Memories of the City: Digitizing Multimedia Archives of Medellín’s Recent History was a project to digitize and preserve two archives of memory, urban migration, and political struggle in Medellín, Colombia, focusing on Moravia and other neighborhoods built by migrants driven from the countryside from the 1950s onwards. We digitized both archives and are working to make them available in digital form — work that continues in Social Justice Archives of Medellín.
The first archive documents the Tuguriano Movement of Barrio Fidel Castro (the Moravia neighborhood), as captured in Misa Colombiana (1976), a film by Anne Fischel and Glenn McNatt. In collaboration with Fischel, UCSB undergraduates digitized a collection of photographic materials created by Glenn McNatt and Ani Tuzman that provides an intimate look at everyday life and political organizing in Moravia.
The second is an archive of oral histories collected by linguists Luz Stella Castañeda and José Ignacio Henao of the University of Antioquia in the 1990s and 2000s to study Parlache, a sociolect that emerged in Medellín in the 1980s amid economic instability and violence. The collection, which includes anonymized interviews and writings of marginalized youth, was key to their linguistic research but has not been more broadly accessible.
Through projects like this we are working to reimagine how archives can function: not as passive repositories but as dynamic, collaborative spaces where diverse voices contribute to knowledge production.