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About Us

About Us

Drawing on decades of community-engaged research with Indigenous communities and more recent work collaborating on community story mapping, Maylei Blackwell created the Mobile Indigenous Community Archive (MICA) as an Indigenous memory project in 2018. Working with Indigenous community organizers throughout 2019, they dreamt together to create the vision of the project. It soon became clear that their idea was not just a repository for memory, story, and knowledge, but rather a digital, community, and pedagogical space and process for multiple generations of organizers and knowledge holders to contribute, store, organize, and teach using their documents, videos, photographs, ephemera, and other collected materials.

Our first collections were processed by an innovative team of graduate and undergraduate students through our class, “Decolonizing Indigenous Community Histories and Archives,” and the initial pilot platform was built in a Digital Humanities capstone in 2021. Michelle Vasquez Ruiz, then a graduate research assistant, joined the project to share her expertise in digital curation and archival processing with students. Together, the team developed protocols on how to collaboratively work with Indigenous communities in caring for materials and designing digital spaces that reflected their visions of community. Seeing the impact this type of seed project can hold for other Indigenous communities, including her own Zapotec community, Vasquez Ruiz has since stepped up as a Project Director. She now works to manage current collections and develop protocols for future materials through the skills and experiences she gained in her initial role.

MICA has been crafted as a space to exchange knowledge, train and share skills. Collaborative, community-led archiving and curation guided by community protocols, needs, and visions has produced the Mobile Indigenous Community Archive as an online digital platform open to the public. We also offer training, research and labor to organizations and individual knowledge keepers to help them systematize, build, and digitize their collections as well develop metadata, curate, exhibit and distribute this memory work.

What we do

 

The project developed out of Maylei Blackwell’s twenty three years of collaborative research with Indigenous women organizers in Mexico and its diaspora and her idea to create a community-based archive of resistance based on their multiscaled activism. It builds on Floridalma Boj Lopez’s decade-long work exploring the ways historical memory is embedded within Maya cultural production and youth organizing. As Indigenous scholar activists, they are committed to community-centered research, Indigenous knowledge production and decolonizing the archive. Mobile Indigenous Community Archives draws on Boj Lopez’s concept of the “Mobile Archives of Indigeneity,” that explores what it means for memories and histories to travel with Indigenous migrants through textiles, photographs, or stories. While dispossession is often a common experience that both propels, and at times defines, migration for Indigenous people, Indigenous migrants and their children nonetheless find and when necessary create ways to build community. These archives, like the communities that give them meaning, are mobile and Indigenous.

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

Our collaborative mobile archive is a partnership between students and Indigenous organizations to not only help the communities to preserve their own vital history in a mobile, broadly accessible way.  MICA works with youth organizers to partner with the founding generation of their communities and organizations, as well as other wisdom keepers, to gather, curate and organize with these stories and materials.

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This is being used as a note for people that are going to be working on this website in the future. This note shouldn’t show up anywhere on the website. Only viewable when editing.

DO NOT DELETE THIS PLEASE!!!

– Trinh via SSCERT WebTeam

Our Team

Project Directors

Maylei Blackwell

Maylei Blackwell draws on over twenty years of collaborative research accompanying indigenous women’s organizing in Mexico and its diaspora in her forthcoming book, Scales of Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Transborder Organizing (in press with Duke University Press). She is the co-editor of the Critical Latinx Indigeneities special issue of Latino Studies, and a co-founder of the working group of the same name. She is the author of the landmark ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (2011) as well as a co-editor of ¡Chicana Movidas! New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era (University of Texas Press, 2018). Her research on social movements in the US and Latin America, transborder activism, and indigenous politics and migration have appeared in the U.S., Mexico, and Brazil in journals such as Latino Studies, Meridians, Signs, Aztlán, Journal of Latin American Studies, Desacatos and Revista Estudos Feministas. She teaches Chicana/o and Central American Studies and Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Blackwell has served as an advisor to the Binational Front of Indigenous Organization (FIOB), as the chair of the Abya Yala Working Group of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), a founder of the Women’s Indigenous and Native Caucus (WINC) of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social, and is a co-creator and co-director of the digital story platform Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles (mila.ss.ucla.edu).

Michelle Vasquez Ruiz

Michelle Vasquez Ruiz is PhD Candidate in the department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She holds a BA in Political Science and Chicano Studies from the University of California, Irvine and an MA in History from California State University, Los Angeles. She is a former a USC Humanities in a Digital World PhD Fellow and has a deep interested in using digital tools to make history accessible to the public. She has worked as a curator for the Boyle Heights Museum in Los Angeles and a researcher for Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles where she worked with teams of undergraduates to develop historical materials for digital exhibits. Currently, her research looks at the migration history of the undocumented Zapotec community in Los Angeles. Her work has been published in American Quarterly, Ethnic Studies Review and Mobilities.

Student Researchers

Nube Cruz

Nube Cruz is a self taught artist and student currently at UCLA studying Fine Arts. They are also an Artist in Research fellow who is currently investigating nopal/cochineal extraction in the Americas and its colonial impact to native people. They helped build the Mapping Indigenous Project Website and are an assistant researcher helping archive indigenous movements through the project. In addition to this Nube is also an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores themes of indigenous histories and aesthetics and merges them with techno futuristic elements. Their body of work visually challenges western narratives. Through their work they construct and deconstruct ideas of the settler state by incorporating interdisciplinary methods that play with concepts such as magical realism, surrealism, video, sculpture, photography and indigenous futurism.

You can follow their work on their website or artist IG.

Personal Website: nubecruz.com
Instagram: nubae.jpg

Nicola Chávez Courtright

Nicola Chávez Courtright (she/they) is a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA in Anthropology, Psychocultural/Medical Track. She is one of the founders of AMATE, which houses El Salvador’s only LGBTQI archive. Nicola studies the intersections between memory and political emotions among Salvadoran LGBTQI social movements by looking at grassroots archival practices. They are Salvadoran-American, a settler/ladina moving between Tongvaa and Náhuat lands. She has worked as an English Spanish translator, freelance journalist and researcher, with writing appearing in GLQ, Cultural Anthropology, El Faro Académico, Buzzfeed News and NACLA, among others.

Project Alumni

“Digital Humanities 199/299”

  • Ivana Dama
  • ​​Lili Flores Raygoza
  • Bryanna Gonzalez
  • Cam McDermid 
  • Kate Mclnerny,
  • Jennifer Mendoza
  • Kevin Phan
  • Aaron Untiveros

“ Community Histories and Archives Chicana/o & Central American Studies 189”

Digital Humanities Advisors

Xaviera Flores

Community Memory and Knowledge Holders

Fabiola Jurado De Mendoza, Margarita Gutierrez, Maylei Blackwell, David Bacon, Gaspar Rivera-Salgado