“Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster”: Feminist Archival Praxis After the Digital Turn

This essay focuses on the Chicana por mi Raza digital archive, a collection of oral histories and documents from women who were active in social movements during the 1960s and 1970s. The essay argues that digital archiving projects like Chicana por mi Raza challenge conventional notions of humanistic research and reformat the archive in critical ways by shifting it from a static repository to an active site for the co-creation of feminist knowledge. Rereading the archive as a site of encuentro (encounter) and exchange, the essay explores how contemporary feminist scholars can teach (and learn) about the past in ways that recover lost histories and incite new—and unexpected—connections.