Safekeeping Community Stories

This workshop co-hosted by CAHAAS (the Central American Historical and Ancestral Society) and ESMoA (the Experimentally Structured Museum of Art). The program is focused on understanding strategies to preserve family histories, collective memory, and the heirlooms that help tell their story. It will cover such topics as digitization, accessible conservation methods, ancestry research, and oral histories. Facilitated by ESMoA’s Communication Manager Bryan Puerta, cultural memory worker and practitioner Claudia Portillo (CAHAAS) will lead discussions regarding the importance of a community and family-oriented archival practice in the pursuit of safeguarding more robust and comprehensive cultural, urban, and art histories for LA’s Latinx populations. Researcher Jasmine Magaña (Getty Research Institute) and conservator Ronel Namde (Getty Research Institute) will assist with leading sections on tools and best practices for digitization and conservation. 

In dialogue with the Getty Museum’s presentation of Instante/revelación: Moments in Mexican Photography, the workshop addresses the practices of collecting, archiving, and storytelling, broadening the scope for whose stories are preserved, in what manner, and by whom. Participants will be asked to bring in an heirloom from their personal or family archives (photographs, letters, ephemera, small object etc.) and be guided through the process of recording an object-based oral history and generating metadata. Participants will leave with digital copies of all the documents they create stored on a USB drive as well as a sample archival enclosure for a photograph or document. 

This workshop is part of CAHAAS's community engagement and cultural activism, advancing its mission to contribute and promote a broader understanding of the collective history of the Central American diaspora. By partnering with ESMoA, CAHAAS is working towards strong partnerships with other organizations equally invested in working alongside communities to bridge the cultural knowledge gap. ESMoA operates on a simple premise: art belongs to everyone, and a museum earns its place in a community by being useful to it. Its mission is to act as a catalyst for creative thinking in the South Bay and greater Los Angeles, provoking visitors to "Reimagine Creativity" through public programs that are always free and built with neighbors, schools, and local organizations rather than for them. Underlying that work is a belief that cultural institutions hold a real responsibility not only to display work but also to make room for the knowledge and memory already present in the surrounding communities.