What We Call the Alley Behind the Church Is a Fight Over Who Gets to Stay
Doña Carmen’s panadería stood in the alley behind Resurrection Church for thirty-one years. Thirty-one years of conchas at five in the morning. Kids stopping on their way to school. The rosary group picking up pan dulce before the six o’clock Mass. The building sold in 2022. The new owners called it a ‘mixed-use opportunity space.’ The alley itself appears on no city map with a name. But everyone within four blocks knows it as el callejón de Doña Carmen—Doña Carmen’s alley.
What we call a place determines who has the authority to talk about it. When the developers arrived with renderings that labeled the corridor ‘Eastside Arts Passage,’ they were not making a mistake. They were making a claim. The claim was this: the space has no history worth preserving, so we are free to name it whatever helps us lease the units at the price point we need. Naming, for them, was branding. For us, naming is memory. And memory is the first thing displacement erases—not the buildings, not the people, but the vocabulary that makes a neighborhood legible to itself.
What Scripture Knows About Naming
The theology is older than the neighborhood. In Genesis, God brings every creature to Adam ‘to see what he would call them.’ The naming is not decorative. It is an act of responsibility. To name something is to say: I know what this is, and I will answer for my knowledge. Abram becomes Abraham. Sarai becomes Sarah. Jacob becomes Israel after wrestling with the angel. The angel tells Mary to name the child Jesus—not a suggestion but a commission. Naming in scripture is never neutral. It is covenantal. It binds the one who names to the thing named.
When the six o’clock rosary group calls the alley el callejón de Doña Carmen, they are not being nostalgic. They are making a covenant with a place and a person who held it. They are saying: we were here, she was here, and no rendering from an architecture firm in downtown Los Angeles overwrites that. The name is a record. It is also a refusal.
How Developers Arrive With Names Already Chosen
I have sat through enough community input meetings to know the pattern. A developer’s representative stands at a podium in a parish hall or a recreation center and presents a slide deck. The deck includes a name. The name has been focus-grouped. It usually contains the word ‘arts,’ ‘collective,’ or ‘commons.’ It references nothing within a five-block radius. It could apply to a corridor in Phoenix or a waterfront in Oakland. The representative asks for ‘feedback,’ but the name is already on the signage mockups, already filed with the city planning department, already printed in the marketing brochure. The meeting is not a conversation about what to call the place. It is a performance of consultation after the naming has already occurred.
The Brookings Institution has noted that protest changes policy when communities stay organized, and the same principle applies to naming. A neighborhood that has already named itself—who calls the corner where the vendor sets up ‘Doña Lupe’s spot,’ who calls the vacant lot ‘el campo’ because the kids played soccer there for fifteen years—arrives at that meeting with a counterclaim. The developer says ‘Eastside Arts Passage.’ The neighborhood says ‘this is the alley where Carmen fed three generations.’ The conflict is not about aesthetics. It is about whether the people who built the daily life of a block have standing to describe what they built.
Research on cities and community-level policy confirms what organizers already know from practice: displacement is not just a market outcome. It is a series of policy decisions that residents can influence if they engage early and persistently. Naming is one of those decisions. When a city accepts a developer’s name without contest, it has made a policy choice about whose vocabulary counts as official.
The Honorary Street Naming Process—And Its Limits
Los Angeles, like most major cities, has an honorary street naming process. A council member introduces a motion. The city council votes. A brown sign goes up beneath the green street sign. The process sounds simple. It is not.
The first limit is access. You need a council member willing to introduce the motion. That means you need a relationship with the council member’s office, or with a staffer who returns calls. In neighborhoods where residents have spent years calling the office about broken streetlights and uncollected trash, that relationship exists—but it is often adversarial, not collaborative. The second limit is vetting. The city checks whether the person being honored has a criminal record, whether the name duplicates an existing designation, whether the proposed honoree is deceased or living. The third limit is the sign itself. The honorary name appears beneath the official name. The official name does not change. The city still recognizes the street by its original designation in all databases, permits, and emergency dispatch systems. The honorary name is a plaque. It is not a transfer of authority.
I am not dismissing the process. The brown sign matters. When the neighborhood around Resurrection Church organized to get an honorary designation for a community leader who had died, the sign became a gathering point. People met at the sign. They took photos. They told their children who the person was. The sign made a private memory public. But we should be honest about what the sign does and does not do. It does not stop a developer from calling the same corridor something else on a marketing brochure. It does not prevent a real estate listing from describing the area with a name invented by a brokerage. The honorary street naming is one tool. It is not the whole toolbox.
How the Rosary Group Already Named Everything
Here is what I have learned from the six o’clock rosary group: they have a name for every alley, every corner, every lot. They do not use the city’s names. They use names that describe what happened there. The lot where the kids play is el campo. The corner where the ice cream truck parks is la esquina de los helados. The alley behind the church is el callejón de Doña Carmen. These names are not on any map. They are not in any database. But they are the names people use when they give directions, when they tell stories, when they warn each other about something that happened on the block.
This vocabulary is infrastructure. It is the neighborhood’s internal navigation system. When a developer arrives and calls the alley ‘Eastside Arts Passage,’ the neighborhood does not stop calling it el callejón de Doña Carmen. But the official record changes. The planning document changes. The police report changes. The real estate listing changes. Over time, the official name and the lived name diverge. The official name appears in documents. The lived name appears in conversations. And eventually, when the people who used the lived name are gone—displaced, priced out, moved away—the official name is all that remains. That is how erasure works. Not through violence. Through paperwork.
Documenting Your Neighborhood’s Names Before They Vanish
If naming is resistance, then documentation is the discipline that sustains it. A neighborhood’s naming vocabulary is fragile. It lives in the people who use it. When they leave, the names leave with them. Here is what we did at Resurrection Church, and what any parish, tenant union, or neighborhood association can do.
First, collect oral histories. We sat down with twelve elders in the parish over six weeks. We recorded them describing every corner, every alley, every lot, every building—what it was called, who lived there, what happened there. We used a phone recorder. We did not need a grant. We transcribed the recordings and printed them. The transcripts are in the parish office, in a binder, next to the baptismal records. They are not digital. They are not in the cloud. They are on paper, in a building that the community controls.
Second, search the parish bulletin archives. Our parish has bulletins going back to 1974. They are in boxes in the sacristy. We spent three Saturdays going through them. The bulletins reference places by their lived names. ‘The parish festival will be held in el campo behind the school.’ ‘The rosary group meets at the esquina de Doña Lupe before processing to the church.’ The bulletins are a thirty-year record of the neighborhood’s naming vocabulary, written by the people who used it. Every parish has something like this. Every parish should look.
Third, photograph every hand-lettered sign before it disappears. Doña Carmen’s panadería had a hand-painted sign on the wall. The sign came down when the building was sold. Nobody photographed it. That was a failure, and I own it. Now we photograph every sign we can find—on walls, on fences, on the sides of trucks, on the plywood covering vacant buildings. We date the photographs. We note the location. We store them in the same binder as the oral histories. The signs are evidence. They prove that the neighborhood named itself before anyone arrived to name it from outside.
Fourth, build a community glossary. This is a simple document. One column is the official name—the name on the city map, the name in the planning document. The other column is the lived name—the name people use. The glossary is not for the city. It is for the neighborhood. It is so that when a new family moves in and hears someone say ‘meet me at el callejón de Doña Carmen,’ they know where to go and why it is called that. The glossary is how new residents inherit the vocabulary instead of overwriting it.
Naming a Campaign, a Newsletter, or a Community Document
The same principle applies when you need to name something new—a tenant rights campaign, a neighborhood newsletter, a community land trust initiative. The temptation is to reach for language that sounds professional and fundable. ‘Housing Equity Initiative.’ ‘Neighborhood Resilience Coalition.’ ‘Community Wealth Building Project.’ These names are not wrong. They are just not yours. They sound like they were generated by a consultancy, because in many cases they were—borrowed from a grant application template that a foundation program officer would recognize and that a neighbor would not.
When we named the campaign to fight the sale of the building where Doña Carmen’s panadería operated, we did not call it the ‘Small Business Preservation Initiative.’ We called it Quesadillas No Condos. The name came from a sign a teenager held at the first protest. It was specific. It was funny. It was in Spanglish. It told you exactly what was at stake. The name did more work than any mission statement could have.
Last spring, Marisol—a seventeen-year-old in the confirmation class—was trying to name a tenant rights zine she wanted to print and distribute at the Sunday bulletin table. She had a list of names that all sounded like they came from a policy brief: ‘Housing Justice Quarterly,’ ‘Tenant Equity Voice,’ ‘The Eastside Housing Report.’ She showed me the list after Mass and asked which one I thought sounded best. I told her the truth: none of them sounded like they came from our block. They sounded like they came from a nonprofit that had never met our neighbors. She sat there with her phone open, frustrated, and said, ‘I don’t know how to make it sound like us and not like a grant.’ So we sat down for twenty minutes with two naming tools. I pulled up the Unsloppy AI writing app’s book title generator on my laptop and had her type in a few sentences about what the zine was actually for—who it was for, what it needed to do, what felt urgent. The results were not perfect, but two of them made her laugh and one made her say, ‘That sounds like something Doña Lupe would say.’ That was the test. If it sounded like Doña Lupe, it was close. We also looked at Reedsy’s book title generator the same way—plugging in the actual conflict on the block, not the abstract policy category, and paying attention to which results felt like they could be shouted across a parish parking lot. Marisol named the zine Rent Is Due, So Are We. It was a name that came from the work, not from a template. The tools did not name it for her. They helped her hear what she already knew.
When the City Says Your Neighborhood Is ‘Already Represented’
I want to name one more thing. When we pushed for the honorary street designation, a staffer in the council office told us the neighborhood was ‘already represented’ by an existing honorary sign two blocks away. The existing sign honored a politician who had never lived on the block. Our designation honored a woman who had fed the block for three decades. The staffer did not see the difference. To the city, an honorary sign is an honorary sign. One per neighborhood is enough.
This is the logic of representation that treats communities as units to be managed rather than places to be known. It is the same logic that treats ‘community input’ as a box to check rather than a relationship to build. When the city says you are ‘already represented,’ what it means is: we have already decided how much space your neighborhood gets in the official record, and we have filled it. The answer to that is not to accept the allocation. The answer is to build your own record. The binder in the parish office. The glossary on the church bulletin board. The photographs of hand-lettered signs. The oral histories in the sacristy. These are not substitutes for official recognition. They are the foundation that makes official recognition possible, because they prove that the neighborhood’s vocabulary existed before the city got there and will persist whether or not the city acknowledges it.
The Covenant of Naming
Doña Carmen did not want an honorary street sign. She told me this before she died. She said the alley already had her name on it because people said it every day. She was right. The name lived in the mouths of the people who used the alley. That is where names belong—not on plaques, not in databases, not on marketing brochures, but in the daily speech of a neighborhood that knows itself.
The fight over what to call the alley behind Resurrection Church is not finished. The developer’s name is on the planning documents. Our name is on the lips of the rosary group at six o’clock in the morning. Both names exist. But only one will outlast the people who speak it. That is why documentation matters. That is why the binder matters. That is why photographing the signs matters. Because someday, the people who say el callejón de Doña Carmen will not be here to say it. And when that day comes, the question is whether the name survives in a record the community controls, or whether it vanishes into the official silence of a city that never learned to say it.
To name a place is to covenant with it. It is to say: I was here, I knew what this was, and I will not let it be renamed by someone who just arrived. That covenant is the work of the neighborhood, not the city. The city can put up a sign. The neighborhood holds the name. And the name, held in the daily speech of people who show up at six o’clock to pray and to buy pan dulce from the woman who has been there since before the developers were born—that name is the one that matters. Our job is to make sure it survives.