While getting to the other side of the holiday season, my family picked up strep and pink eye. Then just as we were starting to get better, Los Angeles burst into flames. Thoroughout all of this I’ve been trying to finish up an essay for an application with a prompt related to place, power, community, and archives. In all the goings-ons I mis-read the prompt as asking for 1,000 WORDS, when in fact, it was asking for 1,000 CHARACTERS.
I felt pretty good about it (better than I do about the 1,000 character version I quickly chopped together!), so I’m going to post a blog-i-fied version of it here. It felt cathartic to write this, in lieu of non-stop refreshing a Google search for “los angeles fire” over and over again for a second day in a row.
Because I was trying to be professional in this essay, I did leave out my most gutteral, repeated thought during these last days: that LA is a stupid place, but I love it so deeply and dearly. And am heartbroken for my big-city-patchwork-of-neighborhoods community.
As I was completing the final touches on a draft description to outline my relationship to my work environment as place, wind swept embers into raging fires and upended my broader community. Los Angeles is a large city of neighborhoods, and although they can be distinct and unique, we are all still knit together and connected. The city has a long history of violent division and social disparities, but it is our differences that are also often part of the local beauty of this place. And we are united when we are all under threat.
I am not from Pacific Palisades or Altadena, but these microcommunities in my city community are still part of the interconnected body that make up the city at large. The thick chunks of ash sprinkling down on my neighborhood are pieces of someone’s home, someone’s sense of hope, someone’s sense of safety. Thankfully my rental abode retained power, and we weren’t under an evacuation order, but the pain of seeing those in your place, your city, have these things wrenched from them so quickly, and with such violent force – I cannot help but feel an ally in community. Although we are different and experiencing different things, we are together in pain for this physical environment we shared and the varied things that a place can promise us (whether real or illusioned).
We checked on coworkers and friends; many under evacuation orders. One friend watched her son’s preschool burn down on television. How do you retain a sense of place and community when the physical representation of that history goes up in smoke? There are many parts of the United States where the scars of history are not physically represented, but represented in intergenerational trauma and invisible scars that the bearers are not always even cognizant of. Our bodies are sites of history. The archival record can also provide a sense of place when geography is decimated.
Los Angeles is my adopted home, but my ancestors aren’t from here – neither indigenous nor early colonizing migrants. As a kid I lived in a few different states, and as a mixed race person, there is no one singular place that I belong to; where my whole self will be seen and recognized. My existence is a record of 20th century American imperial military incursions. Feeling unmoored can be personally challenging, but there is also power in not being anchored to a singular idea. I must make a future space for myself and my communities outside of the dominant historical, social/cultural boundaries of “race” and “ancestry” that American culture has defined as tools of political control and power.
As a teaching faculty librarian, I work with a student body that the government labels as “HSI” or a Hispanic-Serving Institution, which means at least 25% of our full-time equivalent campus undergraduate student body identifies as Hispanic or Latino. We also have deep pride on campus for the work of campus leaders (students and faculty) in the late 1960s in founding some of the earliest Chicana/Chicano and Africana Studies programs in the United States.
As instructional faculty, I sit by default in a position of power. I am not Latina or Black, yet the students in my classes often are. As a perceived white-only person, I call out our archives’ historical collecting problems, the bias in the collection development process, and our on-going (and endless) work related to reparative description. I allow myself to be vulnerable, and try to center the humanity of people represented in our archives, connecting students with the idea that their own histories are valuable, and that they have the power to shape new historical narratives that go against dominant white, heteronormative, male takes on the past.
What I want to convey to students is the need to understand where we are, who has historically defined our places, and the need to unmoor ourselves from what holds us back from transformation. The need to be comfortable with the unknown and the gray areas when things are not well defined, as we search for new ways of being and knowing. At the same time, I have to be careful with my default faculty power, and make sure to allow myself to be humble about what I do not know.
In the archival field we are trained to impose order over chaos; to label everything in a uniform and recognizable fashion; to make things findable, often at the cost of individual authenticity. Both in what I do with students, and in what I do in leading our archives unit’s accessioning and processing workflows, is with the aim to create a space where it is safe to question what is established. I want students to see archives as a fluid and conflicting space to interrogate, as well as a space where there is room for their own stories. In this same way I want our Archivist team to feel supported in doing work, while also having space to question established practices. To have empathy for past archival missteps, is to also make space for us to forgive our present missteps, priming a space for reflective growth.
Our work place is safe amidst these fires. As the firefighters work to control and dampen down the blazes, we must mourn, and prepare to reshape our sense of place and our relationship to one another in this sprawling city-community. We will need to remember and reflect, while also letting go to make room for more nuanced narratives. Archives can play a role in helping us do this work, as individuals, as members of broader and continually evolving communities, and as a nation.
As I am not “from” here, I sometimes forget that Los Angeles is my place too. But these catastrophic fires are a strong reminder that this IS my place, and I am in and of community here. I am lucky to be in my physical home tonight, but my heart is aching for my community home.
Illuminated Past 