On Feb. 14, 2019, Manhattan-native Djali Brown-Cepeda launched Nuevayorkinos—a digital archive dedicated to documenting New York City’s Latino history and culture through family photos and stories. “I started the project as basically this love note, this ode to my city, to the five boroughs in which I grew up,” Brown-Cepeda said during an interview for TIME100 Talks that aired on Oct. 15. “It was a way for me to give the flowers now to people that have been overlooked, forgotten, and that are being displaced.”
The Nuevayorkinos digital archive has collected hundreds of stories, ranging from recollections of childhood in Brooklyn in the 1990s to a grandparents’ East Harlem wedding in the 1950s. Nuevayorkinos, which has more than 31,000 followers on Instagram, has also memorialized loved ones who have passed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. With past physical exhibitions at the El Museo del Barrio in Harlem, New York, and the Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana in San José, California, the archive has grown in popularity outside of New York City’s 2.5 million Latino population. Despite this, Brown-Cepeda says the archive will continue to center New Yorkers.
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“My submission guidelines [are] very simple, you have to be Latinx from New York city first and foremost,” Brown-Cepeda says. “This does not include New Jersey and I stress this because you would not imagine the amount of, ‘well, I can see New York from where I’m from. I’m not saying that in any sort of exclusionary way, but I’m not from New Jersey. So I don’t know that experience.” (In addition to those two conditions, the guidelines state that the digital materials submitted should have been taken within one of the city’s five boroughs before 2010.)
“Latinidad doesn’t look one way. The East Coast experience is different than the Miami experience, different than Texas, different than California,” she continues. “It felt important as a Black woman, as a…
Source : time
