For more than three decades, the Paso del Norte region—encompassing Ciudad Juárez, El Paso, and Las Cruces—has endured a persistent crisis of feminicide, gender-based violence, and disappearance. Families of victims have faced not only profound personal loss but also institutional neglect, failed investigations, and systematic archival erasure. Case files are often incomplete, inaccessible, or manipulated, while digital systems reproduce racialized, classed, and gendered exclusions rather than correcting them (Drive 2015; Fregoso and Bejarano 2010; Lagarde de los Ríos 2010; Lozano 2019; Monárrez Fragoso 2019). In response, mothers, activists, feminist collectives, and human rights defenders have created their own forms of memory work (Caswell 2021), documenting victims’ lives and the histories of anti-feminicide activism through what Catherine D’Ignazio (2024) calls counterdata. Their work represents both resistance and an alternative archive of memory. Over the years, families have built personal and collective archives that function as counter-archives, preserving the memory of the lives of victims and the histories of feminist resistance.

Fuerza Feminista: Intimate Recovery and Memory Archive (FFIRMA) (Fernández and Bejarano 2025) is a transborder, community-engaged digital humanities project that emerges from these conditions. Developed through collaboration among faculty, students, activists, and community advisors from the U.S.-Mexico border region, FFIRMA has, since 2019, documented and preserved the testimonies, personal archives, and political histories of activists leading the struggle against feminicide in Chihuahua and across the borderlands. The project includes more than thirty oral history interviews, alongside personal collections, legal documents, protest ephemera, and other community materials. Together, these form a bilingual, multimodal, postcustodial digital repository grounded in care, accountability, and community sovereignty.

This paper examines FFIRMA as a model for rethinking digital humanities and memory work across borders—not simply as acts of preservation, but as ethical, political, and methodological practices in the digital and AI era. Positioned within the DH2026 theme of “Remembering,” the paper asks what it means to remember across fractured archival infrastructures, systemic violence, and histories of transnational solidarity. It argues that digital memory projects must confront the structural conditions that erase marginalized communities and social justice movements from official archives while supporting community-rooted forms of data stewardship, narrative control, and epistemic autonomy.

The presentation first situates the historical emergence of feminicide in the Paso del Norte region, showing how failures in documentation expose deep weaknesses in nation-state memory infrastructures. Families frequently discover that official records are contradictory, incomplete, or entirely missing. At the same time, feminist and human rights archives connected to anti-violence movements have often been displaced into special collections and institutions in the United States rather than preserved locally within the communities where these struggles emerged. This crisis of memory is not accidental; it reflects institutional systems that privilege bureaucratic efficiency over accountability and human dignity.

A second focus of the paper introduces FFIRMA’s conceptual framework of transborder digital archaeology. Rooted in feminist relationality, postcustodial archival practice, and community-driven data ethics, this methodology examines how memory moves across geopolitical, archival, linguistic, generational, and epistemic borders. It asks who carries memory, who is responsible for its stewardship, and how digital humanities can avoid reproducing extractive research models or violent representations of border communities.

Transborder digital archaeology approaches memory as layered, embodied, and relational. Rather than treating family materials as artifacts to extract, FFIRMA understands them as living archives requiring consent, trust, and ongoing collaboration. The project emphasizes long-term relationships with activists and families, bilingual and bicultural data practices, community control over digitization, care-centered workflows, and critical discussions about the impact of digital technologies and artificial intelligence. These practices expand understandings of digital humanities methodology by centering care, sovereignty, and relational accountability across the Global North and South.

One of FFIRMA’s central contributions is its documentation of intimate archiving: the everyday and deeply personal practices through which families preserve memory when institutions fail them. These archives include photographs, notebooks, protest banners, testimonies, legal annotations, and personal artifacts gathered through marches, demonstrations, and community organizing. Intimate archiving restores personhood and complexity to victims whose lives are often reduced to statistics or forensic categories within state systems. FFIRMA collaborates with families to digitize and contextualize selected materials while ensuring communities retain authority over their representation and circulation.

In doing so, FFIRMA challenges assumptions embedded in UNESCO’s “Memory of the World” framework, particularly the idea that memory is preserved primarily through stable institutions and neutral infrastructures. FFIRMA instead demonstrates that marginalized communities sustain memory through relational networks, grassroots activism, and collective witnessing. Memory is not passively stored; it is actively maintained through struggle, care, and political commitment.

As a bilingual digital platform housing testimonios, digitized collections, and curated editions, FFIRMA foregrounds community sovereignty at every stage. Contributors determine what can be digitized, what remains private, how materials are contextualized, and how their voices appear in metadata and narrative framing. By rejecting extractive archival norms, the project resists transforming community memory into institutional property and instead models forms of community-controlled digital memory aligned with broader conversations on Indigenous Data Sovereignty and archival justice.

Finally, the paper situates FFIRMA within global discussions on social justice movements, ethical digital humanities, and archival justice. It argues that the “Memory of the World” also exists within the lived and intimate archives maintained by communities historically pushed to the margins. FFIRMA demonstrates how transborder digital humanities can resist archival erasure, support community autonomy, foster transnational solidarity, and restore dignity to victims of systemic violence.

Ultimately, this paper argues that remembering in digital humanities is never neutral. It is shaped by the politics of data, the violence of nation-state archives, and the relational practices of communities fighting for justice. FFIRMA offers a model for constructing alternative infrastructures of memory that affirm lives, resist erasure, and reimagine the Memory of the World from the ground up in the cultural (digital) record.