Blurred Borders: Creating a Partially Private Digital Archive with Public Visual Representation

• In Event: Politics and Possibilities of Collage as Archive: Centering Anticolonial Methods

Abstract

Archives documenting the experiences of folks of Mexican descent have seen renewed attention in recent years with Chicana feminist contributions like those of Blackwell’s (2011) Chicana Power! and Hurtado’s (2020) Intersectional Chicana Feminisms, as a few examples. With it, there’s a complementary call to incorporate conversations around class, race, and gender. I engage questions toward an archive that focuses on the range of experiences shaped by time and experiences of living within and along different borders of the US. When considering the Mexican descent population of the area(s), each locale is shaped by a unique history – including ongoing and distinct forms of racialization, immigration history, movements, solidarities and antagonisms, labor, schooling, and policing. Engaging these particularities in research and in classrooms offers us a chance to interrogate the oft taught Mexican/Chicano Studies narratives, and question the supposed universality within the group, acknowledging anti-indigeneity, anti-Blackness, and heteronormativity.

This research adds to a longer feminist Mexican/Chicana/e archive through public visual representation and mostly anonymized transcripts curated only for members of the extended community. I aim to re-envision archival components, creating this project as a visual arts and artifact filled public piece. The public facing piece is complementary to a semi-private community textual/oral archive. With the creation of a arts-based website housing artifacts and art, along with selected quotes and passages, as a representation of the archive in lieu of solely texts - I ask what the archive can mean for historical memory when made and limited specifically for those who understand our familial, cultural, and historical lineages.

The goal through this archival creation is to highlight facets of everyday women’s self-representation through visual representation of their narratives and artifacts. How do narrators share their own stories and identities, as well as what that looks like through a digital platform. I bring forward methodological nuances of oral history and ethnographic research (drawing from Sanchez Carmen, 2024; Author 1, 2023b; Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016). This research elevates oral histories of women of Mexican descent who range in age from 20 to 80 years old (n=12); inspired and guided by Anzaldúan conceptualizations of borderlands as generative third spaces (1987). Though critical of universalized histories and one-size-fits-all theorizations - the analysis explores transformation of geographic and cultural borderlands and those within them over the decades. A public facing website includes the exploration of broad themes and concepts emergent across the oral histories, and will include vignettes/excerpts from the oral histories. I aspire to complicate an already existing archive, and to compare across geographic locations women(x) relationships to activisms and movidas, defined not as “big M” Movements, but as everyday acts and histories to remember (Espinoza, Cotera, & Blackwell, 2018).

Author

• Allison Cabana, Graduate Center - CUNY