How does one recover marginalized histories of activist women/queer people of color that are unarchived, unrecorded, and/or exist at the edges of multiple archives? This presentation traces the adventure of building a digital exhibit of the 1979 Festival de Mujeres, a 1-day festival in Mexicana Chicago that helps shed light on the activities and networks of 1970s Latina feminisms in the city. With barriers of funding, retrieving 50 year old memories, stored photographic negatives and tape recordings, damaged posters, crumpled t-shirts, obituary notices, materials stored beneath mouse droppings, and identifying a digital home, the exhibit comes to life through love-- the love of former Festival participants and Latina feminists of different ages for their histories and the young and future generations who need and demand them. The anthropologist brings to this work the fieldwork and participant observation that builds the relationships demanded to access delicate memories and materials and to build such exhibits with community members that would be impossible without them. Such un-archived memories, materials, and digital exhibits also are subject to barriers of time required to encourage memories from their keepers who are long on activism and community contributions yet short on time and resources; findng adequte storage for archives that are not primarily paper (e.g., oversize artwork, old photographic negatives); finding a home for an exhibit of materials not stored in archives open to the public; and the central role of Catholic institutions in archiving Latino materials in the Chicago region. The Festival de Mujeres digital exhiit was made possible with the support of the US Latino Digital Humanities Center and is part of the Chicago Monuments Project.
https://usldhrecovery.uh.edu/exhibits/show/festival79
