Leonel Flores: Community organizing for clean air

Sara Tiersma
March 19, 2025

In the heart of Santa Ana’s Madison Park neighborhood, vibrant new murals are emerging, each depicting the neighborhood’s story of resilience and community spirit. Inspired by the murals that adorn downtown Santa Ana, the project’s organizer, Leonel Flores, saw an opportunity to bring this cultural expression closer to home. With grant support, he leads the efforts to create murals filled with symbols like marigolds for tradition, jacaranda blooms for transformation and the vibrant green parrots that have settled in urban Santa Ana representing migration and adaptability. Collectively, the murals reflect the spirit of the people who have made the area their home.

For Leonel, who has called Madison Park home for over 30 years, these murals represent more than just art—they symbolize a journey of empowerment and environmental justice. As a resident and through his work, he has witnessed the community’s heart and resilience, as well as its struggles as an underserved neighborhood. Madison Park faces persistent challenges, such as disproportionate environmental burdens, including factories bordering residential streets creating poor air quality.

Leonel first began volunteering with his local Madison Park Neighborhood Association (MPNA) as a high school student, wanting to help make his neighborhood a better place to live. He was the first recipient of the organization’s Textbook Scholarship in 2011, helping fund a portion of his tuition as he graduated high school and left to continue his education at UCLA.

Though college wasn’t a smooth transition—he had to take breaks along the way—Leonel persisted, earning his undergraduate degree in Sociology with a minor in Chicano Studies in 2018. Equipped with his degree, he returned to the Madison Park neighborhood to figure out what was next. He reconnected with the MPNA and they offered him a job: how would he like to start doing environmental justice work for their new organization Getting Residents Engaged in Empowering Neighborhoods – Madison Park Neighborhood Association (GREEN-MPNA)?

Leonel didn’t have any background in environmental justice—he barely knew anything about it—but what he did know was his community, and that prepared him to take on the work. He stepped into that role and now serves as the Program Manager for GREEN-MPNA, managing projects like the mural initiative and the Comunidad Unida Aire Limpio (CUAL) committee, which brings together high schoolers, college students and local adults to tackle air quality issues and push for environmental justice.

Through his role as Program Manager, Leonel became deeply aware of the air quality issues affecting Madison Park and the organization’s efforts to address them. One of his proudest victories came in 2019 when he and local partners successfully delayed Santa Ana’s General Plan update, buying time to push for the adoption of 77 new environmental justice policies that hold city officials accountable for the community’s health. 

Personally, though, the mural project holds a special sense of accomplishment for Leonel. He had noticed the murals, which seemed to be everywhere now in downtown Santa Ana, didn’t really extend outside the center of the city. This absence of public art in his own neighborhood fueled his desire to take on the project, creating a visual celebration of his vibrant community and reflecting GREEN-MPNA’s mission to foster the growth and wellbeing of the neighborhood.

“The mural tells the story of our community, our environmental justice work and all the obstacles our residents have had to overcome,” shares Leonel. “It represents our journey to create a better quality of life for our families.”

Looking forward, Leonel dreams of a greener, healthier neighborhood. He’s pushing for more buffer zones and green spaces to keep industrial pollution away from homes. Through “toxic tours,” he invites people from outside the neighborhood to witness firsthand how pollution affects everyday life in Madison Park, from factories bordering backyards to the invisible haze in the air. Inspired by cities like London, which transformed from one of the most polluted in the world to a model of clean air solutions, Leonel believes Santa Ana can do the same.

GREEN-MPNA has empowerment in the name because everything they do aims to empower and enhance their community. As Leonel believes, “Everybody deserves to have clean air.”

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Sara Tiersma is a senior at the University of California, Irvine, where she is majoring in Literary Journalism. She is a 2024-2025 WUICAN Climate Communications Fellow with the UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI).

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WUICAN acknowledges our presence on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Acjachemen and Tongva Peoples, who still hold strong cultural, spiritual and physical ties to this region.