Despite the stigmatization of Iranians by the dominant American political and media discourses, Iranians have a visible public presence in Los Angeles (LA) through a range of organized public events. Based on the data collected through one year of ethnographic fieldwork (2017- 2018) including forty interviews and participation in more than one hundred Iranian public events, my paper explores the ways Iranian immigrants of LA respond to the American political and media discourses in the context of events, such as Shia Islamic mourning rituals or the Iranian New Year celebrations, that are practiced on the streets of LA. Drawing on Dell Hymes’s notion of “traditionalization” (Hymes 1975:354), I argue that Iranians create these events mostly by recontextualizing “traditional” behaviors in the context of LA. However, I employ Talal Asad’s concept of “discursive tradition” (Asad 1986: 15-21) to claim that these recontextualizations are discursive and respond to the political and media discourses in the US. My analysis identifies at least two types of responses in Iranian public events. Some events aim to counter the American political and media discourses. An example is giving roses to bystanders during Shia processions in the streets of South Gate, LA—a new and unprecedented practice which, according to organizers of the mourning ceremonies, aims to counter the discourse of Islam as a religion of violence popularized by the U.S. media. However, many Iranian events—such as heritage events—challenge the American imagination of Iranians by conforming to the broader American social and political relations. These events that celebrate “the ancient Iranian traditions” attempt to replace the American perception of Iranians as people of color, “fundamentalist Muslims, hostage-takers, and terrorists” (Malek 2015: 21) with the image of women dancing to Iranian music in colorful costumes, all framed as Iranian “ancient traditions.” They simultaneously mobilize the potent discourse of Iranian “banal nationalism” (Billig 1995: 175) which links Iranians to the Aryan Myth and “claim” a white identity (Maghbouleh 2017: 21), erasing all traces of Islam from the public imagination of Iranian-ness. Thus, many of these events attempt to challenge the American political and media discourses on Iranians through conforming to the broader American ideological and racial discourses that frame Islam as a negative and whiteness as a positive marker of identity.