In January 2017, the Women’s March LA Foundation organized one of the largest intersectional women’s marches in the United States joining the legacy of social justice and civil rights marches in Los Angeles. This “occupation of space” represented a diverse and inclusive intersectional feminist space in the streets of LA becoming an annual feature of LA public life in January 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.

In the summer of 2019, The Women’s March LA Foundation’s Emiliana Guereca collaborated with artist Leda Ramos, a WMLA volunteer since its founding, to co-produce the Dolores Huerta Square Unveiling and Street Fair to honor the legacy of labor and civil rights leader Dolores Huerta with musician Alice Bag in partnership with Council District 14 in Boyle Heights.

Immediately following the dedicated “Dolores Huerta Square” in Boyle Heights, it became clear to the WMLA Foundation that what followed was to formally advocate for the naming of “Dolores Huerta Street” as the city of Los Angeles inequitably has almost no streets named after women apart from a few streets named for Hollywood actresses in or around the film studio areas of LA. Herein lies the roots and beginning of the WMLA Foundation’s Feminist Street Initiative: Reclaiming Our Streets, Justice, and Historical Memory with Leda Ramos named as project lead for this initiative.

The Feminist Street Initiative: Reclaiming Our Streets, Justice, and Historical Memory aims to include Indigenous, Black and POC women to the roster of over 50,000 streets in LA County and Pasadena. WMLA looks primarily at Los Angeles in the reclaiming of historical public memory but also women critical to U.S. labor, culture, and social justice history. The Feminist Street Initiative (for short) will make visible the names and intersectional public history of art, labor, and social justice organizers including Dolores Huerta, Toypurina, Biddy Mason, Octavia Butler, Emma Tenayuca, Luisa Moreno, Fannie Lou Hamer, Grace Boggs, Ella Baker, Gloria Anzaldua, and more. These are women who have contributed to community building and community formation primarily in Los Angeles and whose legacy we have inherited beyond Los Angeles.

Leda Ramos is an artist and faculty labor union organizer and teaches Latinx Art, Film and Visual Culture in the Chicana(o) and Latina(o) Studies Department at Cal State LA. She is Director of the Central American Memoria Histórica Archive Project at Cal State LA and artist/co-curator of the exhibition, “Central American Families: Networks & Cultural Resistance,” JFK Memorial Library (2018–2019). Ramos’ art and social justice projects include: the WMLA Feminist Street Initiative: Reclaiming Our Streets, Justice, and Historical Memory; LatinxFaculty4BlackLivesMatter; Dolores Huerta Square and Street Fair (2019); Graphic Design For the People with artist Eileen Herrera since 2016; Guest editor, Izote Vos: A Collection of Salvadoran American Writing and Visual Art (2000); Artist and Organizer, FORO 2000 Poetry/Performance Cultural Exchange, El Salvador (2000); Leda Ramos + Alessandra Moctezuma Installations: “Between Home and Work,” Hidden Labor: Uncovering L.A.’s  Garment Industry, Common Threads Artists and UNITE (1998-1997); We are Vendors, Not Criminals/Somos Vendedores, No Criminales (1997);  and Living Room installation, L.A. Freewaves Video Festival and Exhibition at the Geffen Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles with ADOBE LA (Architects, Artists and Designers Opening Up the Border Edge of Los Angeles) in 1996.

Ramos is the former Director of Education at the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) from 1998–2001, where she designed poetry, film, and art workshops with visiting artists for youth in Pico-Union. She led the Central American community engagement research with Belmont high school youth for the Migration of the Golden People community mural, in collaboration with artists Judy Baca and Pete Galindo, Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). She was a College Art Association Fellow at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities Research Project: “L.A. as Subject: The Transformative Culture of L.A. Communities (1997). Ramos’ public art is written about in several publications including, Space, Site and Intervention: Situating Installation Art. Minnesota Press (2000). She has an M.F.A. from Rutgers University.