In reflecting on my work with the Puerto Rican Cultural Center over the past ten weeks, I am struck by a dual sense of accomplishment coupled with an intense awareness of the vast amount of work ahead for the Community Archive. As a team, working very much “from scratch” with only a preliminary sense of where we might even find relevant historical materials, we succeeded in achieving the major initial goals of the project. Namely, these goals were identifying the locations of materials that will be a part of the founding “PRCC Collection;” conducting a fairly detailed survey of these materials to determine types of mediums/formats, information, organizations, and date ranges that we were working with; and then moving all of these materials to a central location to begin processing them as an archival collection.
Importantly, the foundational Archives Team also worked to develop a Handbook for use by future volunteers and archival team members. The idea of the Handbook came out of the need for this initial team to communicate our workflows, processes, and decision-making to the people who will be continuing this work. With this Handbook, all of the work that this team accomplished to figure out some best practices (as well as questions we have identified that will need to be determined as more information is learned about the archival materials) will not have to be duplicated. Collectively, we brainstormed that the Handbook should include these key sections in order to best prepare new team members: a brief history about the PRCC itself and readings about its political history, a short narrative of the work done on the Archive project to get it to this current stage, and the overall mission of the project; the rules of the workspace and emergency contact information for any needs with the physical space; a short introduction to archival concepts, including the goals of arranging materials, both more generally and as they relate to community archives; a detailed description of the sorting process we implemented (essentially preliminary arranging) so that new people can continue this work easily and efficiently; a glossary of key terms that we have come across, which will help new archival volunteers to clearly identify information in the materials that they encounter; and finally, an outline of next phases and a timeline for this work, as well as some of the short-term and longer-term archival goals that can help guide and inspire people through this work.
There are still plenty of questions for the PRCC and its Archives leadership team to determine as they move forward. There are also questions that will fundamentally be answered only with time and a more in-depth knowledge of the materials, such as an arrangement structure, or a conservation/preservation plan for specific materials. Other long-term goals include implementing a cataloging system, developing a digitization plan (as well as understanding and organizing materials that have already been digitized), initiating an oral history program, gathering further community contributions to the archive, and identifying partnerships and outreach opportunities to further make these important materials accessible and usable. Along with these broad goals is of course the necessity of identifying and applying for grant funding to help sustain the project, which takes a significant amount of effort in itself; paradoxically, grant applications will often be stronger and more successful with more up-front work being done on the project, so continuing to build upon our current efforts is essential to the future of the Archives project for multiple reasons.
Most importantly, the community built around and associated with the Puerto Rican Cultural Center must be actively engaged in the process of developing and sustaining the Archive, as their local network is a fundamental part of preserving their own history for both broader access and self-empowerment. The people who have helped to make the PRCC and the Puerto Rican community in Chicago and Humboldt Park what it is today are incredibly talented, engaged, thoughtful, generous, and motivated; and the history contained within this organiztion is unique and valuable on multiple levels. I am grateful to have been a part of working with them and beginning to preserve this essential history for the future.
