Guerrilla Archiving Program

The Guerrilla Archiving Program is a community-centered, digital justice-oriented initiative that preserves endangered archives in remote regions across the Dominican Republic. We collaborate with local libraries, churches, and families to preserve, categorize, and digitize documents, making local collections more resilient and accessible to the communities that produced these cultural artifacts. With local partners' permission, we create open-access digital collections that make Caribbean intellectual production available to a global audience.

Following post-custodial archiving methods, we recover forgotten archives by establishing trust with sage community members and bringing students, librarians, and archivists from the U.S. and universities across the Caribbean to learn archival protocols for repairing, digitizing, and categorizing documents in the field, without removing materials from the community.

To learn more about the origins of Guerrilla Archiving as a method, visit here.

We hosted our first cohort of volunteers in July 2025 at La Biblioteca Renovación, located in Puerto Plata. Biblioteca Renovación began as a social organization during the age of revolution in the Caribbean; it played an essential role in nineteenth-century struggles against Spanish colonialism, pan-Antillean organizing, and networking amongst Caribbean Freemasons. In collaboration with Biblioteca Renovación Director Maria Amelia Finke and Archivist Rachel Winston of the Black Diaspora Archive at The University of Texas at Austin, the Guerrilla Archiving Program 2025 began processing and digitizing the library's extensive collection of nineteenth-century maps, print posters, books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, and other primary documents.

We will be hosting our second cohort of volunteers this July 2026 to continue the work at Biblioteca Renovación. Join us in protecting community archives and cherishing them as living tools that help us author our own histories and sustain our ancestral legacies.