Home Movie Remezcla: “Doing Good Relations” as an Approach to Archival Healing

In 2018, my cousin and I attended Home Movie Day at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles—an annual event coordinated by the Center for Home Movies that celebrates amateur film and filmmaking. Each year, Home Movie Day events organized across the globe welcome the public to share their personal home movies in a day-long community screening. A cheerful event, we watched perhaps a dozen short films projected on the large auditorium screen showing fuzzy images of family trips to Disneyland, a day at the beach, and a children’s birthday party. The resonance was particularly strong as I listened to the enthusiastic stories shared by those whose home movies were projected. At the same time, the event left me with a longing for the scenes captured in my own home movies, featuring my family’s conversations in Spanish and Christmas tamale-making traditions. Moreover, the inadvertent exclusion created a facade of homogeneity in one of the most racially and ethnically diverse counties in the United States, where Latiné residents comprise the majority at 49 percent.¹ Although not surprised by the absence of Latinés, on the screen or in the audience, the experience still left me rather crushed.²

Latinés living in the United States have documented their everyday experiences through amateur filmmaking since the 1920s. For instance, the home movie collection of Corpus Christi, Texas, residents Antonio Rodríguez Fuentes (1895–1988) and Josefina Barrera Fuentes (1898–1993) spans from the 1920s to the 1930s. The films feature scenes of the Fuentes children playing sports, celebrating Christmas morning, and showcasing Mexican American border life, parades, and community organizing.³ This documentation offers valuable insight into the Texas-Mexico border, challenging mainstream depictions of it as a persistent site of violence, drug cartels, criminality, and poverty.

A recent report by UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Institute reveals that US Latinés and Latin American diasporas currently account for a quarter of the US population and are projected to be nearly one-third in thirty-five years, as well as the fastest growing population in the United States.⁴ Concurrently, Latinés in the United States face the highest levels of violent hate crimes since 1991, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation began collecting and publishing hate crime data.⁵ Incidents such as a Latino man having acid thrown in his face, being called an “illegal,” and told to “go back to his country”; viral videos of Latiné families being harassed with racially loaded insults; and the deadliest mass shooting in recent history in the border town of El Paso targeting Latinés and immigrants have contributed to alarming levels of fear and anxiety.⁶ These stressors are exacerbated by today’s sociopolitical climate characterized by violent anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric toward Latin American immigrants, contributing to the rise of deaths of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border in harsh and remote locations.⁷

Anti-immigrant laws and policies are entrenched in a long history of structural racism and discrimination in the United States, rooted in the legacies of coloniality, slavery, and segregation.⁸ In their study on the emotional and psychological effects of racial discrimination in US-born Latinés and Latin American adolescent migrants, Torres and colleagues point to the decades of institutional racism.⁹ These incidences of anti-Latiné violence include experiences of mob lynching from 1848 to 1928, forced deportation of Mexican-origin American citizens in 1920 to 1930, and segregated “Mexican schools” in the 1940s, contributing to forms of historical or intergenerational trauma.¹⁰ Today, as in the past, Latinés continue to experience the effects of violent legacies of colonial power relations in the Americas through multiple modes of harm that also include archival silences, disappearances, and distortions of marginalized voices.

The concept we commonly refer to as an “archive” is distinctly rooted in Western ideology. Organizing information is shaped by culturally specific practices, with the archive originally serving as a supreme technology in absolute monarchies and powerful empires. In contemporary contexts, the archive predominantly reflects Euro-American information organization, intertwining the archive with the colonial endeavors in the Americas.¹¹ Colonizers have frequently used archives and archival science to exert dominance, control, or erase Indigenous peoples, along with their cultures, histories, identities, and ways of life. While the archive may always remain entangled in the power dynamics of colonial, totalitarian, and apartheid apparatuses, the act of reclaiming ancestral cultural traditions and fostering the imaginative spirit of survival and adaptation opens up new spaces of encounter and resistance. More recently, digital archives initiatives have emerged as important spaces for solidarity and community building. In particular, cultural traditions of story sharing play a key role in establishing, strengthening, and deepening connections among individuals and communities—acknowledging these practices acknowledges the profound impact of stories in shaping relationships, conveying experiences, and enhancing overall well-being for historically marginalized groups.¹²

In response to historical and contemporary anti-Latiné violence in the United States, this article underscores the critical need not only to recover Latiné narratives but to approach this effort through a relational framework grounded in culturally specific, context-dependent memory traditions. Specifically, I glean insights on my early collaborations with individuals in my own personal networks to digitize and remix a home movie from their collection with clips from video recorded “testimonios,” a method used by US Latiné feminist scholars to center marginalized voices originating from a Latin American oral tradition. This early work informs the goals of the Home Movie Remezcla project, a critical digital humanities initiative I currently facilitate that seeks to center stories of everyday lived experiences of Latinés rooted in “doing good relations” to resist and transform harmful relational patterns within archival practices that affect us all.

This project embodies interconnected relational principles, including regular communication, reciprocity, and accountability, creating spaces for collectively imagining and enacting alternative ways of existence eroded by colonialism, capitalism, and, more recently, neoliberalism. This approach seeks not only to initiate and sustain vital interdependent networks through skills building, resource sharing, and the fostering of social connections among participants but also to address systemic injustices and advocate for broader social and policy changes.

Archiving is fundamentally centered on relationships—relationships with objects, people, time, place, space, and so on. As noted by Jeanette Bastian in the article “Mine, Yours, Ours: Archival Custody from Transaction to Narrative,” these relationships continually undergo reexamination to realign with contemporary record keeping and societal needs.¹³ Bastian explains that debates about foundational archival principles and practices began in earnest in the twentieth century as new critical modes of thinking within and outside of the archival field, coupled with radical technological developments in records creating and keeping, introduced archivists to new ways of conceptualizing their roles in relationship to the records they assessed and preserved. This scrutiny has only intensified in the twenty-first century with growing concerns connected to critical issues of social justice and personal rights, as well as the emergence of community-initiated and controlled archives.¹⁴ While this repositioning of basic archival principles has contributed to an array of alternative models (community-based, participatory, shared stewardships) aimed at resolving issues of control over community records, these approaches are still premised on an assumed entitlement to the cultural knowledge of historically oppressed communities, continuing to appear as stewardship, access, and rights.

Alternatively, placing relationality—an approach that emphasizes the significance of relationships and connections in shaping experiences, identities, and societal structures—at the center of archival theories and practices provides more nuanced analysis of how power operates. Rather than solely focus on oppressive power structures, relationality grounded in Latiné feminism explores the transformative potential within relationships as sites of communal resistance and healing from historical injustices. Collective action and mutual support become strategies to challenge hierarchical power structures and create alternative, more equitable spaces that contribute to overall well-being and harmony.

A project that employs Latiné feminist concepts of relationality to transform power dynamics, promote ethical relationships, agency, and collective resistance against oppressive systems is the Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective, a community-driven initiative focused on preserving and sharing the digital memory of Chicana and Latina activists from the civil rights era. The collective is dedicated to documenting and archiving the stories, experiences, and contributions of Chicanas and Latinas who played significant roles in social justice movements.

In the essay titled “Nuestra Autohistoria: Toward a Chicana Digital Praxis,” cofounder María Cotera explains that Chicana por mi Raza reimagines the digital archive “as an active space of exchange and ‘encuentro’ [encounter] between the present and the past that had the potential to enact new strategies of alliance and a new praxis of Chicana feminism at the intersection of digital and analog culture.”¹⁵ This shift in approach transformed the project into a transgenerational community of scholars, activists, archivists, and students working together to produce knowledge by and about Chicanas through the deployment of digital tools, institutional resources, and story sharing. For instance, emphasizing resource redistribution, Cotera elaborates on how scholars involved in the project leverage their affiliations with academic institutions and associated resources (such as digital tools and funding) to foster discourse on Chicana feminism from both within and beyond the confines of the university.

Another project that uses the archive as a site for community engagement and encuentro is the Women Who Rock (WWR) Oral History Archive. This critical feminist digital humanities initiative represents a collaborative endeavor among scholars, activists, music artists, students, and community members to construct an online oral history archive that addresses the historical underrepresentation of women in music and provides a platform for sharing their stories.¹⁶ A robust project, it also encompasses other interconnected components, including an annual, participant-driven community engagement conference and film festival, project-based undergraduate and graduate coursework, and a Wordpress site featuring numerous oral history videos, performance recordings, and mini documentaries shared through Vimeo.¹⁷

Excluded from “official” archives, WWR emphasizes the importance of interdependent community networks by engaging the concept of “convivencia” (coexistence), providing “a method for moving forward within a network of human relationships that connect people and communities working on related projects with similar aims.”¹⁸ With the goal of decolonizing and reshaping the power dynamics and silences inherent in archival structures, the project’s facilitators define the digital archive as “a trace of relationships forged through collective archiving.”¹⁹ In describing their collective process, the facilitators underscore the significance of prioritizing the “living process” of archival practice.²⁰

Through the daily contributions and interactions among records creators, subjects, and community members, relational approaches to the archive transform into what Stuart Hall termed “living archives.” Hall introduced this concept to articulate the cultural work forged by diasporic groups, challenging the “closed” and “settled” structures inherent in traditional archives.²¹ Living archives, in Hall’s vision, are “present, on-going, continuing, unfinished, open-ended.”²² Hall’s emphasis on the significance of community engagement in archival processes has led many to embrace the idea of a “living archive” in their endeavors to document and preserve cultural expressions, social movements, and marginalized voices.²³ Archives of this nature transcend mere recovery efforts, becoming indispensable discursive networks of community and collective memory building.

In my own work, I place relationality at the center of my archival praxis to facilitate the activities of the Home Movie Remezcla project in ways that foster a sense of community, reflection, interconnectedness, and holistic well-being. Remezcla has its origins in the ImaginX en Movimiento (IXeM) Memory Collective, a grassroots initiative I cofounded with graphic designer Aldo Puicon, experimental filmmaker Laura Pérez, and filmmaker and media arts educator Cassandra Gonzales.²⁴ Active as a collective from 2019 to 2022, IXeM emerged from a desire to do archiving differently by foregrounding the well-being of individuals and communities. Coupling critique with action, we aimed to build collaborative projects that offered counternarratives to dominant histories by reimagining digital archiving as a practice for nurturing connection and well-being in the twenty-first century.

Remezcla emerged from these early efforts. The project was conceptualized as a space for fostering a sense of agency and control over one’s narrative through the digitization and self-narration of personal home movie collections, which play a vital role in preserving underrepresented histories, fostering community building and solidarity, and providing counternarratives. Starting with my own personal home movie collection, I digitized camcorder and VHS tapes containing memories such as my younger sister’s fifth birthday party, my piano lessons as a nine-year-old, and a narrative film I made as a preteen with my younger sister and cousins while visiting my maternal grandmother in Rosarito, Mexico (see fig. 1).

Taking a do-it-yourself (diy) approach, I used the digital tools readily available to me, which included my personal MacBook Pro laptop, a Toshiba D-VR610 VCR/DVD recorder previously donated to me by my PhD advisor, my childhood Sony Handycam Video 8 camcorder, and a user friendly video playback device called El Gato (see fig. 2), which I purchased online for under $80.²⁵

Following the digitization of my own collection, I partnered with my friend and colleague William Camargo, a photographer who incorporates both personal and historical archival material into his art practice.²⁶ In 2020, we collaborated on digitizing and narrating a home movie documenting his fourth birthday celebration in his hometown of Anaheim, California. After I finished digitizing the VHS tape, we met virtually through Zoom to video-record his narration. The cloud-based conferencing platform by then was widespread as people sought digital solutions for remote work, education, and social interactions at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I then utilized the user-friendly iMovie editing software, known for its accessibility to amateur video editors, to integrate the Zoom video recording into the digitized version of the home movie through the “picture-in-picture” feature (see fig. 3). I have since created several digital renditions of the original tape, which are currently accessible on Vimeo and the @ixemcollective Instagram account with additional descriptive context.²⁷

This early work also included digitizing a film from the personal home movie collection of a former IXeM member. This collection is composed of numerous Super 8 films documenting moments of Mexican American family life in the Los Angeles suburb of Pico Rivera during the 1960s. The family, far from being mere subjects, engaged in diverse forms of narration encompassing the textual, oral, and performative. To digitize the films, we purchased a Wolverine 8 mm and Super 8 MovieMaker for $300 through an online vendor (see figure 4). While the digital files produced by the commercial-grade convertor may not meet “archival” standards, they are nonetheless well suited for the needs of Latinés who often prioritize shareability, engagement, and interaction among family and friends over technical quality.

The described creative, do-it-yourself, and resourceful approach to making the best of limited resources is deeply rooted in the ethos of “rasquachismo.” This concept emerged as a response to the socioeconomic challenges confronted by Mexican Americans in the twentieth century, emphasizing resilience and adaptability in the face of adversity. Derived as a variation of the term “rascuache,” it traces its origins from the linguistic encounter of colonial Spanish and Indigenous Maya and Nahuatl languages, connoting meanings such as “of poor taste” or “of low quality.”²⁸ Although the term is commonly used as a classist slur in Mexico, Central America, and the United States, literary and cultural theorist Christina Rodríguez explains that in “Calo” or “Chicano Spanish,” it has undergone a transformative shift from negative to positive, adopting the variant, “rasquachismo” (spelled with a “q” instead of “c”).²⁹

In the context of art and aesthetics, rasquachismo frequently entails the inventive repurposing of everyday objects and materials to craft meaningful and expressive works. In the essay “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility,” Tomás Ybarra-Frausto characterizes the term as embodying “a witty, irreverent, and impertinent posture that recodes and moves outside established boundaries.”³⁰ It stands in opposition to conventional norms of perfection, instead choosing to embrace imperfections and applaud the resourceful solutions borne out of necessity. This concept has wielded considerable influence in Chicané art, literature, and cultural practices, reflecting a spirit of self-reliance and creativity within the constraints of economic and social barriers.

Artist and activist Guillermo Gómez Peña, for instance, engages in what he terms “techno razcuache art” as a means of promoting social change and advocating for social justice. Acknowledging the transformative potential to foster connections and build solidarity, Gómez Peña, in the online essay “The Virtual Barrio @ The Other Frontier (or the Chicano interneta) 1997,” encourages “activist artists and theoreticians to find innovative, grassroots applications for new technologies” to establish connections between community centers, artistic collectives, and human rights organizations through the internet.³¹

More recently, digital media artist and filmmaker Alex Rivera, profoundly influenced by Gómez Peña, has embraced a “rasquache aesthetic” in media creation to challenge preconceived notions of Latiné identity and experience while nurturing political solidarity.³² While Rivera is widely celebrated for his award-winning feature film Sleep Dealer (2008), set in a near-future dystopic Tijuana, his multimedia pursuits trace back to 1995, encompassing diverse forms that merge films, memes, music videos, and art installations.

Highlighting the pivotal role remix culture plays in rasquache aesthetics, Debra A. Castillo characterizes Rivera’s practice as involving “the tearing apart and rebuilding of cultural images.” Rivera infuses his work with texture and depth through a “technological mashup,” incorporating recent and historical documentary footage, animation, public domain images, voice-over narration, and a variety of other materials.³³ This extensive body of work explores thematic concerns related to US migration issues, delving into exploitative labor practices, surveillance technologies, and immigration policy. As Castillo points out, Rivera simultaneously fosters connections among Latinés through networked storytelling, promotion, and distribution. Projects like Cybraceros, Invisible Cinema, and SubCine, housed on website-based platforms, reflect creative and practical solutions to the myriad barriers faced by Latiné filmmakers. These challenges include limited access to resources, financial support, and channels of distribution.³⁴ Embracing a rasquache approach to independent media making, Rivera strategically leverages internet technologies, such as websites and content-sharing platforms, to promote and disseminate Latiné visual media, including his own, through innovative alternative methods.

My work expands the notion of a rasquache aesthetic, as demonstrated by artists like Rivera and Gómez Peña, into the realm of digital cultural memory work through what I term “digital rasquachismo.” Conceived in 2019 during a playful conversation with IXeM member Aldo Puicon about naming our technique, digital rasquachismo centers the ingenuity of Latinés in resourcefully repurposing technology for the imaginative preservation, engagement, and dissemination of cultural memory.³⁵

Moreover, digital rasquachism presents opportunities to disrupt prevailing power dynamics by reevaluating foundational archival principles and practices from an “underdog” perspective, intentionally positioning it within the domain of social justice initiatives. Thus, digital rasquachismo unfolds as a dynamic and multifaceted paradigm that, through its fusion of creativity, resistance, collaboration, and cultural specificity, has the potential to reshape the archival landscape. In this manner, remixing plays a pivotal role in the concept digital rasquachismo.

Remixing embodies these values by emphasizing originality, innovation, creativity, and uniqueness. Commonly perceived as the reappropriation and recombination of various existing media recordings—ranging from vinyl records, digital audio files, and published books to photographs, films, and websites—remixing aims to forge something new and distinct. This process significantly varies depending on the knowledge, experience, opinions, and interests of individuals, communities, and organizations directly engaged in its creation.

Archives have enthusiastically incorporated remixing into their public programming, as demonstrated by, for example, the “Spinning Home Movies” series hosted by the Southside Home Movie Project.³⁶ This online collection showcases home movies filmed by residents of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods between 1929 to 1982. Employing a technique of “creative reuse,” the virtual event series breathes new life into the archive by enlisting Chicago musicians, performing artists, and DJs to curate a customized soundtrack paired with selected home movie clips from their collection.

In these compilations, intimate family scenes in kitchens and living rooms against a distinctive backdrop of songs, sounds, and audio clips, collectively paint a loving portrait of midcentury Black life. Adding in an extra layer of depth, occasional prerecorded video commentary by home movie donors and their descendants is seamlessly integrated into the clips. This innovative approach not only preserves personal histories but also invites these individuals to actively shape and engage with the narrative of their own stories. It transcends mere representation, transforming creators into agents who actively contribute to, rather than passively exist within, the archival landscape.

What distinguishes Home Movie Remezcla from other public programming initiatives, as those described above, is its unique focus on remixing as a creative intervention into prevailing archival narratives through the use of Latiné feminist methodologies. In doing so, the project firmly centers on prioritizing and amplifying the often overlooked bodies and experiences of individuals and communities living at the margins. Latiné feminist methods play a crucial role in generating new knowledge through storytelling and dialogue, providing a pathway to recognize, understand, and address the wounds inflicted by oppressive systems. These methodologies actively contribute to a transformative healing process.

More precisely, traditional narrative methodologies highlight the cultural agency inherent in historically marginalized communities, fostering emotional connections among participants, including project facilitators. This strategy introduces new avenues for challenging colonial and racial capitalist power dynamics. Furthermore, the collaborative experience of witnessing the vivid and culturally affirming portrayal of a cultural record by its creators, expressed in affectionate terms, has the power to reshape archival cultural power dynamics. This shift envisions archives as spaces of solidarity and healing.

In this pursuit, Remezcla challenges detached or disembodied archival practices by melding the everyday personal experiences and stories documented in personal home movie footage with the Latin American oral history tradition of “testimonio” (testimony). This tool holds a pivotal role in Latiné feminist activism and scholarship, functioning as a methodology to amplify marginalized voices, offering a platform for narrating lived experiences, and fostering cultural connections and solidarity within communities. It achieves this by sharing common struggles, challenges, and triumphs.

Narrative in the form of storytelling is a fundamental traditional cultural practice for many diasporic communities emigrated from Latin America and the Caribbean to the United States. It is a multifaceted process that addresses historical wounds, strengthens cultural bonds, and promotes overall well-being.³⁷ Many of these communities bear the weight of historical trauma stemming from colonization, forced displacements, and cultural annihilation, the enduring consequences of which manifest in contemporary state-sanctioned mechanisms of silencing, forgetting, or misremembering.

Diana Taylor significantly contributes to this discourse in her book The Archive and the Repertoire, as she directly engages with the concept of the colonizing project and its deliberate effort to dismantle ancestral cultures and memory.³⁸ Taylor underscores that Indigenous communities traditionally upheld and transmitted their understanding of history through embodied practices. Spoken language, dance, healing rituals, and communal witnessing were integral components in conveying social knowledge and safeguarding a shared sense of identity and memory.³⁹ While acknowledging that certain individuals with specialized skills could document detailed information in writing, the essential transmission of cultural knowledge remained deeply rooted in embodied practices. Taylor emphatically argues that, in this context, the written text “never replaced the performed utterance.”⁴⁰

Colonization, extending to the sixteenth century in the Americas, encompassed, in part, the delegitimization of Indigenous methods for preserving and transmitting historical knowledge. Colonizers aimed to erase embodied memory systems by creating “official” records and representations of colonial spaces and their inhabitants. According to Taylor, Native histories were systematically “burned and rewritten to suit the memorializing needs of those in power. The space of written culture then, as now, seemed easier to control than embodied culture.”⁴¹

Nevertheless, embodied memory systems persist in the lives of Indigenous peoples, with storytelling emerging as a dynamic and enduring practice. In the face of colonial efforts aimed at obliterating ancestral cultures and memories, storytelling emerges as a powerful tool for resistance and endurance. Through rich oral traditions, Indigenous communities actively transmit their histories, values, and cultural practices across generations, resisting these efforts to silence or erase their voices. In this way, storytelling serves as a mode of cultural preservation that exists outside the confines of colonizers’ written records, presenting an alternative narrative that boldly challenges prevailing colonial perspectives.

The testimonio genre, originating in Latin America in the 1970s, serves as a powerful tool to challenge oppression and underscore justice by centering the voices of various nondominant groups. Its roots are closely tied to geopolitical resistance movements and collaborative liberation efforts against imperialism in the Global South. Testimonio has been instrumental in documenting and sharing the experiences of individuals and communities facing various forms of repression, injustice, and marginalization.⁴² Testimonio reflects a commitment to amplifying marginalized voices through narrative forms that address a wide array of issues, including human rights abuses, political violence, economic exploitation, and struggles for social change. Although the genre is not directly rooted in Indigenous cultural practices, the method’s commitment aligns with broader goals of cultural preservation and resistance present in Indigenous storytelling traditions, including the emphasis on oral traditions, communal storytelling, and the preservation of collective memory.

US Latiné feminists have creatively adopted and adapted the Latin American genre of testimonio by incorporating it into their scholarship and literary works as a powerful vehicle for storytelling, resistance, and social justice. By infusing testimonio with their unique experiences and perspectives, US Latiné feminists have created a distinctive mode of expression, functioning as both a literary genre and a formidable tool to rectify omissions and distortions prevalent in dominant historical narratives. Scholar and writer Emma Pérez, for instance, illustrates this adaptation in her seminal work The Decolonial Imaginary (1999), employing testimonio as a transformative practice to address the overlooked aspects of Chicana experiences in dominant histories.⁴³ Through this deliberate process of “re-membering,” Pérez actively engages in the recovery and reclamation of Chicanas’ stories, offering a space to counteract historical erasure by articulating their narratives firsthand. Moreover, by addressing the wounds inflicted by historical trauma stemming from colonization, testimonio emerges as a cathartic tool for healing.⁴⁴

US Latiné feminists have also incorporated testimonio into their literary works as a powerful means of remembering, healing, and reshaping individual and collective histories. In novels such as So Far from God (1993) and The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), Ana Castillo uses testimonio to document and engage in therapeutic storytelling, sharing personal and community narratives that grapple with issues of identity, colonization, and historical trauma. Castillo’s storytelling acts as a remedy for the wounds caused by systemic injustices, discrimination, and erasure. Similarly, Sandra Cisneros experiments with testimonio elements in her groundbreaking novel, The House on Mango Street (1984), addressing identity, gender, cultural expectations, and the unique challenges faced by Latiné women. Drawing on her personal experiences growing up as the only daughter in a family of six brothers in an underserved neighborhood in Chicago, Cisneros illuminates cultural and gendered wounds rooted in exclusion and loneliness, revealing the profound impact of societal and cultural structures on women in Latiné communities. Through these novels, both Castillo and Cisneros demonstrate the transformative potential of testimonio in contributing to personal and collective healing processes.

It is important to note that remembering, while pivotal to acknowledging and confronting traumatic memories, is not a straightforward path to healing. Intentional remembering is complex and multifaceted. The works discussed above highlight that the act of remembering can be simultaneously cathartic and painful, providing individuals and communities with means to reclaim their identities and make sense of their pasts. When contending with traumatic experiences, remembering becomes a way to confront the horrors of the past and to give voice to the silenced and seemingly forgotten. Nevertheless, this process is not without its challenges. Remembering is a crucial step in acknowledging and addressing trauma, yet it is not a panacea. Healing involves a broader process that includes understanding, self-acceptance, and communal support. In the following pages, I reflect on my personal experiences.

While scrolling my Instagram feed one morning in May 2022, I came across a video shared by my former coworker, Marcos Pineda. The one-minute video, recorded with a mobile phone, captured Marcos celebrating his thirty-third birthday in the company of family and close friends in an intimate backyard patio (see fig. 5). Seated at a small table, Marcos smiles softly as he looks at the birthday cake before him, adorned with several flickering candles. His godson stands beside him, swaying shyly, singing along to the classic “Happy Birthday to You” song. He is accompanied by other family members who playfully sing out of key. Once the song concludes, Marcos takes a deep breath and leans in to blow out the candles on the cake. Off-camera voices urgently interrupt with a warning: “COVID!” With a bashful smile, Marcos instead waves his hands in a fanning motion over the candles.

In this manner, the video guides us through a journey across time and space, initially providing a window into a joyous family reunion in a seemingly simpler past. However, as the concluding images reveal themselves, we are abruptly pulled back to the present—a period defined by substantial uncertainty and peril. The recollection of the life-threatening COVID-19 virus, intertwined with unresolved pain and collective trauma, disrupted this idyllic family moment. The specter of the pandemic, captured in the video, highlights the critical importance that remembering can hold for our survival.

On that same day, I contacted Marcos through Instagram Messenger and asked him if he would be interested in narrating his home video as part of the Home Movie Remezcla project—which he enthusiastically agreed to. Several days later, we connected over Zoom. After some catching up, we delved into the discussion about his video. I had prepared just one question for him: “What about this moment was important to keep and share with others on your social media?” Marcos explained that during his previous birthday, he was hospitalized with COVID-19 and subjected to invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV)—a process where a device aids in breathing by pumping air into the lungs of a person with severe respiratory failure.

According to a January 2021 study, individuals diagnosed with the virus under IMV had a limited likelihood of surviving.⁴⁵ The reported case fatality rate (CFR) at the time of the study was 45 percent for those placed on ventilators.⁴⁶ The factors contributing to this stark rate among U.S. Latinés, include socioeconomic conditions, limited health-care access, language barriers, multigenerational households, concerns about immigration status, and a higher prevalence of preexisting health conditions not only persist, but have been exacerbated by the pandemic. For Marcos and his friends and family, the video of him celebrating his thirty-third birthday served as a testament to having narrowly survived a life-threatening condition. Publicly sharing this moment was an invitation for others to collectively bear witness to his remarkable recovery—“through feelings, through the heart.”⁴⁷

Following Marcos’s interview, I continued to reflect on what he had shared. Unexpectedly, I remembered learning about Marcos’s recovery from COVID-19, once again, from scrolling through my Instagram feed the previous year. In this post, Marcos was photographed in a hospital bed with a visible oxygen tube beneath his face mask after an eleven-day hospitalization in May 2020. Yet, I continued scrolling without giving it much more consideration. Certainly, social media platforms are designed with features like an infinite feed to create an environment where users can easily get caught up in the continuous stream of content, leading to mindless scrolling and dissociative states.⁴⁸ Nevertheless, reflecting on my initial response left me feeling deeply ashamed and unsettled.

Given the context, however, it is reasonable to argue that rather than a mindless lapse of empathy and compassion, my reaction was instead prompted by a surge of intense and distressing emotions, causing my brain to rapidly shut down as a coping mechanism—a survival strategy—effectively enabling me to suppress these emotions for nearly a year. This would help explain my immediate sense of relief when I first came across the post, “Oh good. He made it. He’s fine.” The only thought my mind could grasp was the comforting fact that my former coworker was alive and would recover. This knowledge led me to mindlessly scroll through my feed, bypassing the opportunity to fully engage with the emotional complexities of the circumstance.

In her poignant firsthand account of surviving childhood trauma, What My Bones Know, acclaimed investigative journalist and public radio producer Stephanie Foo explains that responding with dissociation to overwhelming events is a normal function of the limbic system, which serves as the center for our emotions, behavior, and memory.⁴⁹ Due to the vulnerability of our nervous system to stressors, the human body develops a defense mechanism known as dissociation, protecting and buffering itself from overwhelming physical and emotional stimulation. Essentially, if an emotional state is so paralyzing that we cannot “fight” or “flee” (two basic stress responses), our bodies go offline, disconnecting from our thoughts, feelings, and memories. We reorder our realities in an attempt to protect ourselves—an aspect known as “freeze.” In other words, the scenario I described represents a mind-body reaction to overadaptive coping mechanisms, facilitating a swift, automatic, and unconscious shutdown of the thinking part of our brain to ensure our survival in situations perceived to be life-threatening. As Foo emphasized, despite our attempts to forget, our mind-bodies frequently resist engaging in this detrimental and reactive form of forgetting, acting as reminders and signaling memories in need of remembering for our well-being.

In a particularly enlightening passage, Foo recounts collaborating with clinical psychologist Jacob Ham to address her own childhood trauma. According to Ham, trauma is relational, arising from “bad relationships with the people who were supposed to be caring and trustworthy but instead were hurtful.”⁵⁰ Healing from relational trauma, he argues, involves comprehending and addressing the impact of traumatic experiences within the framework of relationships and social connections. Instead of concentrating solely on individual experiences, this approach acknowledges that trauma unfolds within the relational dynamics of families, communities, and broader social systems. It is thus crucial to recognize the responsibility we bear in our relationships and interactions with others, necessitating a mindful and intentional commitment to “doing good relations.”

Since the early collaborations with friends during the first two years of the pandemic, I have extended partnerships to include both institutional and grassroots organizations. In the process, I have tailored the project to suit various community settings, resulting in diverse outcomes. One notably event emerged from a recent collaboration with the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center (IMC), a membership-based community media project committed to providing a platform for voices and issues that are marginalized or underrepresented in mainstream media. The IMC extended an invitation to me to host an event for their annual participation in Welcoming Week, an initiative organized by the New American Welcome Center (NAWC) each September. The NAWC, in turn, is an initiative of the University YMCA at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), which offers various resources to local immigrant communities. Participants were invited to explore the connections between memories, personal objects, and storytelling (see fig. 6). Attendees were encouraged to actively participate by bringing an item of significance from their personal archival collections, sharing brief stories about their item or important cultural tradition in their lives, or attentively listening to those who chose to share a memory.

The intentional choice to exclude digital technology in this event was driven by the diverse immigration statuses of the audience. To prioritize safety, I opted not to include a digital preservation component. The gathering, which I facilitated, was intimate, comprising about twelve individuals affiliated with the IMC and/or the NAWC. The group included participants across various roles in relationship with the organizations, including community members, volunteers, board members, directors, as well as their friends and family. Drawing on my personal experiences in healing gatherings, I arranged the seating in a circle to foster an open structure that encourages equitable participation and cultivates a sense of community.

Indigenous traditions often incorporate storytelling circles as a communal practice for sharing knowledge, experiences, and cultural narratives. In many Indigenous cultures, the circle represents a sacred and inclusive space where individuals gather to engage in oral traditions, passing down stories from generation to generation.⁵¹ The circle is symbolic of equality, unity, and interconnectedness, fostering a sense of community and collective healing.⁵² It is important to note that specific practices can vary among Indigenous communities, each having its unique traditions and protocols for storytelling circles.⁵³ My own protocols stemmed from the Indigenous-rooted Latiné story sharing circles I participated in at various stages of my life.

Accompanied by a pair of family photographs taken in the 1960s, the first narrative was shared by an individual who emigrated from Alexandria, Egypt, during the 1990s. The account voiced the complex process of navigating a new life in a different cultural, political, and geographical setting, highlighting how this experience unexpectedly redefined their connection to their place of origin. The individual described developing a sense of outsider status both in their new home and, over time, upon returning to their place of origin. The sentiment of feeling like an outsider upon revisiting Alexandria resonated with the first-generation Latinés in the group, one of whom used the common expression: “ni de aquí, ni de allá” (“not from here, nor from there”) to describe their experiences as a young Mexican American raised in Chicago. The first participant responded by offering reassurance, stating, “we are from here and from there,” showcasing a powerful exchange of intergenerational care and solidarity.

The shared care and vulnerability expressed between the first participants, who were previously unacquainted, fostered a welcoming and receptive environment for the next person to participate. This individual had prepared two stories for the event—one considered “safe,” and the other reserved for disclosure only if it “felt right.” A testimony to the trust and safety cultivated within the group, the person shared both stories, disclosing that the latter had never been shared in a public setting before.

Collectively, the group responded with genuine care and compassion, engaging in exchanges that involved validating and affirming one another’s experiences in loving ways. These stories arose from a welcoming space in an intimate and trustworthy setting. It is noteworthy that every participant at the event had some level of acquaintance with at least one other person in the group, and nearly everyone had a preexisting familiarity or relationship with me prior to the event. This practice of sharing stories as a form of preservation resonates with the research conducted by Amanda R. Tachine and colleagues on the narratives of Native American students transitioning into college. The authors found that sharing circles facilitated more comfortable participation when there was a prior relationship, stating, “they [the students] felt more comfortable participating because there was a familiarity (interpersonally and culturally) that was a foundation for building trust.”⁵⁴ In our case, the existing familiarity, not only between myself and many attendees but also among each other, fostered a uniquely supportive space for sharing intimate personal stories.

Welcoming Week at the IMC concluded the first phase of a two-part event dedicated to preserving the memories and stories that shape the individual and collective identities of immigrant communities in Urbana-Champaign. The next phase of this collaborative effort will involve establishing a digital memory lab in the Urbana Maker Space, a working group of the IMC. The lab aims to collaborate with the maker space members to provide free public access to resources, information, and guidance on digitizing and remixing a variety of archival materials. This will be facilitated through office hours, workshops, and home movie screenings, providing individuals and communities with a supportive environment in which to reflect on and share their narratives.

Home Movie Remezcla, and its subsequent iterations, transcends mere preservation of cultural and historical materials; it strives to remix archival approaches and reimagine a world where balance is respectfully and responsibility restored. The collective act of witnessing and describing cultural records in loving and culturally affirming terms enkindles hope amid oppressive structures. The relational benefits of sharing and witnessing personal stories within a supportive environment nourishes mindful connections, self-reflexivity, empathy, and a sense of community, presenting exciting prospects for reshaping archives into communal spaces of healing. This emphasis on relational archival practices further empowers individuals and communities as active agents shaping new historical narratives and forging enduring, connections, challenging passive archival roles. It is a call for cultural agents of the archive to engage in processes of transforming and healing the social systems affecting us all.