For Laura Dominguez ’12, ’23, the built environment is never just physical space. Buildings, monuments and neighborhoods also reflect whose stories a society chooses to preserve and whose it leaves out.

That idea has guided Dominguez’s work across historic preservation, public history and scholarship. Now, as a National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute (EMSI), she is helping lead LA2026, a citywide initiative examining the nation’s 250th anniversary through the lens of Los Angeles.

Working with EMSI Director of Programs Amy Braden and six local institutions — including the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Mission San Gabriel Arcángel and the Autry Museum of the American West — Dominguez is helping organize 18 public conversations, both in person and online. The programs will explore questions of democracy, belonging and historical memory, asking how national ideals have been experienced, challenged and reimagined in L.A.

“What do the Declaration of Independence’s ideas mean to us here in L.A.? How do we live them? How do we challenge them?” asks Dominguez, a native of the San Gabriel Valley.

The series reflects Dominguez’s long-standing interest in how history is publicly remembered. She earned a master’s degree in historic preservation from the USC School of Architecture in 2012, then spent years working with nonprofits in San Francisco and L.A. Again and again, she saw how the histories of many communities were overlooked in preservation work.

“Fortunately, I entered the field at a moment of reckoning,” Dominguez says. “People were beginning to recognize the exclusionary aspects of memory work.”

In 2014, she co-founded Latinos in Heritage Conservation, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving Latinx places, stories and cultural heritage while challenging narrow ideas about what counts as “American” history.

At the encouragement of USC Dornsife historian William Deverell, divisional dean for the social sciences, Dominguez returned to USC to pursue a PhD in the history of the United States. Her dissertation examined memory and heritage work in L.A. from the late 1700s to the early 2000s.

Rather than follow a conventional academic path, Dominguez chose to focus on public-facing scholarship that connects rigorous research with civic life. Mentors including Deverell and EMSI Director Peter Mancall supported that ambition. Along the way, she joined the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office Civic Memory Working Group and was a Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow with the National Park Service before taking on her role with LA2026.

“We understand people will have a range of reactions to America 250,” Dominguez says. “By creating space for people to have intimate, meaningful conversations, we’re bringing distinct perspectives to light, modeling ways to have healthy disagreement about the past and showing there’s no one way to think about our nation’s history.”