Chronicling Architecture, Art & Social Justice with Street Archivist Doña Junta from swapmeet_chronicles to the Beyond The Facade Podcast

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.