Activating Archives: The Living Legacy of Liberation Theology in Medellín, Colombia brings together AMPL and Neogranadina with grassroots organizations in Medellín, Colombia. In Medellín, where the Second Episcopal Conference of Latin America met in 1968, priests, lay activists, and neighborhood organizations took up liberation theology, and their successors carry that work on today in popular education, in struggles over housing and the right to the city, and in the defense of collective memory.
The project has developed through a series of strands.
Memories of the City
A first strand digitized two archives of memory, urban migration, and political struggle in Medellín: photographs of everyday life and political organizing in Moravia taken by Glenn McNatt and Ani Tuzman and preserved by Anne Fischel, whose film Misa Colombiana documented the neighborhood’s struggles in 1976, and oral histories collected by linguists at the University of Antioquia in the 1990s and 2000s. You can read more about it here.
A Blueprint for Egalitarian Archival Practice
A second strand was an academic exchange supported by UCSB’s Burdick Global Scholars program. This strand brought UCSB undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and researchers together with colleagues from the University of Texas at Austin to ask three questions: What is an archive? What is its purpose? And how are archives activated? In June 2026, students from AMPL and colleagues from UT Austin traveled to Medellín for two weeks of workshops and exchanges with our partners.
You can see some of the results in the video below:
Social Justice Archives of Medellín
A third, supported by a planning grant from UCLA Library’s Modern Endangered Archives Program, has been a project with Komuni to inventory and preserve its collections, which span 1958 to 2006 and document the city’s social justice movements. You can read more about it here.
Next steps
We are now preparing an edited volume with our partners in Medellín, to appear in 2028. We also hope to gather with our partners at the 2027 congress of the Latin American Studies Association in Mexico City to explore how community archives in Medellín are used in neighborhood memory and political work, and how digital tools for capturing, describing, and publishing archival materials can serve those practices.