Author: Jamie Ann Lee
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Community Archives: Project & Practice
By Olivia Carmen Otero, FOCAS Intern, Spring 2025 / University of Arizona This internship experience has shaped me in ways I never could have imagined, from presenting at the Society of Southwest Archivists conference to collaborating with interns from different institutions as part of FOCAS on a graduate poster submitted for the 2025 Society of…
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Meditations on Mortality, Collective Memory, and Connection
By Nicole Hayes, FOCAS Intern, Spring 2025 / University of Arizona I spent the past semester as an intern at the Arizona Queer Archives—a community archive based in Tucson, Arizona that collects and preserves histories pertaining to queer communities across the state. Quite naturally, as a geographically-specific archive focused on a specific marginalized community, many…
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Mexican American History and Heritage Museum
By Melissa Berry, FOCAS Intern, Spring 2025 / University of Arizona My role as the Spring 2025 FOCAS intern for the Mexican American History and Heritage Museum was to continue building on the work of previous intern Jesus Villalobos in developing the museum’s oral history collection. While scheduling constraints only allowed time for one comprehensive…
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Internship at the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California (CHSSC)
By Riona Tsai, June 2025, FOCAS Intern, 24-25, UCLA In 2021, I began working as an intern at the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California (CHSSC). At this time, I was an undergraduate student at UC Riverside. I began my internship doing research on City Market Chinatown as a part of the Five Chinatowns Project…
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Archiving in Motion: Community, Collaboration, and Storytelling at LAAPFF
By Blair Black, May 2025, FOCAS Intern, 24-25 / UCLA Volunteering at the L.A. Asian Pacific Film Festival (LAAPFF), presented by Visual Communications (VC), was a deeply moving experience that reminded me of how essential collaboration is to sustaining community memory. As an archivist, I often think about legacy in terms of preservation—but working the…
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Sharing Lesbian Joy at the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives
By Sam Stroud, April 2025, FOCAS Intern, 24-25 / UCLA During my time as an intern at the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, I’ve gained experience in many aspects of the archival process. I’ve processed collections, written finding aids, digitized materials, and created metadata for digital collections– to name just a few of my intern…
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La Historia: The History of a Community With the Files of an Archive
By Priscilla Avitia, March 2025, FOCAS Intern, 24-25 / UCLA I first visited La Historia Historical Society Museum during their Mellon Grant showcase. Rosa Pena, La Historia director, Bianca J. Sosa-Phal, La Historia archivist, and Krystal Mendez, a former UCLA Mellon intern, each gave short presentations. They discussed the projects they’ve worked on and events…
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Festival for All Artists: Moments from the Skid Row History Museum and Archive
By Ana Elizabeth Lara Beltrand, Feb. 2025, FOCAS Intern, 24-25 / UCLA My experience at the Skid Row History Museum and Archive is something I haven’t stopped talking about. On my first day, my supervisor Henry and I did a data walk, taking in the contemporary landscape of Skid Row. This was an excellent first…
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From Harm to Healing: Creating Trauma-Informed Statements for the South Asian Canadian Digital Archive
By Iori Khuhro, FOCAS Intern, Spring 2025 / University of British Columbia Culture and Identity “The values and norms that connect us to a shared identity and community.”[1] My name is Iori Khuhro, and I am a second-generation Pakistani-Canadian settler born on lands constituting the Treaty and Traditional Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit…
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Dunbar Pavillion: Building a Community Archive, Preserving Voices
By Olivia Carmen Otero, FOCAS Intern, Fall 2024 / University of Arizona The Dunbar School, a modest, two-room structure built in 1918, served as a school for African American Children in Tucson, Arizona. The school underwent several expansions to accommodate its growing student body and faculty until it was desegregated in 1951. Regarded as one…