Introduction to the Archive

As I unveil a box packed nearly two decades ago, I discover a frantically preserved family history. The truth of the matter is that this story of deportation cannot be carefully historicized. However much time has passed, remnants of what happened are scattered across international boundaries. This story is about the journey of “Memo,” an undocumented Mexican migrant and his personal belongings. It happened within hours when Memo was detained and subjected to deportation. It started with a few hard knocks on the door. A firm command demanded that the door be opened for the U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.). After some more knocks, the door is opened. They are looking for a man who no longer lives in this home. However, I.C.E. does not care. They ask to see proof of Memo’s legal presence in the United States. Memo rented a room in the basement of this house along with a few other men. He was the only one home and therefore coerced to provide documentation. He offers false papers, but these sheets of protection do not suffice, and he is detained. A few days later, Memo was deported. Stories such as this one are not uncommon and as time passes, this sustained violence caused by authority and policy continues to be replicated. 

Several years later I am uncovering several objects in the cardboard box labeled “Frito Lay – foodservice and vending.” As I look further inside, I open an untampered and hidden time capsule. The box has been untouched since the deportation. This time capsule held together for nearly two decades in the shed of my childhood home. I am all of a sudden plowed with haunting questions. The contents inside the cardboard box and its hauntings are what inclined a material culture and digital humanities approach to this research. This project, which I named La Mochila, is a digital archive of Memo’s personal belongings. Young, charismatic, and impressionable, Memo was only sixteen years old when he first crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in the early 1990's. He crossed a total of three times until he was detained and deported by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) in 2003. Because of the abrupt nature of his deportation he had no choice but to ask his brother to pack his belongings and bring only the essentials to the detention center. It was over a phone call that Memo listed off the most essential belongings that would accompany him back to Mexico. What was categorized as non-essential was then packed into the cardboard box and remained in the United States without Memo.

Throughout the course of creating La Mochila, considerations of ethicality arose in every conversation. After a few prototypes using different digital archival systems, I developed a method of research that reflected the particular need of sharing information of an undocumented deportee. Not only did I have to consider the ways to adequately share Memo’s story, I had to decide how to unpack all of the cardboard box’s contents. Mary Ellen Bell and Susan E. Bell have said most appropriately that rummaging through family their family’s “treasure box” was memory work. What Bell and Bell refer to as memory work as grounded explanations of their objects of study through conducting extracted readings. Along with cultural theorist Annette Kuhn, these scholars consider the nature of taking objects for granted and push for further exploration of how “dialogue constructs personal and cultural meanings and insights.” Following this methodology of dialogue, I conducted two oral history interviews with Memo. After having searched in unsystematic ways through the cardboard box or rummaged, I photographed the receptacle's contents and showed Memo.