In another life Doña Junta said she might have been a librarian or an archivist. Hence her research skills. Today we’ll discuss some of her history, her time at Slanguage (the de facto art school and artist-run space in Wilmington CA.) and her drive to research and discuss architecture, institutional buildings including what's happening with those structures throughout Los Angeles. We’ll also highlight a couple of Beyond The Façade episodes; "The Sleepy Lagoon Murder and The Zoot Suit Riots: 78th Anniversary" and "Ghosts of Our Youth: Abandoned Institutions and the Impact on Los Angeles Youth"
Lia also known as "Doña Junta" is a former graffiti artist turned street archivist. Doña Junta runs the social media page swapmeet_chronicles which started off as an idea to highlight every day cultural happenings growing up in a Mexican household. The concept developed into a blog in 2007 in which Doña Junta documented the streets of Los Angeles from graffiti, personal stories, events, abandoned places AND MORE. Today, swapmeet_chronicles (with nearly 4,000 followers) evolved into research on the history of our streets, architecture of buildings, and social issues such as mass incarceration and prison advocacy through photos and research driven feature stories. In 2020, Doña Junta with co-host Sabrina Calderon created a podcast called Beyond the Façade to further discuss these places in detail and interview people who also create content in similar realms.
Doña Junta has combined her interest in architecture with some of her podcast episodes where she and her co-host discuss the historical issues surrounding these buildings. And this includes state carceral institutions - juvenile and adult - and the issues that have taken place there.
Her interest in these institutional buildings was also represented at the Slanguage exhibition: Ghosts of Our Youth: Abandoned Institutions and the Impact on Los Angeles Youth at Angels Gate Cultural Center in 2022. It included images of Juvenile Hall, alongside the video of her podcast discussion on how these institutions affected the youth that were there through the decades but particularly in the 80s and 90s.