Guerilla Archiving Program

The Guerilla Archiving Program is a community-centered archival initiative dedicated to preserving endangered archival collections in remote regions across the Dominican Republic and Haiti. We work with local libraries, churches, and families to safeguard documents that state authorities have neglected.

Following post-custodial archiving methods, we recover forgotten archival collections by establishing trust with sage community members and bringing students, librarians, and archivists from the U.S. and local 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 Guerilla 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 of protecting community archives as living tools that help us author our own histories and sustain our ancestral legacies.