Limits and Loss: Reflections on a Decade of Postcustodial Praxis — A Conversation with T-Kay Sangwand and Gabriel Solís
This conversation was originally held as one of the keynote presentations for the Item Not Found: Accounting for Loss in Libraries, Archives and Other Heritage and Memory Organizations conference hosted by the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA and Oakland University Libraries on March 9, 2023. It has been edited for clarity. The original recording can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Uuaki2UKGc.
T-KAY SANGWAND: Before I get into the conversation with Gabriel, I want to give a little more context of who I am and why I’m talking today. My name is T-Kay Sangwand, and I’m a librarian at the UCLA Digital Library Program. Over the past 14 years, I’ve worked within U.S. academic libraries to build ethical, transnational, postcustodial partnerships in the U.S., Latin America, Africa, and Asia. It was through my work as archivist for the Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) at UT Austin that I met Gabriel. In 2009, I had just facilitated a postcustodial partnership between UT Austin and the human rights organization, Texas After Violence Project (TAVP). Back then, Gabe was in his first year of his MA program in Mexican American Studies, but was also a contractor at TAVP. It’s been really amazing to see how he’s come back to lead TAVP and how much it’s grown under his leadership. Gabe, you’ve taken the organization from one that focuses solely on community-based oral histories to an organization that’s become a model in how to engage in doing community-based memory work and how to archive it ethically — in addition to creatively engaging the public on these complex questions of justice, violence, and accountability, and also advocating for abolition and transformative justice.
Since we both have been working within these postcustodial spaces for the past decade, I wanted to have a conversation that reflects on what has worked well in these partnerships, but also what some of the challenges have been and what the implications of those challenges are for archival loss. So Gabe, thank you so much for joining me in this conversation today.
Before going any further though, I want to define a key term that we will reference throughout the conversation, and that term is postcustodial archiving. The Society of American Archivists defines postcustodial archiving as a practice in which archivists no longer physically acquire and maintain records, but will provide management oversight for records that remain in the custody of record creators. Archivists initially developed this concept in the early 80s in response to the custody issues that emerged with the proliferation of digital records and the impossibility of archival institutions being able to acquire and preserve them all. So while there is no one singular way to do postcustodial archiving, Gabe and I will be discussing a postcustodial model in which a large academic university library partners with a human rights organization to preserve the documentation for the long-term. In this partnership model, the large university library also shares preservation expertise and training so that the organization can also build their internal capacity for preservation.
Over the past 15 years, archivists have discussed and implemented this model of postcustodial archiving as an ethical response to traditional archival practices that tend to extract important archival documentation from their communities of origin, particularly from marginalized U.S. communities and global south* communities. These extractive practices, which are colonial in origin, severely limit communities’ access to their historical memory. In contrast, postcustodial archiving can enable the long-term preservation of histories that may otherwise be lost. Postcustodial archiving can also facilitate the conditions for more community agency and control over their own histories.
Since 2009, in my roles as human rights archivist at UT Austin and as librarian for UCLA’s Digital Library Program, I’ve facilitated these postcustodial partnerships with human rights organizations and cultural heritage organizations around the world. When the conference organizers approached me to speak on these decolonial, postcustodial archiving practices at this conference, I knew I didn’t want to give a typical talk that primarily focuses on the virtues of doing postcustodial archiving. I’ve given a lot of talks and written extensively about this topic. Since the pandemic, all my postcustodial work has been on pause and so it didn’t feel quite right to talk about this pre-pandemic work in this pandemic context. Instead, I thought that it would be beneficial to reflect on what we’ve learned over the past decade and the challenges that we’ve encountered. Since I have only worked in large academic libraries, I thought it’d be important and necessary to have this conversation with someone who’s also intimately familiar with postcustodial archiving but is outside the university. So that’s why I invited Gabe to join me in this conversation and I’m hoping we can have a frank conversation about postcustodial archiving and what it’s accomplished, but also its limitations and the implications of these limitations for archival loss.
Gabe, thank you so much for being here today. Will you share a little bit more about yourself and the work of the Texas After Violence Project?
GABRIEL SOLÍS: As you mentioned, we met back in 2009 after I’d been with TAVP for two years. At that time, we were documenting oral histories related to loss, murder, and the death penalty. I was in my early 20s and those two years were very formative for me. They changed my entire worldview about violence and justice.
After graduate school, I went to work with Mary Marshall Clark at Columbia University’s Center for Oral History Research. I worked on the Guantánamo Bay Oral History Project where we documented and archived testimonies about some of the most horrific aspects and so-called post 9/11 global war on terror. We interviewed many people with a wide range of experiences and perspectives — from former detainees who were abused and tortured at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, Bagram, and CIA black sites to a former US Supreme Court Justice who wrote key decisions about the legal rights of people who are captured as “enemy combatants” during the US war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
When I returned to Texas in 2013, I worked as a capital post-conviction investigator on behalf of people that were sentenced to death. My job was to build trust with our clients and their loved ones in order to reconstruct their life and social histories. While these histories often are centered on violence and abuse that our clients suffered throughout their lives, our job was essentially to show the judges that our clients were loved and loved by other people. That basic humanization was meant to counter the dehumanizing strategy of trial prosecutors who often are effective in convincing ordinary people to vote in favor of an execution. Anyone who’s done community oral history work will understand how that oral history work made me an effective investigator. It taught me how to deeply listen with compassion, understanding, and without judgment.
In 2015, TAVP’s Board of Directors asked me to come back as its Executive Director. I pretty quickly expanded the mission scope to document the impacts of state violence broadly, initiating new documentation and archival projects on police violence, mass incarceration, and in-custody deaths that center agency, humanity, dignity. Involving directly impacted people to make key decisions about how to do this work builds power, counters dominant narratives about violence, and contributes to broader movements to dismantle the carceral state.
In recent years, TAVP has experienced a lot of growth. We’ve implemented new innovative projects and programs, including our Visions After Violence Community Fellowship Program, artist and writer residencies, and our Virtual Belonging project, a collaboration with our friends at the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) and UCLA Community Archives Lab. We also have our Access to Treatment Initiative which trains mental health clinicians across the United States to better serve the relatives of those who have been executed or sentenced to death. I wanted to be sure to mention that last one because it shows that community archives often do a lot more than just preserve materials. Our work fights for healing and justice and liberation. TAVP also continues to be a critical resource for our allies and we create resources responsive to our communities’ needs and to new and ongoing crises. Some examples of this are resources that we’ve created and are updating on mitigating risks of legal exposure, retaliation against communities we serve, and responsibly documenting and archiving audio-visual protest materials. That’s just a fraction of what we’re working on right now.
SANGWAND: I’m always so blown away by the breadth of work that TAVP does and I really wish we could have a more in-depth conversation about some of these initiatives that you all are working on. But since we don’t have time to do that today, I highly encourage everyone to go to the TAVP website and learn more about the breadth of their work.
Gabe, to get into the topic of today, can you talk a little bit more about why Texas After Violence Project decided to enter into a postcustodial partnership with UT Austin and what are some of the impacts of that partnership for TAVP’s work over the past decade.
SOLÍS: We initially entered the partnership with UT HRDI out of necessity. At that time, we were a very young organization. We had very little funding. I think there was probably only one staff person at that time and a few contractors. I was a contractor, just out of college. Our focus at that time was on documentation, so we were driving around the state with our little camera and sitting in people’s living rooms and bearing witness to really difficult stories of loss and survival. In many ways that postcustodial arrangement was perfect for us at that time. It eased our anxieties knowing that highly skilled archivists, like you, T-Kay, were stewarding the important stories we were documenting and other materials we were collecting such as case records, photographs, home videos, and other ephemera. Besides the technical assistance that we needed, it also allowed our collection to be in dialogue with other human rights collections from around the world and symbolically counter notions of U.S. exceptionalism when it came to everyday human rights abuses in the criminal punishment system. More directly, it also allowed us to find community with other groups with similar missions.
One example of this is when you advocated for TAVP to be part of the 2018 Architecting Sustainable Futures gathering in New Orleans that was organized by our friends, Bergis Jules and Jon Voss. That event alone allowed us to make connections with practitioners and groups that we are still working closely with today, it immediately gave us a community. I thought we were alone in Texas doing this work and going to that gathering made me realize that there were many other groups doing similar work. It also allowed us to meet funders that we still have funding partnerships with. I can’t overstate how important that was for our success and growth over the last decade. All of that emerged from this postcustodial partnership.
SANGWAND: That’s amazing. Thank you for recapping that history and showing the connections that were forged between these different community archives at that time. I like to think of that as the golden age of this postcustodial era.
SOLÍS: It was really important. It set us on the trajectory that we’re still on.
Okay, I’m going to ask you a question, T-Kay. What impacts of postcustodial archiving have you seen broadly over the last decade?
SANGWAND: One of the biggest changes that I witnessed is a complete shift in professional discourse and education around postcustodial archiving. When I was in the UCLA MLIS program in 2006, there was no discussion of postcustodial practice as a viable archival method. I think the work that we accomplished at UT Austin through the Human Rights Documentation Initiative really contributed to and shifted the discourse on postcustodial practices. And now we’re seeing discussions, presentations, publications on the topic. It’s fairly mainstream in archival discourse and on syllabi within iSchools. In tandem with this shift in discourse, we’ve also seen more institutional acceptance of postcustodial archiving. As you mentioned, there are funders such as the Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Ford Foundation — they’re all funding postcustodial projects now. And of course, library administrators are likewise pursuing these funding opportunities. I know we’ll get into the complexities of what that means — this mainstreamification of postcustodialism — but I think it’s really important to note this shift in discourse because it is significant.
What I do think is really exciting about postcustodialism over the past decade is seeing the significant impact it’s had for our community partners in terms of preserving materials that might not otherwise be preserved. It’s also helped to build and strengthen archival expertise and infrastructure within local communities. And, as you mentioned, it’s helped to redistribute resources and increase funding opportunities. We’ve also seen it strengthen historical memory locally and among diaspora communities. I want to share a few examples of that impact to give a sense of what that looks like.
Through a postcustodial partnership that the UCLA Library has with the Instituto de la Historia de Cuba or the National Institute of Cuban History, which is based in Havana, Cuba, we were able to digitize, preserve, and provide access to this unique collection of pre-revolutionary radio recordings that were recorded on 16 inch lacquer discs. Even within the U.S., the playback equipment necessary to digitize this material is very rare and thus it’s completely impossible to source that type of equipment in Cuba. Without this postcustodial partnership, it’s possible that these recordings would have deteriorated significantly and not have been able to be digitized in the future.
Another example of this postcustodial impact is through the HRDI’s partnership with the Museo de La Palabra y La Imagen, or the Museum of the Word and Image based in El Salvador. Through this partnership, we were able to digitize a collection of radio recordings — cassette tapes from Radio Venceremos — which broadcast throughout El Salvador during the civil war. Many of these tapes were smuggled outside the country during the armed conflict and then brought back in after the Peace Accords so they had already gone through a lot of transit and were in fragile condition. Without this type of partnership, the tapes might not have been able to be digitized in the future.
Another really important impact story that we have is through the HRDI’s partnership with the Genocide Archive of Rwanda. Back in 2008 when we initiated that partnership, there was no strong archival infrastructure in Rwanda, much less a digital archival infrastructure. Due to the collaboration with UT Austin, the Genocide Archive of Rwanda was able to build up its archival capacity and infrastructure so significantly that the Office of the President in Rwanda contracted the Genocide Archive of Rwanda to conduct an assessment of his own presidential archives. Through that, UT Libraries was subcontracted by the Genocide Archive of Rwanda to support them in that assessment process. So, it was through this postcustodial partnership that the community partner was able to gain the expertise to become archival leaders in their country. I give these examples to show how postcustodial partnerships can strengthen historical memory not only by preserving archival materials, but by also building archival expertise and capacity.
One of the most poignant examples I’ve seen of the significance of strengthening historical memory was through the early stages of a partnership that UT Libraries had with the Guatemala National Police Historical Archive (AHPN). This collaboration led to a UT graduate course that was centered around the Guatemala Police Archive. Through the seminar, many of the students who were of the Guatemalan diaspora were able to engage in the history of Guatemala’s armed conflict by doing research in both the digital archive held at UT, and also at the physical archive in Guatemala City. They were able to take a field trip to the physical archive, and the students talked about how impactful it was for them to be able to reconnect with this history because it had been silenced or hadn’t been widely discussed within their families because of how painful it was. I think reconnecting people to their histories and strengthening their relationship to it is one of the most powerful impacts that postcustodial archiving can have.
The last thing I want to touch on is something that you already mentioned, which is the impact of the redistribution of resources and funding opportunities. I think UT libraries tried to address this creatively. We used acquisition budgets to compensate labor for postcustodial partnerships in exchange for digital archival materials. This wasn’t a perfect solution and it’s not the only solution, but it exemplifies some of the creative thinking that we have to employ in institutions to ensure that we’re really trying to engage in these partnerships ethically. It’s such an amazing example of how TAVP has connected with funders like the Mellon Foundation to get your own funding because community partners shouldn’t be reliant on large institutions to design grant funded projects. They should be able to do that on their own terms and not be reliant on other institutions.
SOLÍS: I’m glad you went through all of the collections that you were a part of at UT Austin because it illustrates the point I was making earlier about the importance of having a collection on state violence in Texas and the U.S. South in dialogue with other global collections on state violence.
SANGWAND: Yes, absolutely.
Now that we’ve talked about the more positive impacts of postcustodial archiving and what’s worked well, I want to ask what you think some of the challenges of postcustodial archiving have been for TAVP and what you think institutions can do better?
SOLÍS: As I mentioned, the partnership was really beneficial for us for several years. But there came a point when library staff at UT were no longer able to be responsive to our needs as they were in earlier years. You had already left UT by that point. UT staff told me that the reason behind the lack of support was because the initial grant funding that had supported the development of HRDI had been exhausted. And, for whatever reason, library administrators didn’t fill those funding gaps.
I want to be clear that the archivists and iSchool graduate students that we work with day-to-day at UT were not the problem. They worked really hard and they put in as much time as they could to try to meet the needs of our fast growing collection. It appears that they simply were not given the resources that they needed to continue the postcustodial standard that you had started there.
This went on for a few years. There were frustrations, then a confluence of factors forced us to really step back from the postcustodial partnership.
First, because of the lack of resources, HRDI was still using an outdated platform that relied on Adobe Flash and that was discontinued in 2020. When that happened, we were given no advance warning. What resulted was that our audiovisual collection was no longer accessible, which jeopardized our mission to build an archive that is first and foremost a resource for activists, organizers, advocates, educators, and our community more broadly. So that was a major problem.
Second, due to these problems around inaccessibility, we secured funding from the Mellon Foundation to build our own autonomous digital repository using Mukurtu. This resulted in the launch of our After Violence Archive, which I’m very proud of.
Third, it was becoming increasingly difficult for us to justify to ourselves a partnership with an institution that has been intertwined with white supremacy since its founding. There are many, many examples like this. However, one recent example is from 2021 when the university refused to take action and get rid of the school’s fight song, “The Eyes of Texas”, which was performed at student minstrel shows in the early 20th century and today is still sung at football games. The university didn’t act on it, even though students of color were demanding action, because wealthy donors threatened to pull their funding from the university because they wanted the school to fully embrace that fight song. That was very revealing to us. My former colleague, Jane Field, wrote a short essay about this and our reaction to it. The final straw for us was when we learned that the university may have been raising money off of our collection in the aftermath of the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the subsequent nationwide movement for Black lives and racial justice. We had never received any funding support from the university for being a postcustodial partner. That was something that we couldn’t get past and so we decided to no longer send materials there and we have continued to migrate our collection to our own digital repository.
I think what happened there in the last couple of years was a failure at the top, which was in stark contrast to the way we worked together in the early years, T-Kay, when you were there and even a couple years after you left. I think it was a failure by library administrators and by high-ranking university officials. I believe that if it were up to the staff archivists who we worked with day-to-day then many of these problems would have been avoided or addressed.
However, I want to be clear that we have to figure out a way to make these institutional partnerships functional. We have to figure out a way to make sure that they are effective and equitable, and honest about serious harms, both past and present. I encourage everybody here to check out the Architecting Sustainable Futures report that was generated from that gathering in New Orleans. That report has very straightforward recommendations for how to make these institutional partnerships functional and equitable. There are people in the community archives world who believe that these partnerships can never fully be equitable. I think there’s some truth to that. However, I also recognize the critical role that these postcustodial partnerships play for activists, organizers, and advocates that don’t have the resources or the capacity, or maybe even interest, to preserve community stories and materials related to state violence and human rights. Their missions are usually centered around direct actions or campaigns, and unless they’re a community archive, there’s not so much of an emphasis on preservation and decisions around access. So whether it’s through the systematic erasure or calculated destruction of records, these stories and materials are forms of endangered knowledge that are always under the threat of being lost. Postcustodial partnerships have a huge potential to help limit this potentially massive loss.
I want to make one more last point. Another reason why we have to figure out a way for these partnerships to work, is that postcustodial partnerships support the communities they serve with protecting their collections, this endangered knowledge against threats — both old and new. This includes the usual threats from police and prosecutors and right-wing extremists, to emerging threats such as the proliferation of mis- and disinformation online, and new threats of surveillance fueled by advances in artificial intelligence, just to name a few examples.
SANGWAND: Thank you for sharing so openly about those frustrating experiences and frankly, unethical experiences that you had working with UT. They’re not entirely surprising, but they’re certainly disturbing. They’re also consistent with some of the trends that I’ve also seen working in these postcustodial spaces. I’m also really glad that you touched on the differences in opinion among community archive folks around whether to engage in postcustodial partnerships with large universities. I think it’s really important to highlight that not everyone in the community thinks the same way about it. And it’s useful to talk about different methods to address some of these issues.
SOLÍS: Oftentimes, there are many, many generations of distrust between large academic institutions and the communities that they are in. That will require a lot of proactive work on behalf of the people situated in these institutions to overcome those barriers.
So T-Kay, what have been the challenges that you’ve seen over the last decade from where you’re sitting in a large academic institution, and what is your view on what these institutions can do better to make these partnerships work?
SANGWAND: There’s a lot I can say about the challenges. Off the top of my head, there are the issues of compensation for community partners and being able to implement ethical, non-extractive practices within partnerships. There’s also the challenge of having sufficient staffing particularly with the right technical expertise as well as cultural competence and linguistic expertise. There’s also the challenge of the lack of sustainability planning after grant funding ends, which you alluded to as well.
First I’ll say that large university libraries shouldn’t be pursuing these grant funding for community-based archival projects without actually involving members of the community that they intend to work with. I know this is very obvious, but it’s worth stating because I’ve sat on review panels for granting programs at National Endowment for the Humanities and Institute of Museum and Library Services, and it’s very common for academic libraries to apply for funding for community-based archival projects with absolutely no one from the community being listed in the project staff or in a position of decision making power. I’ve seen them listed as community consultants, which I generally don’t think is sufficient because they’re usually not compensated fairly and they’re in an advisory role, not a decision-making role. If institutions really are committed to doing this community-based work, then these committee members should be listed on the grant as either principal investigators or co-principal investigators.
As I mentioned earlier, compensation was an issue that we had to think creatively about at UT and we were able to find a solution for some of our partners. But compensation wasn’t available to all of our partners and unfortunately TAVP was an example of that. We were not able to monetarily compensate your staff for their labor processing all the archival materials that were deposited at UT. Compensating partner labor needs to be a default within these partnerships because without that compensation, the work won’t get done, or it won’t get done completely, or it will be done slowly. All of this has long-term consequences for access. If these large university libraries are serious about doing postcustodial community-based work, this compensation should be accounted for in actual budget lines for collection development or outreach.
This leads me to the issue of how institutions can engage in ethical, non-extractive relationships. I want to stress the importance of compensation, but I don’t want to imply that these partnerships should be purely transactional either. Ethical partnerships don’t end when a financial transaction is complete. Apart from a long-term commitment to the preservation of digital materials, there are also needs to be investment in the relationship because the relationship will build the foundation for bolstering access and use of the collections, both within the community of origin and also for the wider public, if that’s what the community has decided. Large university libraries should not be hoarding opportunities to speak on the postcustodial partnership without actually including the partners and inviting them to be part of it. They also shouldn’t be showing off these collections, as you mentioned, in pursuit of institutional clout chasing or fundraising without actually or investing in the relationship. Investing in the relationship doesn’t always have to be monetary either. It can be sharing or redistributing equipment, resources, or other opportunities that the large institution has access to. As you said, due to the ongoing histories of white supremacy and colonialism, there are so many reasons why community groups are wary of working with large institutions. If we continue to perpetuate these dynamics in these supposed partnerships, it will ultimately prevent other valuable community archival materials from being preserved for the long term.
Another common challenge that I’ve seen is that large institutions that receive grant funding to initiate these partnerships don’t always have sufficient staff to support them, or they don’t have the appropriate expertise to staff the project. It’s imperative that archival staff have the necessary cultural and/or linguistics competencies to engage in these postcustodial partnerships, especially if they’re working with indigenous, global south, or diaspora communities. English shouldn’t be assumed as a default language in these partnerships. Nor should Western archival principles be imposed on the collection if it doesn’t work for the collection and serve the partnership. Additionally, if these large universities want to grow their number of postcustodial partnerships, the number of staff supporting those partnerships needs to be scaled accordingly. This isn’t just with archivists, but also those who work in technical services, digital infrastructure, and digital asset management. As many of the presenters yesterday discussed, contingent labor is really endemic in archival repositories and is detrimental to the work. How can large archival institutions ethically say that they’re going to commit to the long-term preservation of materials, when they have temporary positions such as digital assets coordinators. By not addressing these staffing issues, community collections are really vulnerable to loss even before they arrive at an academic institution or they risk atrophying within the institution.
Many of these issues could actually be addressed if institutions engaged in sustainability planning before even applying to grant funding. As you’ve discussed and as I’ve witnessed, many of these postcustodial relationships really flounder after grant funding ends. And it’s because institutions didn’t adequately plan for sustainability in terms of funding for staffing and for investing in their relationship and infrastructure, even though they promised to have a long-term commitment to the partnership and to the preservation of the materials. If this sustainability planning isn’t in place before applying for grants, it’s really unethical for institutions to engage with the partnerships because they might not be able to fulfill their promise of long-term stewardship. If an institution can’t reasonably plan for sustainability, then it should plan for how to sunset a project after funding ends. This should be part of the initial conversation that they have with the community partner because it will help inform the community and their consent process around whether or not they choose to engage in this partnership. When we started this work, close to fifteen years ago, it was largely experimental. We were figuring a lot of things out. I’ve always said that there is no one right way to do a postcustodial relationship. But, I think we’ve learned how not to do it and now we have the benefit of working over the past ten years to know how we can more ethically engage in these partnerships moving forward.
SOLÍS: With all of that in mind, what would be your advice to community archives or activists or organizing groups that may be interested in engaging in a postcustodial partnership?
SANGWAND: My biggest piece of advice is to negotiate with the institution. Don’t be afraid to negotiate for what the community wants and what’s going to benefit the different stakeholders in the community. I think if community materials require specific forms of access that should be specified and requested up front. I know the power dynamic between a large institution and a community group can be intimidating or daunting. However, I think community groups actually wield a lot of power because it’s typically a large institution that’s pursuing them to work together.
With that said, if they decide to engage without partnership, it’s really important to document the decisions and commitments. There can be a lot of staff turnover that results in loss of institutional memory. I’ve had the experience of stepping into a partnership that’s been going on for over ten years and various commitments were documented, but not all of them. I’ve seen first-hand how a relationship can suffer when there are unkept promises because staff members don’t actually know what was promised in the past. Having clear documentation around these commitments and decisions really sets the foundation for having a more successful partnership.
Before we close out I want to pose that same question to you. What advice would you give to other community archives who are considering engaging in a postcustodial partnership?
SOLÍS: First, I would say never jeopardize your principles and ethics. If your principles and ethics are jeopardized, maybe there’s an opportunity to help institutional partners learn and evolve, but if they’re unwilling to act I think you have to leave and cultivate a new partnership. This could be with another academic institution. Or, with the new investment from institutional funders in community archives, I think community archives are increasingly better positioned to have the capacity to engage in postcustodial partnerships themselves. For example, our After Violence Archive has partnered with other collections and we provide many of the same levels of support that you all did for us in those early years. When we’re considering any kind of a partnership with an institution, we first check if our principles and ethics are in balance with the project that we’re considering partnering with. If they’re not, we determine whether there’s an opportunity for that institutional partner to grow and evolve by learning from us and learning how we do our work that is community centered, ethical, and inclusive.
Second, I’d say to always remain vigilant and maybe even skeptical of these partnerships, but also keep in mind that they can work and be effective and generative like ours was in those early years. We’ve had a long time partnership with UCLA Community Archives Lab and are currently working with Michelle Caswell andd Anna Robinson-Sweet there. It’s been a very good and generative partnership over the last couple years for us and we’ll continue to work with them.
Finally, I’ll say not to ignore the real threat of loss of endangered knowledge of communities that we serve, especially those that are directly impacted by state violence and systematic human rights abuses. Find ways to ethically and responsibly document, preserve and, when appropriate, make accessible these community stories and records. This memory work is essential for justice and liberation.
SANGWAND: I think that’s a great note to end on. Thank you so much, Gabe.
I think we’re ready for Q&A now.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: What advice do you have for practitioners and academic institutions to put pressure on our resource allocators and decision-makers to transform structures and budgets to sustain those postcustodial partnerships?
SANGWAND: This is the eternal challenge that we’re faced with. One effective strategy that we had at UT Austin and also here at UCLA is tying how the postcustodial work supports the overall missions of the university and the library. Another thing that I learned in doing these partnerships is that you may have an amazing postcustodial partner with an incredible collection that’s super valuable for the historical record, but if you don’t have people on campus who are going to actively engage with the collection, it’s a lot harder for the institution to justify putting resources towards that collection. Unfortunately, that’s what we saw happen with the Genocide Archive of Rwanda. It’s an incredibly important collection, but no one at UT worked in-depth with Rwanda, so we didn’t have a lot of pressure that we could exert showing that the collection would be used on campus. So those were two strategies that I’ve seen work.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Relatedly, what forms of documentation can help institutions plan for partnership sustainability, especially when staff turnover is frequent in both institutions and with community-based partners?
SANGWAND: This is something that I think about a lot because I’ve never worked in an institution that has done it. At UT Austin, they somewhat planned for sustainability in the sense that they hired me as a permanent archivist. The Human Rights Documentation Initiative was grant-funded, but my position was not grant funded, so I was going to be the one resource dedicated to it. In the end that wasn’t sufficient; however, dedicating staffing lines to partnerships is not only important, but also way more beneficial because you’re not having to rebuild a relationship with rapid staff turnover which actually would require more investment over the long-term. Every institution is going to be different though because you’re working in different contexts with different financial situations. The main things that people have to think about and the questions they have to ask are around staffing, storage capacity, who they identify as campus allies, and who will support the ongoing maintenance of this postcustodial relationship. These conversations need to be held at and with different levels of the organization. It’s imperative to have your admin and resource allocators on board. Postcustodial partnerships aren’t something that can happen in a silo with one department. I think making sure you have all the right people in the room having these conversations is the best start you can have.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Is there a guide or a checklist for community archives entering into partnerships with institutional collections, that lists many of the issues that both Gabe and T-Kay have described as potential pain points and pitfalls impacting ethical practice and sustainability?
SOLÍS: I don’t know if one exists, but the closest that I know of is the Architecting Sustainable Futures report that emerged from that gathering in 2018. If you haven’t already, you should read it. It’s a really good resource.
The other thing that I’ll mention is that TAVP has been very involved in recent years with the creation of a Community Archives Collaborative, which is a global peer support network of community archives. The pandemic disrupted the momentum that we had in putting this collaborative together after the Architecting Sustainable Futures symposium, but I’m glad to say that TAVP hosted a Community Archives Collaborative gathering in Austin in November 2022. The whole point of that collaborative is to create resources for community archives and to be a network for knowledge and skill sharing around the various obstacles and barriers that community archives face. Once the collaborative gets going later this year, we’ll be creating those exact kinds of resources.
SANGWAND: To follow up on that, the publication that Gabe mentioned, the Architecting Sustainable Futures report, would be a really great resource for sustainability planning because it highlighted many of these questions.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: It seems that the impetus of a community wanting to maintain their identity and document their collective memory is at odds with that of a large institution driven by research. How do you reconcile these or can you in the end?
SOLÍS: I think that’s what we’re trying to figure out in having dialogues like this. There are people that I trust and respect greatly in the community archives field who don’t think that it’s possible because of their own experiences with partnerships with institutions that are often so entrenched with white supremacy or problematic practices within their communities. I am not quite there but I think it takes a lot of work at all levels, but especially at the leadership level within libraries and institutions. So, I don’t have a quick and easy answer to that question. It’s a hard one, but I think people are really trying to figure it out because it will continue to be necessary.
SANGWAND: I think there’s going to be a lot of instances where the goals of each partner aren’t always going to align, but there is space for finding what the common goals are. TAVP is a good example of this. When they started working with HRDI, it was very beneficial for all parties who were involved. Then there came a time where it wasn’t and that’s okay. That relationship can transition too. While the separation was for unfortunate reasons, it ultimately led to more growth and autonomy for TAVP. So, being open to different relationship possibilities and leveraging the resources to a community archive’s advantage can be one approach.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: If you believe your institution is applying or will apply unethical and extractive methods of partnerships, do you think it’s worth pushing for change or should librarians try to work outside of the institution to support community-based archives in a different way?
SANGWAND: I think both. There’s a lot of literature now that you can share with your administration that shows there are different ways to approach these partnerships. But sometimes the administration isn’t going to listen and they’re going to do what they’re going to do. If you’re in a role to do so, one strategy can be to educate the community partner on what some of their options are in a partnership. There are a lot of us who work within institutions and recognize the limitations and so we also try to contribute our expertise to community initiatives outside the institution. The Archivists Supporting Activists initiative by the Documenting the Now Project is a really great example of that. Many archival professionals have signed up on this list and if there are activist groups who need archival expertise, they can scan the list and reach out to someone. I think there’s space to address this issue from both within and outside the institution.
REBECCA FENNING MARSCHALL: Thank you both again for sharing your expertise and your experiences with us, T-Kay and Gabe.
Bios
T-Kay Sangwand is a Certified Archivist, librarian, and DJ. Over the past fourteen years she has worked with UCLA and UT Austin to build preservation partnerships for human rights documentation and cultural heritage materials in the U.S., Latin America, Africa, and Asia. She holds a MLIS and MA in Latin American Studies from UCLA and is a Fulbright Specialist in Library and Information Science. In 2018–2019, she was a Fulbright Scholar with Mexico’s Ministry of Culture. You can find T-Kay DJ’ing in Los Angeles and hosting her monthly radio program “The Archive of Feelings” on dublab.com
Gabriel Daniel Solís is the Executive Director of Texas After Violence Project. Prior to returning to TAVP, he worked as a capital post-conviction investigator for the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs, criminal justice research associate at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, and coordinator of the Guantánamo Bay Oral History Project at the Columbia Center for Oral History Research. Gabriel is the recipient of the 2018 Pushcart Prize for nonfiction. His writings have appeared in Texas Monthly, Texas Observer, Oxford American, Scalawag, Cultural Dynamics: Insurgent Scholarship on Culture, Politics, and Power, and Kula: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies. Gabriel is the 2023 University of California Regents Fellow in Information Studies.
*The term ‘global south’ refers to the countries/regions that were previously referred to as ‘underdeveloped’ or part of the ‘developing world’ or ‘third world.’ While recognizing the geographic imprecision of the term ‘global south,’ I use it as an inclusive term to refer to ‘countries and regions formerly colonized by Western Europe’ (and I would add the US) that ‘retain economic, cultural, and political commonalities that relate to the experience of colonization, as well as a position in today’s global power structures that reflects that experience’ (Tobias Schwarz and Manuela Boatca, “Not Having Neutral Terms Does Not Equal Having No Terms At All” in Concepts of the Global South — Voices from Around the World, eds. Andrea Hollington, Oliver Tappe, Tijo Salverda, and Tobias Schwarz, (Cologne: Global South Studies Center, 2015), 17).
