Encountering the archive
A novice researcher on the importance of history, sex workers, and the difference a community-based archive can make.
With so much information available now through the internet, or at better resourced large universities, we often wonder what the value of the work we do at a small community-based archive is. We recently sat down with Lily Wu, a college senior new to archival research, to find out more about her research topic and how access to a “community-based archive” may benefit her work. The interview was conducted by Michele Welsing, a staff member of the Southern California Library.
Why does history engage you? What is important to you about history?
Lily:
I think that it’s important to tell stories that haven’t been able to be told. And there’s so much that we need to learn from history now.
Looking at my parents’ experiences in Taiwan when they were growing up, there was political repression and people weren’t allowed to learn about their most recent history. My parents came to the U.S. after college and there was a lot of anxiety about the effects that China’s politics and power were going to have on Taiwan.
I feel like my parents didn’t get to learn about their country’s past, or their family’s past, as well as they could have. That’s why access to history is important, especially coming from a family where we didn’t talk much about politics while I was growing up.
Can you tell us a little bit about your research topic that you’ve been working on here?
Lily:
This is the first archival research I’ve really done. It’s been meaningful for me and I definitely want to continue it in the future.
I’m studying a mapping program that James K. Hahn, who was the L.A. city attorney in the 80s and 90s, and who later became mayor, established in 1993 in Hollywood and Van Nuys and then South Central.
It was a mapping program that gave people, convicted of prostitution, maps that marked where they would essentially not be allowed to exist on the street. They were prohibited from talking to motorists and getting into people’s cars. Basically, it gave police a list of women, including their photographs, who had previous convictions for prostitution. When police saw these women on the street, regardless of whether they were talking with anyone or soliciting — they would arrest them.
What brought you to that topic?
Lily:
I picked this topic because, as a woman, these stories that haven’t been told are important to me. I wanted to focus on women’s interactions with the law and learn more about Los Angeles. I also wanted to focus on the 1980s or 1990s, just because it was around the time that I was born. I think it’s important to investigate these things because I haven’t seen that much research on L.A. sex workers and how they experienced life in the 90s.
What would you like to see come out of your research?
Lily:
I would like to tell a narrative that is true to people’s experiences. I hope what will come out of it is that different oppressed groups will be able to identify with sex workers’ experiences. I would like to see more empathy.
How does that connect to how you see yourself and who you want to be in the world?
Lily:
I always want to be a person who’s thinking about the experiences of others. Never thinking that another person, based on their occupation or their skin color or any demographic, or whether they are citizens, is lesser. I think that’s extremely important in this moment.
People are always trying to identify a group as outsiders who shouldn’t be included. It’s important to recognize that as history goes along, we tend to follow these trends of trying to exclude certain groups of people, and I try not to do that.
You mentioned that this was your first time really doing archival research. What were you expecting coming into an archive?
Lily:
Even though I hadn’t done research in an archive before, I had talked with various professors about their archival research, so I was ready to be flexible and not know whether I would be able to find specific things. I was ready to let the sources talk to me and tell me what they actually wanted to say. I think that’s important. You don’t want to come in with one argument or one perspective, and then try to hold yourself to it.
I thought it would be tougher than it actually was. The moment I sat down with a box and looked at the files, I realized I can actually do this. Three hours went by and I didn’t even notice. My mom came by and asked, “do you want lunch or anything” and I was like, oh, I guess I’ll stay here until 5pm. It was really exciting for me. I went home feeling very happy, and soon returned, and I’m looking forward to coming back in the future.
What did you find at the Library that contributed to your research?
Lily:
I’m working with the Coalition Against Police Abuse(CAPA) records, and I’m looking at intake forms. I’m just honestly scraping through, looking for mentions of sex work, or if I see something where either the person who is filing the report, or the police officer they’re talking about, says something that has to do with sex or gender.
I like seeing how different intake forms are categorized. It’s interesting because as you flip through, you see things that may not be entirely relevant to your topic but give a lot of context historically. Sometimes people included newspaper articles in the file, and you can see that those articles were from the exact same date as the intake form. That brings a lot of added value to my research.
Looking at material from the 1980s and 1990s, it’s interesting to see how different groups were targeted. One group that stands out to me is gay people, as well as trans people. There were so many more mentions of either gay or trans people being arrested or targeted by the police during the 1980s, so it just leaves me with a question — what happened in the 1990s to cause that amount of self-reporting to decrease? It makes me think about expanding my topic.
How do you feel about being in this Library, which maybe is a little different from the usual archive?
Lily:
My mom actually drove me down here multiple times because I lost my driver’s license. She is really excited about my research, and is like, “wow, if I were your age, I would be doing this too.” She thinks it’s great that I’m staying here for long hours to do this work.
I feel good being in the Library. I walked around yesterday, and I think it’s good to have archives in the same geographies where the material was originally collected. I have seen people from the neighborhood coming in to read books, and I think it’s great that the Library is so accessible to people in the community. I was thinking of doing some research at another archive, but apparently you have to have a Ph.D. and stuff, so I really appreciate that this Library is so accessible.
Before I came here, I didn’t have any sources that were at all directly connected to sex workers, or people who were living on the streets of South LA during the 1990s. I would be very limited in my knowledge if I wrote a thesis about sex workers that didn’t have their voices in it. I tried to find other archives that had this sort of material, and I haven’t found them yet; maybe I haven’t looked hard enough yet.
As far as I know, I don’t think I would have been able to do the project in the same way if I didn’t have these sources and being able to come down to South L.A., which is one of the areas where the mapping program was targeted. Not only with the intake reports, but also in getting a sense of the area, and how policing has changed since the 1990s, or not changed. And if the CAPA records weren’t here, I wouldn’t have that many primary sources about the topic.
What do you think is valuable about a community-based archive like the Southern California Library, and having a collection like CAPA?
Lily:
Conducting research, there’s the top-down approach where you’re looking at how the state is viewing people, and what policies they created allowing police to do certain things. And then there’s the bottom up, where you’re actually seeing how people are experiencing it. My research wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t have any bottom-up sources.
In studying history, it’s nice to think that there’s hope for an alternative reality. I’m more concerned about younger kids who are growing up in this time. They don’t know the pre-Trump era really. Right after the election I was a bit like “let’s give up and go home,” but seeing the way my classmates, as well as people older than me are able to make sense of things and think of ways to actively change things gives me hope.
For the people who contributed their collections here, I would say thank you very much. And definitely for the people who were working at CAPA at the time, and who were writing down these intake forms, I feel like they couldn’t even imagine that someone would be reading them in the future. To those people I would say that their work is so important, that these voices would almost definitely not have been heard or read if they hadn’t done that, so thank you to them.
I’m really glad that such an accessible resource is here. I’m really grateful to be able to come in and peruse the collections.
Lily Wu is a senior at Yale University, majoring in history and computer science. She is the daughter of immigrant parents from Taiwan, and grew up in Southern California. For her senior thesis, she studied a mapping program that L.A. City Attorney General James Hahn established in the 1990s that banned sex workers from certain parts of Hollywood, Van Nuys, and South Central.
For more information about the Southern California Library you can visit: www.socallib.org
