Archives

In her book, Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration, Alejandra Oliva recounts the week she volunteered at the US-Mexico border in Tijuana, helping Central American refugees navigate their asylum interviews. Back in her regular life, the cruelties she witnessed at the border continued to haunt her, and she asked a friend, a chaplain-in-training, how to cope. “We’re given all these things,” her friend said, “and then we have nowhere to put them, so all we can do is archive it, put it away somewhere safe.”

My father passed away three weeks before Donald Trump won re-election. In the aftermath, my coping mechanisms were trying out all the circus apparatus—I am a novice aerialist—and watching Hawaii travel videos.

Rivermouth had been on my to-read shelf for a few months. I write about immigration, about the Chinese who came to the American West during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and in the US-Mexico border, I see echoes of the histories I study. Family separation? Check. Lengthy detentions in prison conditions? Check. Capricious admission and deportation decisions? Check. When my internal dialogue began to be more coherent than strings of expletives, I picked up the book.

I draw on archives in my writing. When I worked on my epic poem Bitter Creek, about the massacre of Chinese miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in September 1885, I gathered arrest and jail records, newspaper articles, eyewitness testimonies, the Union Pacific’s internal investigation, among other things. The Union Pacific’s annual reports show a company hemorrhaging red ink. Due to the racism of the time, the Chinese perspective was absent, but there was plenty that I could piece together with the available records.

Currently, I am building an archive of my maternal grandmother’s family stories. Her surviving siblings—a sister and a brother—have been sharing their memories, photographs, a handful of letters, and, in the case of my great-uncle, his own watercolor renditions of their lost childhood homes. The saga spans from Gulangyu, their hometown in China, to Singapore, Taipei, Honolulu, Atlanta, and a few other places in-between. I even have an unhinged tale of the boy my grandmother dated in high school—the one she did not marry—and a photograph of him.

In the last two years, I also got my father, a reticent man, to tell some of his story. Playing with his cousins and eating fruit off the trees at his grandfather’s house near Malacca during school breaks. A difficult decision he had to make because of toxic politics at work.

Not all my archives are high-minded. I have a catalogue of aerial progress videos, and, of course, an extensive collection of pictures of my cats.

Archives are living collections. They morph as we continue drawing on them to create meaning.

Archives are living collections. They morph as we continue drawing on them to create meaning. I pieced together a story of the Rock Springs Massacre from multiple sources: the Wyoming State Archives in Cheyenne, the American Heritage Center in Laramie, the Sweetwater County Historical Museum in Green River, the Rock Springs Historical Museum, the Nebraska State Historical Society in Lincoln, and the Denver Public Library. Each of these collections holds a part of the story. Another writer might visit different archives and develop a different version of the story. Another writer might interpret the story from a different lens, such as Craig Storti, who wrote that the Rock Springs Massacre and the Chinese Exclusion Act “have little to do with race prejudice or immigration policy. The issue, rather, was the status of the American working man in the industrial era.”

We are given all these things. In writing, I process my experiences and store knowledge. Each of my books is an archive of the questions, desires, and anxieties that animate my life. But when I am given or faced with a new story, I don’t necessarily know what to do with it right away. I might not even know whether it is safe to put into my writing, to make public. And not everything needs to make it into my published work. But I try to store it: as notes on my computer, pictures in my camera roll, documents in boxes. I put it in a place where I can retrieve it later, if I wish. And the act of jotting things down, of sorting and indexing, helps us to catalogue the information or perspectives in our minds. It helps us set an intention to remember.

Oliva writes that the inchoate grief and irritability she felt after she returned from the border stemmed from second-hand trauma, from being a witness to rather than a target of harm. Second-hand trauma works, she writes, “in many of the same ways that first-hand trauma does: Your brain gets rewired in the same ways, your physiological responses are the same.” But, she continues, it “also carries the privilege and shame of safety, awareness that you were removed from the suffering itself, that your reactions are outsized for someone who had merely heard about the pain, that you were protected even if your body doesn’t recognize it.”

In the coming months and years, many of us will be harmed by the policies of the incoming administration as well as the violent rage that it unleashes, inspires, and condones. Many more of us will be watching on in horror, witnessing the depths of human cruelty in our world, traumatized and spared at the same time. Direct action is crucial to the resistance, but we don’t always have the capacity to engage. What we can do is archive: to remember, to record, to assemble the stories we carry into something that resembles meaning.

Direct action is crucial to the resistance, but we don’t always have the capacity to engage. What we can do is archive: to remember, to record, to assemble the stories we carry into something that resembles meaning.

Especially the stories we would rather not remember.

During the presidential campaign, Trump asked voters, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The insinuation was that the electorate was worse off under President Joe Biden. And the rhetoric worked, even though four years ago we were in the middle of a deadly pandemic—millions of people died, many more lost loved ones, body bags piled up in overwhelmed hospitals and mortuaries, the leader of the free world suggested injecting bleach instead of following public health measures, and there was a toilet paper shortage.

Without archives—both professional and public as well as individual and private—we can be manipulated into forgetting.

Oliva writes of her archiving, “I do it in part because I don’t have a choice: The stories I have seen and heard are a part of me now. I cannot set them down, and there’s no way to carry them easily without at least trying to change their endings.”

Oliva writes of her archiving, “I do it in part because I don’t have a choice: The stories I have seen and heard are a part of me now. I cannot set them down, and there’s no way to carry them easily without at least trying to change their endings.”

Not all of us have the capacity to travel to the heart of conflict. We can make archives closer to home. The places we love. Environments facing irrevocable change. Communities coming together after flood or fire. In a time when we are alienated and isolated from each other, when change is often rapid and devastating, building archives is also a way of creating shared stories of who we are and who we can become.

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TEOW LIM GOH is the author of Bitter Creek (May 2025). Based in Denver, Colorado, Goh is the author of multiple poetry collections and a Colorado Book Awards nominated essay collection.

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