Aug 13, 2019 Prof. Lourdes Alberto, Spring 2019 DM Faculty Grant

Dr. Lourdes Alberto is an indigenous Latina (Zapotec) scholar from Los Angeles, CA. An associate professor at the University of Utah, she holds a dual appointment in the Department of English and Division of Ethnic Studies. Dr. Alberto’s research employs a comparative Indigenous studies and Latina/o/x Studies approach to understand how race/ethnicity and colonialism work together to shape the cultural expressions, political and social realities of indigenous peoples and Latinos/as in the Americas.

In the depths of my project, I wheeled two suitcases into Marriott Library’s digital services office full of VHS tapes.

Working from the labels, we sorted and prioritized the order in which the videos would be digitized. In the coming weeks, I excitedly awaited to see what the films would reveal. The project, in some ways, had begun decades before when the Oaxacan activists began recording their communities’ activities. Digital Matters helped me recover, digitize, and build an indigenous Oaxacan archive based on the activism of female Oaxacan community members in Los Angeles between 1970 and 1990. My desire to recover and digitize was fueled by an urgency. The life-span of VHS tape is 8-10 years at which point the video quality begins to degrade. Some of the videos I was bringing to the lab, 30 years old. Thus, I called on my contacts in my own Yalaltecan community—a pueblo from the Southern state of Oaxaca—to begin to source and collect video archives.

Dancers from Yalalag, Oaxaca at Normandie Park in Los Angeles. Most dancers are US-born and wearing huipiles made in Yalalag.

When Michelle, digital archivist, transferred the first thirty some gigabytes of video from the first handful of tapes, the footage cracked opened for me bigger questions about indigeneity, archiving, and the ways Latino/a/x life unfolds in the US.

I had gone into Zapotec homes and asked community members to share the most intimate moments of their families and their pueblo’s most significant moments of indigenous life in Los Angeles. And this process demanded that we as digital archivists ask: What does it mean to build digital archives from and indigenous perspective? And because Mexican indigenous peoples are seen ethnically as Latina/o/x, I also had to ask what are the Latina/o/x archival ethics that frame our digital practices?

Upon competition of this first recovery of files, we now have hundreds of gigabytes of digitized films to preserve and examine. My initial examinations illustrate that indigenous Latino/a/x social and cultural activity are also political interventions into activity back home, in their pueblos. Indigenous mobility/migration is at the heart of the formation of these early indigenous archives. The digitizing of this archive can help us think more expansively about the decolonial, indigenous archives writ large, community/kinship and race/ethnicity and specifically address how ideas about gender and indigeneity within the contexts of migration, diaspora, and removal. Together, these lines of inquiry and the digitizing of this archive will offer a generative staring point for my future research as well as the fields of Indigenous, Native, Latin American, Latino/a/x studies.

And this process demanded that we as digital archivists ask: What does it mean to build digital archives from an indigenous perspective? And because Mexican indigenous peoples are seen ethnically as Latina/o/x, I also had to ask what are the Latina/o/x archival ethics that frame our digital practices?

Indigenous Latinos/as/xs are unique in that they move, as migrants, between two legacies of colonialism, British and Spanish, and the racial orders they produced.

As migrants, they negotiate contemporary racial orders (immigrant, foreigner, “illegal”), language (English and a second language, Spanish, and their indigenous languages). Thus, this project moves forward from that context. Employing a critical latinx indigeneities analytic, as put forth in indigenous studies in Maylei Blackwell, Luis Urrieta, Flori Boj Lopez’s and my own scholarship, that argues indigenous Latinas/os/ox exist within multiple settler colonial frameworks and racial orders the work of viewing and indexing the films begins. My hope is that we build an ever-growing digital archive of indigenous Latina/o/x life in the U.S. to place new media ecologies within indigenous cosmological perspectives.

Indigenous Latina/o/x Archives, in some ways, had begun decades before when the Oaxacan activists began recording their communities’ activities.

–Prof. Lourdes Alberto