to make something for the youth in Coachella Valley. For a place that struggles with drugs, violence, exile and the heat. A haven in a special place.” 

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Moretón moves between two landscapes: the gym and the wider Coachella Valley. Inside, images move from Espinoza’s lined face to young boxers mid-strike, their movements leaving blurred trails across the frame. Outside, Vargas photographs smashed car windows in suburban streets and the vast emptiness of the desert. ​“This project is not only a personal reflection on what legacy means and how that translates to my own experience with my grandfather,” he says. ​“But is a documentative view on what it is to be an immigrant and build something.”

There was an uncomfortable tension Vargas was willing to accept. ​“It’s selfish of me, in my mind, to be like, ​‘Oh wow, you remind me of this individual in my life that I was so close to,” he adds. It’s why early on he was careful not to let the resemblance take over the story. His grandfather gradually became the subject, but he wasn’t the one he started out looking for. ​“Initially, I didn’t understand how big of an impact he had on that space in that community. The more I got to know him, the more I started to see those connections.”

For Vargas, these are clear. ​“My grandfather was like my father. He instilled in me what it means to be a provider, but also a hard worker and commitment to your beliefs, and how that transcends everything,” he continues. ​“I think a lot of that is echoed in Lee and how he approaches the gym – you see him at the gym at his age, still training and still being this figure, this leading individual in these people’s lives.”

Moretón by Darren Vargas is published by Friend Editions.

Jack Dennison-Thompson is a freelance journalist. Follow him on Instagram.

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