In 2015, the relatively young nation of Timor-Leste piloted a project to ‘officialize’ their street names. Beginning with a modest list of 91 street names within the densely-populated capital city, the project grew to incorporate just over 2,000 street names throughout the country by the end of its first-round completion in 2018. Recent work (Fabiszak et al. 2021) has demonstrated the analytical strength of considering both (1) the ideologies inscribed in the streetscape by street-naming and (2) the processes by which these inscriptions are sanctioned as two complimentary interpretative tools. In both cases, the strength of the ideological inscription can be understood as scalar, with certain inscriptions indexing more ideologically-motivated goals than others. Especially in cases of extreme political upheaval, street names, changes to them, and the process of change take on historical significance as they become part of the story of a nation. In Timor-Leste in particular, which has been the host of 4 very different regimes within the last 50 years, changes in street names have never been pragmatically-motivated. Using critical multimodal discourse analysis of legal documents and news media, as well as some evidence from the linguistic landscape, this paper looks at three very different re-namings in Timor-Leste’s capital city (1999, 2011, 2018), the processes which promulgated those changes, and takes Fabiszak and Buchstaller’s framework a step further by arguing for the inclusion of a third component in the ideological analysis of street (re)-naming: the public’s response.