Last March, a developer’s representative stood in the basement of our parish hall and called the stretch of Whittier Boulevard between Soto and Lorena “the Eastside Arts District.” He said it the way you say something that has already been decided. He was presenting what he called a community benefits agreement for a mixed-use project that would demolish three buildings, including one with a mural painted in 1984 by a collective called Los Dos Streetsciers. The mural shows a family crossing a highway overpass, carrying a suitcase and a houseplant. It went up the same year the Olympic murals went up along the 110 freeway, but nobody from the city commission came to Whittier Boulevard to commission anything. The artists bought the paint themselves.
I was standing in the back of the room with Doña Lupe, who is seventy-eight and has lived on the same street since 1962. She leaned over to me and said, “Since when is this the Arts District? This is where we buy tamales.” She was not making an aesthetic argument. She was making a claim about who gets to name a place, and she understood—before I did—that the naming was the first move in the taking.
The Naming Comes Before the Bulldozer
Developers and city planners have learned that you do not displace a neighborhood all at once. First you rename it. “The Eastside Arts District.” “Maravilla Commons.” “Boyle Heights Creative Corridor.” These names sound harmless, even aspirational. They appear on renderings, in press releases, on the signage that goes up before construction begins. They sanitize. They abstract. They replace the name that Doña Lupe uses for every corner—the name of the family who lived there in 1974, the name of the business that burned down, the name of the priest who blessed the street after the floods. That kind of naming is not marketing. It is memory, and it is the most democratic form of land title I know: the people who stayed longest get to say what the place is called.
When the developer called our stretch “the Eastside Arts District,” he was not describing what was there. He was describing what he planned to put there, and he was erasing forty years of working-class history to make his rendering look inevitable. This is what I have come to call naming violence—the act of overwriting a community’s self-knowledge with a brand that serves the interests of capital. It happens before the demolition permit. It happens before the rent increase. It happens in language, and if you do not fight it in language, you will fight it later in court, and by then the new name will already be on the map.
What the Church Knows About Naming
The Church has always understood naming as a spiritual act with political consequences. We name saints. We name feast days. We name the dead in the Book of Remembrance during November, reading their names aloud at Mass so that the institutional power of death does not get the final word. When a child is baptized, the priest asks the parents for a name. That name is spoken before the community and before God. It is not a label. It is a claim: this person belongs here, in this family, in this story, in this place.
The liturgical calendar itself is an act of naming the year. Ordinary Time. Lent. Easter. Advent. Each season names a posture, a way of being in the world that the community inhabits together. When we process through the neighborhood on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, we are not just devotional. We are saying: these streets belong to us, to this story, to this Mother. The procession names the territory in a language the city planning commission does not speak.
This is why I have come to believe that the fight over the murals on Whittier Boulevard is not ultimately about paint on a wall. It is about whether the people who have lived here for forty years get to say what this place is called, or whether a developer’s marketing firm gets to decide. It is about whether Doña Lupe’s names—the ones tied to families, to histories, to the smell of specific meals on specific corners—survive the next round of investment.
How We Built the Documentation Project
After that meeting in the parish basement, a group of us—parishioners, a retired librarian, two muralists from the original collective, and a graduate student who grew up in the neighborhood—decided we needed to document everything before the developer’s “community benefits agreement” could erase it. We did not start with a plan. We started with a camera and a list of addresses Doña Lupe dictated from memory.
The project took us four months. Here is what we did, and here is what I would tell any parish or neighborhood group that wants to replicate it.
Step 1: Walk the street with the elders. We walked Whittier Boulevard from Soto to Indiana on three Saturday mornings with Doña Lupe and two other longtime residents. They pointed at buildings and told us who lived there, what business occupied the storefront, when it changed hands, why it closed. We recorded everything on a phone voice memo app. Doña Lupe named corners by who lived there in 1974—the corner of Whittier and Soto she called “where the Garcías had the shoe repair,” though the shoe repair closed in 1989. That name is not obsolete. It is a land claim made in memory.
Step 2: Photograph every mural, every sign, every painted wall. We photographed thirty-seven murals, painted signs, and community-built walls along a one-mile stretch. We logged each one with its address, the date it was painted (when known), the artist or collective (when known), and a description of the imagery. For twelve of the murals, we did not know the artist. We posted the photographs on a community board at the panadería and asked people to tell us. Within two weeks, we had names for nine of them.
Step 3: Record oral histories of the artists. The graduate student conducted structured interviews with six of the surviving muralists. We asked them not just about the art but about the neighborhood—where they bought their paint, who let them use the wall, what the block looked like when they painted it, what happened to the businesses that were there then. These interviews are not art criticism. They are neighborhood history told through the hands that painted it. We deposited the recordings with the East LA Library’s local history collection and with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles archives. Both institutions accepted them without hesitation. The librarian told me, “We have been waiting for someone to do this.”
Step 4: File the documentation with the city. This is the step that turns memory into legal evidence. We submitted our mural inventory, the oral history transcripts, and the photographic record to the Los Angeles Office of Historic Resources as part of the public comment on the developer’s environmental review. The California Environmental Quality Act requires that cultural resources be identified and assessed before demolition. Our documentation forced the city to acknowledge that the murals existed as cultural resources, not just decoration on a wall slated for removal. The developer’s “community benefits agreement” had not mentioned a single mural. Our filing made that omission part of the public record.
Step 5: Make the documentation public and physical. We printed a twenty-four-page booklet with the photographs, the mural histories, and a map of the corridor. We left copies at the library, the panadería, the barbershop, and the back of the church. We did not make a website. We made a thing you could hold, because Doña Lupe does not use a website, and this project belongs to her before it belongs to anyone with an internet connection.
When the Documentation Became Evidence
Here is what happened next. The developer’s environmental review was delayed by four months because the city had to assess the cultural resources we documented. During those four months, the tenants in the buildings slated for demolition organized. They had time—time the documentation bought them. Two of the three buildings were eventually saved. The third was demolished, but the mural was photographed, measured, and documented in a way that allows for potential recreation. The developer agreed to fund the recreation as part of a revised agreement, and the tenants in the remaining buildings received relocation assistance and a right of first refusal in the new construction.
This was not a total victory. One building is gone. But the fight proved something I want every parish and neighborhood group to hear: documentation is organizing. The act of walking the street with a camera and an elder’s memory is not separate from the political fight. It is the political fight. It builds relationships. It creates a shared record that cannot be dismissed as anecdote. It forces institutions to acknowledge what they were prepared to erase.
The Problem With What Gets Called a “Community Benefits Agreement”
I want to say something about the developer’s “community benefits agreement,” because these documents are being used across East LA and in neighborhoods like it across the country, and most people do not know what they are until one shows up at their door.
A community benefits agreement, or CBA, is a legally binding contract between a developer and a community coalition. In theory, the developer agrees to provide certain benefits—affordable housing units, local hiring, community space, funding for programs—in exchange for community support for the project. In practice, most CBAs are negotiated between the developer and a coalition of organizations that were not elected by the people who live there, were not formed in response to the project, and in some cases did not exist before the developer needed a community partner. The “community” in “community benefits agreement” is often a legal fiction.
In our case, the CBA was negotiated between the developer and an arts nonprofit based in downtown LA that had no office in our neighborhood, no membership on our block, and no history of advocacy on Whittier Boulevard. The CBA promised a mural fund—$50,000 for new public art. That sounds generous until you understand that it was offered in exchange for demolishing murals that forty years of community history produced, murals that cannot be recreated with a grant. The CBA treated the existing murals as blank walls waiting for investment, not as cultural resources built by people who lived here. The naming violence I described earlier—calling the stretch “the Eastside Arts District”—was the linguistic version of this same erasure. The new name and the mural fund worked together: one erased the old neighborhood, the other offered a sanitized replacement.
When we filed our documentation, we did not argue against development. We argued that the community’s existing cultural resources had to be identified, assessed, and preserved before any agreement could be called a “community benefit.” The city agreed. The developer revised. The neighborhood bought time. That is what documentation does. It does not stop development. It forces development to contend with what is already here.
Naming the Campaign: When You Need a Title That Works on a Flyer and In a Filing
One of the problems we ran into early was that our documentation project did not have a name. We had been calling it “the mural thing” in committee, which is how you know you have a naming problem. We needed something that would work on a flyer stapled to a telephone pole, on a filing submitted to the Office of Historic Resources, and on a grant application to the library foundation. The name had to carry the weight of the work without sounding like a marketing campaign or a doctoral dissertation.
We spent two meetings going in circles. Someone suggested “Whittier Boulevard Mural Preservation Initiative,” which sounded like a government program nobody would remember. Someone else suggested “Save Our Murals,” which was accurate but had been used by six other campaigns in LA County alone. The committee was stuck, and the stuckness was costing us time we did not have.
A member of our group mentioned that when she was writing a community history booklet for her daughter’s school, she had used a novel title generator tool to get past the blank-page paralysis that always sets in when a committee tries to name something. The tool she described worked by taking a few parameters—genre, tone, core conflict—and returning a range of title options you could then adapt. It was not a magic answer machine. It was a way to stop staring at a blank screen and start evaluating real words in front of you. The Authors Guild, which has published best-practice guidelines for authors using AI tools, frames this boundary clearly: AI should support, not replace, human voice and original thinking. That was exactly how we used it—as a spark, not a decision. The group took the suggestions, argued about them, changed them, and eventually landed on “The Walls That Hold Us: Forty Years of Murals on Whittier Boulevard.” That title went on the booklet, the city filing, and the grant application. It worked because it was specific, it was ours, and it named what the murals actually do: they hold a community together.
I mention this because I have watched too many good organizing efforts stall over naming. The name of your campaign, your documentation project, your tenant union, your mutual aid network—it matters. It is the first thing people see. It needs to sound like it came from the block, not from a branding consultant. But you also cannot spend three meetings on it. The tool we used, which was a simple title-generation resource, helped us break the deadlock. There are several such tools available; the Reedsy Book Title Generator is one example that takes genre, tone, and core conflict as inputs and returns title options with brief explanations of what each captures. The point is not the specific tool. The point is that when a committee is paralyzed by the blank page, a structured prompt can move you from silence to argument, and argument is where good names come from.
What Sustains This Work: The Practice of Naming the Dead
I want to end where the Church always ends: with the dead. Every November, we read the names of the deceased from our parish Book of Remembrance during Mass. We read them slowly. We read them all. Some years the list is long, and the reading takes fifteen minutes, and people shift in their pews, and I can feel the impatience. I keep reading. The naming is the point. The dead are not a preamble to the Eucharist. They are the community, and the community includes the people who are not here to speak for themselves.
The mural documentation project is the same practice, applied to walls instead of names. Los Dos Streetsciers painted that family crossing the overpass in 1984 because they wanted someone to see what displacement looked like before the word “gentrification” was on every flyer in the neighborhood. The mural is a name. It names a family, a journey, a suitcase, a houseplant—the small possessions that mean you intended to stay somewhere. When the developer called that stretch “the Eastside Arts District,” he was counting on nobody remembering that the mural had already named it. He was counting on the name being forgotten, because a forgotten name can be replaced.
What You Can Do Tomorrow
If you have read this far and are asking what you can actually do tomorrow morning, here is where I would start. Pick one block. Walk it with the oldest person you know who lives there. Bring your phone and turn on the voice memo. Do not bring a clipboard. Do not bring a survey. Ask them to name every corner, every storefront, every wall that has had paint on it in the last forty years. Write down what they tell you. That recording is your first document. It is not research. It is a land claim made in the language of the people who stayed.
Then photograph what is still standing. Log the address, the date if anyone can remember it, the artist if anyone can name them. Do not wait for a grant. Do not wait for a nonprofit to tell you your documentation counts. Print what you have and leave it where people will pick it up—the laundromat, the panadería, the back pew of the church. If a developer’s representative comes to your neighborhood with a rendering and a new name for your street, you will already have a record that says otherwise. You will have Doña Lupe’s names, and the photographs, and the recordings. You will have evidence that this block was already named by the people who built it, and that the name they gave it is the one that holds.
The spiritual practice that sustains this work is simple: show up and name what you see. Naming is not a metaphor. It is the first act of resistance against erasure, and it is the oldest practice the Church knows. We name the dead so they are not forgotten. We name the murals so they are not painted over. We name the corners by the families who lived there so the developer’s new name does not stick. Do this on one block, with one elder, with one recording. Then do it on the next block. That is how a neighborhood stays ours.