Archives in Common highlighted in Humanities for All
Peeling carrots and working on the Mutual Aid Timeline at La Morada. Image courtesy of Ángeles Donoso Macaya.
April 16, 2021
Archives in Common: Migrant Practices / Knowledge / Memory was formulated as the pandemic emerged. As a public humanities project, it has different overlapping goals, of which two of the most pressing are: 1) supporting, expanding, and helping to disseminate mutual aid initiatives devised by community activists through their audiovisual and textual documentation; and 2) facilitating spaces that foster the transmission, sharing, and dissemination of indigenous knowledges, practices, and memories. Conceptually, this project seeks to answer questions such as: How does one create an archive in common that is consistent with the mutual aid ethics? What purpose does this archive serve? Who are its publics? Archives in Common seeks to dismantle the walls that separate the public university from the communities that the university serves, hence the material answers to these questions—a work in progress—attempt to put in practice the notion of “the common.”
Archives in Common defines the archive not only as a place or as a series of operations, but also as a practice—one that allows us to create and imagine collaboratively, strengthening solidarity and mutual aid networks within our communities.
Constellation, Marco Saavedra, mixed-media collage. Image description: A mixed-media collage appears on a piece of what appears to be butcher paper. A cluster of printed-out black-and-white photographs of people and paintings appear surrounded by drawings and writing made in black permanent marker. The following figures appear surrounded by quotations, including Fenton Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Nina Simone, Claudia Muñoz, Natalia Méndez, Sor Juana, Romare Bearden, Franz Kafka, and W.E.B. DuBois among many others. (A complete image description is available at the bottom of this post).
Ángeles Donoso Macaya is a feminist immigrant educator, researcher, writer and
activist from Santiago, Chile, based in New York City. She is Professor
of Latin American Visual Studies in the Ph.D. Program in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cu...
Carolina Saavedra is an educator at Stone Barns Center’s, a non profit organization whose mission is to catalyze an ecological food culture. She is also the sous chef at La Morada
restaurant, where the Saavedra family fights to ensure equality and ...
La Morada restaurant is a South Bronx restaurant specializing in Oaxacan cuisine, with a lending library & a Poet in Residence, and is in solidarity with street vendors, Day laborers, restaurant workers, and undocumented esse.Throughout the Coronavir...
Artist & host Marco Saavedra was born in San Miguel Ahuehuetitlán in the indigenous Mixteca Baja region of Oaxaca. Due to poverty, hunger, and free trade agreements, his family was displaced into the United States. He has fought deportations, reporte...
