Hello fellow preservationists, history lovers, art lovers, and everyone
who just happened to stumble upon this blog.
While I am attaching this blog to my own personal blogs, I want to disclose that the efforts of preserving and creating a sort of community/organization archives without a professional archivist at the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center are and will hopefully always be a community/group effort.
A little information about this organization. The Esperanza Peace and Justice Center is located in San Antonio Texas with several locations throughout the San Antonio area. The organization has existed for over 26 years with a fairly constant level of growth in programming, staff, building locations, as well as the number of readers for the organization's monthly newsletter.
For the past 26 years, the organization has strived to bring cultural arts or what we tern art activism to the San Antonio area. Through the arts, the Esperanza Center has been able to remind and encourage the San Antonio community about the many social and human injustices that plague our society.
The Esperanza Center aims to highlight the struggles of classism, racism, homophobia, sexism, ageism as well as discrimination towards immigrants, the disabled, the young and old, and all other forms of hatred and bigotry. Our history as an organization that uses the tool of art to discuss and educate has often faced opposition from conservative right winged fundamentalists as well as governmental agencies who do not agree with the idea of placing the people (those that do not belong to the 1% elite) FIRST.
Over the years, the Esperanza Center has committed itself to not only creating history but also to preserving the history that too often goes forgotten. Whether it is photographs of working class communities of the Westside of San Antonio to the prevention of building demolition set to be replaced by high cost condos, hotels, fancy restaurants, and so on.
Our history is recorded through our memories and photos, but also through our invitations, flyers, posters, signs, banners, and all other forms of art that we create.
My role in this preservation effort is to gather the energy and momentum and combine it with a sincere love for history as well as a commitment to protecting the history that mainstream museums, archives, exhibit, and textbooks tend to forget or purposely ignore, misrepresent, or under-represent.
I have been working on this project that we are calling a community archives for over 4 months. I enjoy every moment of it and hope to show that enthusiasm to anyone who inquires over my job responsibilities.
Through this blog, I hope to keep track of our work for the sake of history record keeping as well as impart some reflections for any other arts, cultural, ethnic, multicultural organization or group that wishes to preserve (Y)OUR history since many of the people at the higher institutional level choose not to.
If you have any suggestions or would like to help, I encourage you to leave a message or message me.
Thank you and wish US good luck.
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