The Mobile Indigenous Community Archives (MICA) is a collaborative, community-based digital archive of Indigenous social movement organizations. As an Indigenous memory project, MICA foregrounds the ways Indigenous women have been at the forefront of struggles for Indigenous surviviance and women’s rights but often excluded both from narratives of resistance and scholarship. Further, MICA was born out of, and is animated by, the organizing and transboder community building of the Latin American Indigenous diaspora. The Latin American Indigenous Diaspora of Los Angeles includes an estimated 250,000 Oaxaca Indigenous migrants who began migrating during the bracero program of the 1940s and began settling in the city in large numbers in the 1980s (Vankin 2017). The Mayan diaspora in Los Angeles includes many refugees who, starting in the 1980s fled the civil war in Guatemala and settled the Westlake and MacArthur Park neighborhoods of LA, and their numbers have only grown since then rising to an estimated 125,000 (Estrada 2013).
The project developed out of Maylei Blackwell’s twenty three years of collaborative research with Indigenous women organizers in Mexico and its diaspora and her idea to create a community-based archive of resistance based on their multiscaled activism. It builds on Floridalma Boj Lopez’s decade-long work exploring the ways historical memory is embedded within Maya cultural production and youth organizing. As Indigenous scholar activists, they are committed to community-centered research, Indigenous knowledge production and decolonizing the archive. Mobile Indigenous Community Archives draws on Boj Lopez’s concept of the “Mobile Archives of Indigeneity,” that explores what it means for memories and histories to travel with Indigenous migrants through textiles, photographs, or stories. While dispossession is often a common experience that both propels, and at times defines, migration for Indigenous people, Indigenous migrants and their children nonetheless find and when necessary create ways to build community. These archives, like the communities that give them meaning, are mobile and Indigenous.
Our collaborative mobile archive is a partnership between students and Indigenous organizations to not only help the communities to preserve their own vital history in a mobile, broadly accessible way. MICA works with youth organizers to partner with the founding generation of their communities and organizations, as well as other wisdom keepers, to gather, curate and organize with these stories and materials.