Starting in 2015, MCM worked with the City of L.A.'s Great Streets Initiative through "Nuestra Avenida: César Chávez Reimaginada." Many of our members are based near Boyle Heights' Cesar E. Chavez Avenue, and there had been numerous fatal hit-and-runs there recently. We took the funding opportunity to spend time engaging with community members while LADOT added traffic calming designs to the street.

We led a yearlong community visioning process along the community corridor. We held art events, canvassed, collected surveys, and hosted sidewalk charrettes to engage local businesses, community organizations, and families. We aimed to create a shared vision for streetscape improvements that would address traffic safety issues in the community. Our collaborators included artist Dewey Tafoya, CALÓ YouthBuild, and From Lot To Spot. GoHuman helped fund the efforts as well. The gallery below shares photos from our 2016 work. 

With Self-Help Graphics & Art and the UCLA Urban Humanities Institute, MCM hosted several art-based workshops in 2016 to highlight the issues of safety and visibility of low-income cyclists and pedestrians of color. Both events used temporary public installations of life‐sized cutouts of team members and family-inclusive bike rides or walks.

On July 31, we facilitated a demonstration and art-making party at Mariachi Plaza in collaboration with residents and guided by artist Andi Xoch.

On October 29, we held a Day of the Dead/ Día de los muertos walking tour of the ofrendas at Grand Park. 

In academic year 2016-2017, Dr. Allison Mattheis, Assistant Professor of Education at Cal State LA, provided research support to MCM as a Faculty Fellow for the Public Good. Dr. Mattheis taught two MA courses in Fall 2016 where students used MCM as their case study. One course focused on politics and policy, the other on qualitative research methods. In Spring 2017, Dr. Mattheis coached two graduate students, Sivan Levaton and Anell Tercero, in synthesizing the course findings into a policy brief.

Dr. Allison Mattheis (center) with two students who presented a poster entitled "Gentrification and Transportation: Neoliberalism in Motion" at the February 2017 Cal State LA Student Research Symposium. The poster was based on research with MCM.

Dr. Mattheis' own research is on youth empowerment and how to bring marginalized voices into institutional spaces. Along with MCM team members Maryann Aguirre and Adonia Lugo, she co-authored a chapter about biking in East L.A. that was included in the 2017 book Anthropology of Los Angeles: Place and Agency in an Urban Setting.