Guadalupe Rosales is the author of East of the River: A Memoir of Los Angeles Girlhood, out today from One World. She is also the artist behind the archival projects “Veteranas and Rucas” and “Map Pointz,” about Latinx history in L.A. Below, she discusses her approach to documenting Latinx communities. (Photo credit: Fabian Guerrero.)
When I started writing East of the River, I found myself returning to the same kinds of things I had been collecting and thinking about for years: photographs, love letters, party flyers, handwritten notes, and all the objects we hold onto without necessarily thinking of them as history.
I left Los Angeles for New York in 2000 and lived there for more than a decade before moving back home in 2016. Being away made me cherish everything connected to LA, from the stories we shared to the little material things we managed to hold onto. I began to see photographs and letters as more than documents. They could carry a place, a person, a whole memory.
In the years before I moved back, I started visiting L.A. more often and noticed that my mother had kept boxes filled with photographs, letters from teenage crushes and boyfriends, and other things from my younger years. Like so many Latina mothers, she saved everything.
In New York, I didn’t have those boxes with me. What I did have was a small stack of wallet-size Starshot portraits that friends had given me. I carried them around for years because they connected me to home. They felt almost like the little prayer cards you get at church, something small and precious you keep close.
When I launched Veteranas and Rucas in 2015, and later Map Pointz in 2016, I wasn’t thinking, I’m going to build an archive. I was homesick and searching for photographs of women and girls who looked like me and the people I grew up around. I wanted the hairstyles, the makeup, the bedrooms, the cars, the backyard parties, but I also wanted the stories behind them.
Then people started sending me their own photographs and memories. I began to see how much of our history was sitting inside photo albums, shoeboxes, drawers, and garages.
Writing East of the River meant turning that same attention toward myself and back toward my community. After years of asking other people to open their boxes, I had to open mine too.
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