I thought I knew what I was doing

Margaret gave me three names two weeks ago. Three families. Three contact sheets with phone numbers and brief notes in her tidy handwriting — things like ‘Lupe: keeps everything in shoeboxes’ and ‘the Nguyens: two generations of photos, no labels.’ I thought I’d make the calls, introduce myself, ask a few questions, maybe schedule some visits. I thought it would feel like an extension of what I’ve been doing with Abuela Rosa’s archive all along. I was wrong about that.

I thought I knew what I was doing

The first call was an hour and forty minutes. The second ended with me crying quietly into my coffee while a woman named Dolores told me about her grandmother’s immigration documents she’d been keeping in a plastic bag inside a shoebox inside a closet for thirty years because she didn’t know where else to put them but she couldn’t throw them away. The third family hasn’t called back yet and I’m already a little nervous about what their story is going to be. By the time I finished I had three open notebooks on the counter — one per family, because they are genuinely that different in terms of what they have, what they need, and what ‘preserving history’ even means to them — and I just sat there for a while looking at all of it.

Three notebooks. Three families. One very humbling afternoon.

I’ve been thinking about what Margaret said months ago, about organizing her late husband’s collection: that there’s a difference between what’s historically significant and what’s sentimentally irreplaceable, and that the hardest part of the work is helping people understand their materials deserve both categories. I understood it intellectually when she said it. I understand it in my chest now. Dolores’s plastic bag of documents isn’t a filing problem. It’s thirty years of not knowing whether her grandmother’s story was worth taking up space. That’s not something I fix with archival tissue and labeled boxes. That’s something I have to earn the right to help with. I wasn’t ready for how much weight that would feel like. But I also don’t think I’d trade it.