Ramiro Alvarez, Exit Reflection

I knew, roughly and loosely, that history, or should I say History™, was a bit of a mess, to say the least, before taking AMCULT 498. Most of what I knew and was learning in “progressive” spaces, however, was how history was inaccurate; the facts didn’t line up with what “actually happened.” A lot of this was common sense—Columbus did not discover the Americas—and a lot of it was adding historical sound bites back into the mix of larger stories, for example I have seen efforts to add more information into already existing timelines of slavery, women’s rights, and indigenous rights as a way of “correcting history.” These historical sound bites, as I called them, in a way reified the white man’s timeline by acknowledging some sort of legitimacy to it, even as more information was added to them. This information I’m referring to can be anything from more direct quotes from non-white figures that were there—for example, inserting into the white man’s timeline a sleuth of subversive Harriet Tubman quotes—or something like uncovering more factual specificity to how bad Native Americans were bing treated. In other words, the facts of white history were challenged for what they left out, but they weren’t challenged for how their memory practices were built to leave people out, to pacify and subdue radicals like Tubman, and to focus on facts.

            There was definitely a hollow feeling to this method of correcting history. Why do we need such factual accuracy to convince people in 2015 that our ancestors suffered in parallel ways to how we suffer today? When will we stop? Until we’ve recovered every single fact in obscured history? Volumes and volumes of corrective history can be written, but when will people get around to reading it and internalizing it? All of these questions swarmed my already anxious and cracked understanding of how I would help save the world. And while I had a feeling that an emphasis of factual history was the wrong route to take to save our collective memory, I did not really understand how white supremacy had hijacked our understandings of “subjective” and “objective.” What sounded to me like two forces that can exist in balance like the poles of North and South do, looked more like a harsh binary where both ends were mutually exclusive and fixed, with objectivity as the true, proper, and more valuable piece. It seems common sense to me now, but all it took to interrogate this notion was asking, who is making the history and who is calling their bias interpretation objective?

            I remember mentioning once in class that the extent of what I knew about history production was grade school history textbooks. The only exposure I had to this field of history reunification was through the banned books cases and conservative, white supremacist history text book debates taking place in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. I had never once considered how even something like a PBS documentary is a form of history creation. Adding to that list, now I understand how historical journals, museums, documentaries, holidays, organizations, art, etc., all embody a role in history creation. But if these institutions are not getting their information from textbooks or their own research, where is it coming from? In comes the archive.

            About two years before taking this class I had visited the Bentley Historical Library on North Campus to poke my nose around some of the collections made for Latinx student organizations. I went with the intention of coming out with lists of worthy material to incorporate into the project I had at hand during that time. I went in with the intention of spending a couple of hours at the archive, sure, but a satisfying couple of hours nonetheless. Wow, was I in for a surprise.

            From my understanding, the Bentley’s archive is like many archives in protocol and safety measures, and that is exactly my issue. For one, two hours there still had me empty-handed. Second of all, the organization of the material was not enough for me to search productively; it was clear that an online search engine style of research was going to have me going in circles and I needed to start thinking like an archivist, but where would I get that training other than trial and error?

            Eventually after three visits, I got the hang of it and my project was complete. However, I walked away from that experience with a sour taste in my mouth. If this building closes when most people are getting out of work, who is this here for? If it takes hours to find one piece of relevant information, who is this here for? If the finding aides aren’t as intuitive as one would think, who is this here for? If it takes a team of people and a very large building to call yourself an archive, who can realistically reproduce this?

The archive is alive and well for the wealthy, the elite, and the knowing. It is because of these inaccessible qualities that we get that difficult feedback loop where those interrupting the archive are those very same minds and bodies that are appraising what goes in the archive in the first place. The archive then becomes synonymous with maintenance, validation, and reification of and for existing methods of history creation and distribution. The archive then merely functions as the sandbox for oppressive reality creation that can’t be refuted because “it’s in the archive,” in other words, it’s objective truth.

            What I have learned in this class is that “correcting” history is an endless battle if we do not eliminate the possibility for more misinformation to be created. I am not suggesting we abolish archives, but that we transition to a style of memory upkeep that is genuinely guiding us to a healthy future; the creation of a “living” and communal archive that does not seek permanence, but is permanent in the ways we are constantly interacting with it as something we need—because at the end of the day I still believe societies need a sort of archive, especially in the age of mass information and hyper-visibility.

Much like how self-awareness functions in humans, where the past serves as an enormous pool of valuable lessons if interpreted honestly and wholly, the “living” archive can serve that purpose of inspiration for new creation, new ideas, new ways of living that are reflective of the lived past, not the “past” embedded in dates and facts, as those components of history are static and therefore not ideas, something that by definition is constantly dynamic.

            This is reflective of how I want to live my life. I do not want to live with a linear understanding of myself or my people that cuts us up between identity labels and “successes.” I want to be ever evolving, preserved only in the moment, and inspired by both the surreal nature of what has happened and the uncertainty of what can happen. But with this current placement of the archive, I cannot connect with that inspiration. At all. The future seems predictable; after all, the feedback loop is predictable. The past seems dead and not worthy of exploration, just veneration, and that is also uninspiring for it is prescriptive and therefore not authentic to whom I am.

I walk away from AMCULT 498 with a reignited love for the Chicana movement. But what I carry out of this experience more than anything is inspiration in the form of constant re-envisioning as praxis. Is that not what growth is? I leave the constant pressure to understand myself factually and embrace the possibility to understand myself abstractly, poetically, and alive, even if that isn’t as “satisfying” or as easy to communicate to others as facts are. Factual fixation is something to unlearn from this white supremacist culture and I thank Maria and her class for getting me started on that lifelong endeavor.