The Art of Archival Activism: Youth Speculative Archiving through Spatial Histories in Chicago’s West Side

• In Event: Archive to Unforget: Educational Geographies of Remembering, Reclaiming & the Recovery of Our Collective Memory

Abstract

For today’s youth, learning about one's history and culture is not always a given in the classroom. Many schools are learning spaces void of any cultural or spatial connection, particularly for Black & Brown students. This paper details an action-based community based artivism & archivism program hosted by the One Lawndale Arts Activism Initiative that explored Black & Brown spatial histories through speculative youth archiving (Germinaro & Logan, 2025). Through key relationships with community organizations, students underwent a 10-week program designed to allow students to develop their relationship with their communities' spatial histories and envision their role in creating and setting history in real-time. Framing the program with the question of “what stories are missing from your community?”, we used a concept of critical fabulation or “speculative history, close narration, and documentary poetics. All are methods for engaging and remaking the document, for assembling and composing alternative narratives of Black existence” Hartman, 2021, p. 127). The Lawndale community is broken up into two sections based on geopolitical and sociohistorical figurative lines, also by racial demographics, North Lawndale and Little Village. We led with the fact that the space is both designated as one neighborhood by the city and therefore the needs of both communities are further neglected; tactics used to oppress these communities. Therefore, we introduced students to various community members, organizers and learning opportunities detailed by a speculative pasts pedagogy to uncover histories students carried with them in their families, lineages and relations to the neighborhood. We had a goal at the end of the program to build art based products that would establish a youth archive, one that will continue to tell the story of youth in Lawndale and contribute to the ongoing resistance of residents in North Lawndale and Little Village through archival reconstruction (Graham, 2019). Using student interviews, the authors were able to understand both the importance of locating a Black & Brown folks past in speculative youth work and how relationships are imperative to building an archive and skillset toward reclamation of history. Ultimately, this paper seeks to build knowledge toward answering the question: what's the role of youth in building a community archive? Specifically, how does a youth archive shift how we think about speculative YPAR work and the role of youth in community archiving and building out spatial histories?

References

Germinaro, K., & Logan Jr, A. (2025). Actualizing Black Spatial Histories Through a
Speculative Youth Archiving Project. Occasional Paper Series, 2025(53), 20-34.

Graham, M. (2019). Imagining the Archive: Speculation as a Tool of Archival Reconstruction.
Hartman, S. (2021). Intimate history, radical narrative. The Journal of African American
History, 106(1), 127-135.

Author

• Kaleb Germinaro, University of Illinois at Chicago