Guadalupe Rosales on collecting family photos, flyers, and memories to document Latinx life in Los Angeles

The useful part

She is also the artist behind the archival projects " Veteranas and Rucas " and " Map Pointz," about Latinx history in L.A. I left Los Angeles for New York in 2000 and lived there for more than a decade before moving back home in 2016. They felt almost like the little prayer cards you get at church, something small and precious you keep close.

How it works

• I was homesick and searching for photographs of women and girls who looked like me and the people I grew up around.
• I began to see how much of our history was sitting inside photo albums, shoeboxes, drawers, and garages.
• Rucas in 2015, and later Map Pointz in 2016, I wasn't thinking, I'm going to build an archive.
• I wanted the hairstyles, the makeup, the bedrooms, the cars, the backyard parties, but I also wanted the stories behind them.
• Writing East of the River meant turning that same attention toward myself and back toward my community.

What to take from it

I carried them around for years because they connected me to home. After years of asking other people to open their boxes, I had to open mine too.

Details worth keeping

Below, she discusses her approach to documenting Latinx communities. River, I found myself returning to the same kinds of things I had been collecting and thinking about for years: photographs, love letters, party flyers, handwritten notes, and all the objects we hold onto without necessarily thinking of them as history. I began to see photographs and letters as more than documents.

Related coverage

• Bookriot: You're invited to Book Riot's 15th birthday party.
• Newyorker: Anthropic is trying to "destructively scan all the books in the world." How worried should we be?
• Howtogeek: You can read me like a (currently) open book.
• Habr: Несмотря на огромную численность населения Китая и Индии, наибольшая часть населения Земли ныне пользуется системами письма на основе латинского алфавита.