Community archives are independent grassroots identity-based memory organizations where minoritized communities come together to document their own histories.

Michelle Caswell, Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge, 2021).

While theories and practices of community archives are at the heart of recent developments in archival studies, digital humanities has been slow to engage with community archives, instead focusing on work done by faculty centered at universities. This short paper investigates how digital humanities tools and community-engaged participatory action methods can be harnessed in support of cultural autonomy at community archives. Using the process of creating the “Resurrecting El Barrio” StoryMap as an example and framed as a demonstration of archival care ethics, this paper argues that DH projects can decenter academic outputs in favor of community cultural autonomy. Such projects are designed to meet the needs of a specific community rather than a broad and vague “public.”

The “Resurrecting El Barrio” StoryMap was conceived in 2024 and launched in 2025 by community-based archive La Historia Historical Society and a faculty member ( name redacted for peer review). Governed by a board of community members and powered by mostly volunteer labor, La Historia documents the history of Mexican American farm working communities in El Monte, east of Los Angeles.

South El Monte Arts Posse, “East of East: Mapping Community Narratives”, https://semapeastofeast.com

Until “urban renewal” forced their demolition in the 1970s, El Monte was divided into six historic barrios, segregated makeshift communities that were simultaneously thriving Mexican American cultural centers and sites of municipal neglect. Hicks Camp was one such barrio. Now long demolished, it exists only in the memories of its former residents and the archival records they steward.

On a class visit to La Historia, the PI of this project noted a display of a detailed hand-drawn map of Hicks Camp. Pushpins and pieces of yarn linked sites on the map to historic photographs that evidenced homes, businesses, community centers, schools, and playgrounds that no longer exist. The display constituted a networked map of the community’s collective historic imagination. In explaining the map, La Historia’s Executive Director Rosa Peña mentioned the desire to digitize it to make it more accessible and interactive. Working collaboratively, the two successfully applied for university funding to hire two MLIS students from the community to launch the “Resurrecting El Barrio” StoryMap. Not only does the project feature digitized historic photographs of Hicks Camp, but students are currently making plans to solicit feedback and records oral histories from former Hicks Camp residents at La Historia’s annual upcoming menudo breakfast. The project is a significant departure from much of La Historia’s work which is done largely onsite, in-person, with analog materials as a deliberate choice that enables community members to control the narrative about its past. As such, it is key for community members themselves to direct this project, making key decisions about what records get digitized and made accessible online.

Created in response to community needs, Resurrecting El Barrio does not use the technological resources of the university. Nor does it require digitized records be placed in a university repository. Instead, guided by the principles of cultural autonomy and rooted in community archives principles, it redirects university resources and paid student labor to increase the capacity of a community archives to serve the needs of a minoritized community. Resurrecting El Barrio is built on the nine key principles the Reciprocity for Researching Records Collaborative proposed for building mutually beneficial relationships between academic researchers and community archivists: relational consent; mutual benefit; investment; humility; accountability; transparency; equity; reparation; and amplification.

Reciprocity in Researching Records Collaborative, “Come Correct of Don’t Come at All,” https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7v00k2qz.

The project is driven by the needs of La Historia and the digital resource it has created belongs to that community archive. Likewise, the projects’ budget reflects equity, as funding pays for staff at La Historia, the labor of students from Mexican American communities, and community events. As such, the project fosters collaboration, builds trust, and honors community-held knowledge.

While this is a small prototype in its initial phase, the project has big lessons for how digital humanities as a field conceives of public engagement. Rather than seeing the general public as a receptive audience to which knowledge is disseminated at the end of project, Resurrecting El Barrio positions a very specific minoritized community as creators of knowledge engaged in every step of the project, from conceptualization to dissemination. As a step towards equity, university resources are redirected to support the capacity of a community archives to make autonomous decisions about how it wants to be represented in a digital space.

Furthermore, archival care ethics are at the root of this project. As Resurrecting El Barrio demonstrates, digital humanities projects can catalyze relationships of care between academics and communities, between community members and the archives that serve and represent them, and between older and younger generations. Digital tools do not need to be sophisticated and costly for these relationships to thrive.

The project aims to have an impact on elders in La Historia’s community, who will generate new historical knowledge that can be passed down to younger generations, who will then be able to see themselves in history. This sense of representational belonging counters the symbolic annihilation Mexican American communities in El Monte’s history. Furthermore, beyond El Monte, this project serves as a model for how digital humanities tools can support community needs to digitally recreate lost geographies, particularly as an increasing number of communities are displaced due to the inequitable impacts of environmental crisis and war.