Digital Archives as Relationship-Building: Reflections on Worldmaking in Community-Based Latin American and Caribbean Diasporic Memory Work in Southern California

<p>While participatory digital methods for conducting archival research and practice have contributed in meaningful ways to discourses on rebalancing power asymmetries in archival partnerships between academics and communities, this work has yet to effectively disrupt the status quo. Using a transdisciplinary approach I reflect on my first-hand experiences working in partnership with U.S. Latin American and Caribbean diasporic groups on personal digital memory projects as an active member and founder of ImaginX en Movimiento (IXeM) Memory Collective and draw on women of color feminism, Indigenous perspectives, and anti-colonial/decolonial theories that reflect the embodiment of memory to offer an alternative methodological tool for regenerating community-academic archival partnerships. Building on these various bodies of knowledge, my dissertation demonstrates how a digital archives praxis rooted in relationality can help transform structural power dynamics in the archive. Most powerfully, it opens up space to imagine and enact alternative ways of being together that allow for collective liberation. While academic-community partnerships will always remain entangled in issues of power, authority, and control, there are possibilities to further equity and justice through a digital archives praxis of relationality.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Cultural Studies, PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Restricted to Claremont Colleges Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

School of Arts and Humanities

Year dc:date.available

2022

Author dc:creator

• Hicks-Alcaraz, Marisa

Contributors dc:contributor

• David-Luis Brown
• JoAnna Poblete
• Angela Aguayo

• Caribbean
• community
• diaspora
• digital archives
• Latin American
• relationality

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/448

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarship.claremont.edu:cgu_etd-1479