This project examines neighborhood signage across Los Angeles County through the intersection of data visualization, data justice, and semantics, the study of how signs produce meaning. The project investigates how physical signage simultaneously reveals and obscures Los Angeles cultural, racial, and socioeconomic reality. The central research question asks how everyday visual markers encode systems of power, representation, and exclusion within urban spaces. In my role as a lifelong resident of Los Angeles County, I construct a situated dataset by documenting signage personally encountered across the neighborhoods where I have lived, attended school, and worked. Rather than assuming neutrality, the methodology foregrounds lived experience as a valid and critical mode of data collection, particularly in its reflection of working-class life through the city. The project systematically categorizes and visualizes patterns in signage by analyzing variations in typography, language use, materiality, frequency, and spatial distribution. Distinctions such as multilingual versus English-only text, institutional branding versus hand-painted lettering, and permanent versus ephemeral materials are examined as indicators of uneven investment, cultural visibility, and state presence. The findings demonstrate that signage operates as a non-neutral visual system that encodes disparities in economic resources, historical representation, and political attention.

This research exposes racialized ICE enforcement patterns in Los Angeles County, documenting how immigration enforcement systematically targets immigrant laborers rather than individuals who pose public safety threats, directly contradicting federal priority classifications. Drawing on six data sources, including the Deportation Data Project, oral histories from over 25 community members at the Refugee Children Center, CLEAN Carwash Worker Center tracking data, Home Depot day labor site documentation, HILL Rapid Response Network records, and media bias analysis, the research reveals how labor itself has been weaponized as a site of immigration control. Findings document at least 368 car wash workers taken across 106 raids and 133 day laborers detained at Home Depot sites in the Inglewood, Hawthorne, and Lennox corridor, the majority with no criminal record. Custom Python visualizations and community-collaborative mapping translate enforcement data into accessible, justice-centered analysis. Grounded in a decolonized, data justice framework and the researcher's positionality as an immigrant and UCLA Data Justice Hub Scholar, the presentation centers community voice, elevates grassroots resistance, and situates rapid response networks and worker centers as emerging peace strategies in an ongoing conflict between federal enforcement and impacted communities.