A major piece of this Mellon-funded project is the Intern Blog, which is required of each intern across our nine collective academic institutions. Intern Blogs offer first-hand storytelling from the interns at their community archive sites. Blogs share their experiences, their perspectives on archival practices, their engagement with community archives materials and histories, and their learning from within local communities themselves.
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History & Technical Skills: Working with Los Descendientes and the Mexican American Heritage and History Museum
By Jose A. Robles II, FOCAS Intern Spring 2025, University of Arizona During the Spring 2025 semester, I was lucky enough to be a part of Los Descendientes de Tucson and The Mexican American Heritage and History Museum, alongside Melissa Berry. Alisha Vasquez and Rikki Riojas were fantastic mentors and supervisors throughout my time with…
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Preserving the History of the Dunbar School
By Hana Lipke, FOCAS Intern, Spring 2025 / University of Arizona The Dunbar Pavilion, as it stands today, is an African American focused cultural and community center located at the corner of West 2nd Street and North Main Avenue. The oldest building on site is the original Paul Laurence Dunbar School, which grew from “The…
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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…