We Keep Each Other in the Archive

Words by Mayra Garza

I didn't grow up celebrating Día de los Muertos. Like many, I came to it later. Not through tradition, but grief.

When my abuelita passed away, I felt a quiet kind of desperation. I didn't want to forget her voice, her face, the way she made me feel. I began collecting what I could: photos, cards, home videos where her laugh echoed in the background. I didn't yet know the word for preservation. I didn't know what an archive was. I just knew I needed to hold on. In that search, I found Dîa de los Muertos. The altars. The offerings. The images are surrounded by marigolds and candlelight. It wasn't just a tradition; it was a method of memory. A way to say: you are not gone.

The first archives I ever knew weren't institutions. They were altars. And they were everything I needed.

A VHS-C home video filmed by my mom shows me playing in front of my abuelita as a child. Off-camera, my mom says, “Para cuando seas grande, Mayra, veas a tu abuelita que te alcahuetaba un montón,” followed by my abuelita’s laugh. Years later, after her passing, watching this video felt as if my mom’s words were reaching across time, speaking directly to me in the present.

Ofrendas are not neutral. They are sensory, spiritual, and intimate. They are made by hand, by heart, by people who know what it means to be erased. Unlike institutional archives, ofrendas aren't built for permanence. They are ephemeral, constructed, dismantled, and rebuilt each year. But their power lies in that return. They are living, breathing acts of care. They hold photographs of loved ones and objects that tell stories: a favorite soda, a handwritten recipe, a poem, a childhood toy. These aren't just decorations. They're records of a life, assembled by those who carry its memory.

Western archival traditions often prioritize order, objectivity, and longevity. Ofrendas challenge all of that. They are relational and emotional. They invite us not to distance ourselves from memory, but to feel and embody it. They are archives built from love. In dominant narratives, disappearance is treated as a vanishing, blank space. However, in my communities, disappearance is often a slow and systemic process. It looks like erasure.

It's like being told our stories aren't historical, just as we watch our traditions dismissed as folklore.

That's why ofrendas matter. They name what was never meant to be remembered, insist on visibility, and say: we were here. We still are. Many of the altars I've seen extend beyond individual remembrance. They hold space for collective grief, migrants lost crossing borders, victims of state violence, and neighbors who died unhoused. These are not just gestures. They are truth-telling practices. They document what dominant systems refuse to name. These ofrendas are counter-archives. They don't just preserve memory; they expose erasure.

To build an ofrenda is to do archival work. You gather. You describe. You interpret. You curate. You choose what to include, what to protect, and how to make a presence felt for the person being remembered. But it's not sterile documentation, it's ritual. It's remembering through scent, color, touch, and silence. The stories shared while setting up. In this way, the ofrenda becomes both record and ceremony. A reminder that to archive is also to tend, mourn, and witness. And when the altar is built with the help of friends, family, and community, it becomes something greater than an individual memory. It becomes collective. It becomes sacred.

The Macehual Alumni altar at TANA honored the children lost in Uvalde, Texas, with backpacks, photos, candles, and marigolds as symbols of remembrance and care.

This kind of memory work doesn't live only in ofrendas. It lives in everyday care practices, such as the instinct to save voice memos, scan old photos, and label folders. After my abuelita passed, I started documenting everything. I wanted digital copies of what I might one day lose. I wanted to make sure no one else disappeared without a trace. I didn't know I was archiving; I just knew I needed to remember. Later, in my archival work, I saw those instincts mirrored in the materials I handled: prints, community newsletters, scrapbooks assembled with tape and hope. In my role as the Print Digitization and Preservation Intern at California Revealed, I've helped preserve these records that often don't make it into formal institutions but carry generations of place-based knowledge, resistance, and care. Whether handling a faded photo or lighting a candle on an altar, I'm doing the same thing: trying to remember what we were never meant to forget.

Disappearance may be inevitable, but forgetting is not. Ofrendas have taught me that we can remember out loud even in the face of loss.

We can name what was taken. We can carry what remains.

When we build altars, we don't just honor the dead; we archive longing, resistance, presence, and care. In doing so, we remind each other that we are still here, we always have been, and we will keep each other in the archive.

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