Outside Union Station in Los Angeles on the Saturday before Easter a small group of people display signs protesting Robert Kennedy, Jr. The presidential hopeful is at the train station holding a campaign event celebrating “the life and legacy” of civil rights and labor leader Cesar Chavez.

The protesters outside the station do not speak. The signs—seemingly written by one hand—tend to share a theme: Kennedy is a “spoiler powered by MAGA.” As people stream into the venue, the station’s retired ticket concourse, the protesters—Black and middle-aged—hold their signs with visible unease. When I ask one of the protesters what brought him to the event, he simply turns his sign toward me. Disquietingly, two people nearby in full face coverings stand against the station watching the sign-holders. Something in the body language of these two suggest they are the managers of what appears to be a staged protest.

Inside the vast, high-ceilinged concourse—part art deco, part mission revival—people don campaign buttons, eat chicken skewers, order drinks. Volunteers talk to passersby about getting Kennedy on the ballot in California. Short-haired bodyguards stand sentinel, aware, no doubt, that 56 years ago Kennedy’s father, Robert Kennedy, during his own run for the White House, was assassinated a few miles away at the bygone Ambassador Hotel. Members of an all-female mariachi band strum their instruments and sing their songs, paper flowers in their hair. Journalists, cordoned off in the back, scroll through iPhones, reposition cameras, type on laptops. Sunlight falls through the large cathedrallike windows onto the station’s shiny floor.

When I ask a white man in his 30s—Garrett B.—what brought him to the event, he says he appreciates Kennedy’s “earnestness,” “respectable bloodline,” and that he is “against corruption.” A Latino man in his 20s came to the event because “no one is policing the different realms of government.” A Latina in her 50s, there with her elderly mother (who would later repeatedly utter “yes” as Kennedy spoke), says she likes Kennedy because he is “neutral around all the party politics” and has “been through a lot and is stronger because of it.”