A Conversation with Kim Villafuerta Barzola

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Kimberly Villafuerta Barzola grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, and has spent most of her life in and around Boston. She graduated from Boston University with a self-designed major in Agrarian Studies, combining her interests in history, environmental justice, and rural farmworker community organizing. Currently, Kim works as an Assistant Archivist at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and is the senior co-chair of the Society of American Archivists and Archives of Color section. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Kim virtually and learning about her background and career as an archivist. 

How did you first get interested in archival work? 

After graduating, I worked for several years in various nonprofits in the Boston area, focused on environmental justice and union organizing. During this time, I got involved with a community campaign to save the historic Harriet Tubman House from being demolished for luxury condominiums. The Harriet Tubman House was an invaluable community resource and a significant part of the Black history of the South End neighborhood—one of the last remnants of the Black community in that area. 

To advocate for its preservation, the community applied to have the Harriet Tubman House designated as a historical landmark. Part of this process involved gathering evidence of the building’s historical importance, which led us to the archives. At the time, I didn’t know much about archival work, but the staff at the Northeastern Library archives were incredibly supportive and eager to assist. 

Unfortunately, the campaign ended with demolition of the building. However, through the process of organizing around its preservation, we recognized a gap in the archival records regarding the community value of the Harriet Tubman House. In response, archivists at Northeastern and librarians from the Boston Public Library secured funding for the Harriet Tubman House Memory Project, an oral history initiative aimed at capturing the community’s feelings about the building after its destruction. I subsequently went down an archival rabbit hole, and decided to start my master’s in Library and Information Science at Simmons University. 

Did you participate in any internships during your MLIS program, or gain LIS-related work experience? 

Before starting my MLIS, I worked as a library assistant at the Agha Khan Documentation Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which focuses on Islamic architecture and building heritage. In that role, I utilized the Arabic skills I had developed during my undergraduate studies to read photography and building notes during the cataloging process. That experience helped me connect with others across MIT’s libraries and led to a similar processing project at Harvard Law School Library. There, I collaborated with their Islamic law librarian on a project involving Arabic gazettes, supported by the George A. Strait Minority Fellowship and Scholarship. 

Did you know you wanted to work in archives at the start of your MLIS program? 

When I started my program, I don’t think I knew a lot of the differences between librarianship and archives. I knew I was interested in archives, but I didn’t actually have a sense of what that was until about a year into the program. My program helped expose me to the day to day grudge work of an archivist. The MLIS gave me the opportunity to get in the weeds of processing and helped me realize that I do actually want to do this type of work. 

Can you describe what your role and responsibilities as an Assistant Archivist are at the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund? 

The Legal Defense Fund (LDF) primarily serves as a civil rights legal archive. Our department is relatively new, and we’re still building out our team. One of my first tasks was to draft the collection policy for the archives. Just yesterday, we launched our public digitized archive. Each archive is inherently unique, and while it may seem redundant to say that the LDF archive is special, there is so much information about the legal aspects of the civil rights movement that has yet to be made publicly available. We receive numerous research requests, particularly for access to documents and court cases. 

The nature of the LDF archive means that we do so much description at the item level, which is reflected in the digital archive we just created. I recently came across this document from the 1960s that was about desegregation and how in order to actually desegregate a school, you have to include Black history in the curriculum. It’s amazing to have a document like this in the record stating that in order to fully desegregate schools, not only do you have to integrate Black students, but you need to proactively teach Black history. Processing at the item level allows me to have incredible moments of encounter with documents, and that’s largely due to the resources that the LDF has access to. We have nine people on our archives team, which is very rare. Right now, about 25% of my work is processing, but the majority of it is oral history work. 

What advice would you give to aspiring archivists? 

I think it’s worth pursuing an internship to hone in on a skill that you may not know well, or a skill that you think is going to be valuable in the direction of the career you’re aiming for. I initially thought I wanted to do digital archives, so I tried to develop technical skills to help prepare me for work in a digital archive. Now that I’m on the other side of the MLIS program and the job search process, I think it’s really important to have experience processing a collection. For a lot of early career archivists, processing will likely be a part of their work. Getting experience with processing helps you understand documentation, understanding the extent and scope, and how to input that data in the system at hand. A huge part of my interview process was describing my experience with processing. One of the things that helped me was to start looking at job descriptions for the job I wanted, and see what the requirements were to work in a community archive, or oral history position, for example. It might take some time to figure out what you’re interested in, but it makes you that much more prepared for when you’re doing the job search.

Stitching Memory: A Digital Tatreez Archive

Palm trees, mountains, watersprings, stars, and Panamanian orchids adorn Lina Barkawi’s handmade wedding dress. But Lina’s dress was an act of more than mere craftsmanship — in creating her thobe, Lina contributed to the centuries-old tradition of Palestinian embroidery known as tatreez. Passed down orally from generation to generation, tatreez patterns hold great symbolic meaning, reflecting one’s personal life and regional identity. Sato (2023) introduces The Verge readers to Tirazain, a digital archive and library of tatreez patterns that seeks to preserve the ancient art for new generations of Palestinians like Lina. 

Tirazain was created by embroidery artist and technology executive Zain Masri, who sought to “collect embroidery patterns from books in one place, where anyone could find and use motifs for their tatreez work — especially younger Palestinians whose families may not practice embroidery due to historic mass displacement” (Sato, 2023). Tatreez knowledge is traditionally conveyed through oral history, but decades of exile and dispossession resulting from the Zionist settler colonial project has severely impacted the ability for Palestinians to impart tatreez knowledge to younger generations. 

Schwartz and Cook (2002) address how “classic archival concepts which emerged from the written culture of European bureaucracies” are not adept at preserving the memory of oral cultures like that of tatreez. Tirazain subverts the dogma of Eurocentric archival practice by taking the form of a community digital archive that attends to the needs of the global tatreez community. Caswell et al. (2016) speak to how community archives diverge from the traditional archive by “reframing the functions of appraisal, description, and access to align with community-specific priorities, to reflect contingent cultural values, and to allow for greater participation in archival decision making.” Tirazain reflects this alternative archival paradigm by populating the digital archive through the labor of volunteers who digitize the motifs, stitch by stitch. Renowned tatreez artist Wafa Ghnaim laments how “our dresses are exiled just like we are… they’re in all of these museums around the world, and we don’t have physical ownership over those dresses. What we really need to be digitizing are all the millions of patterns on those dresses that are under lock and key in these museums that we will never be able to reclaim physically” (Sato, 2023). Ghnaim’s words remind us that despite the importance of digital community archives like Tirazain enabling new generations to learn the art of tatreez, many more tatreez patterns remain captive by colonial memory institutions.  

Caswell et al. suggest that community archives can unsettle traditional archival principles like provenance by using ethnicity as a form of provenance (2016). In that vein, Tirazain uses village and regional names of Palestine as a form of provenance, because tatreez motifs can “often be traced back to specific regions or villages, and historically, one could look at a dress and see where its wearer was from” (Sato, 2023). Using geography as a form of provenance is particularly potent given that many of the embroidery motifs in the Tirazain digital archive trace their origin to one of the 418 Palestinian villages destroyed during the Nakba, or the Catastrophe, in 1948-1949 (Aranguren & Barrilaro, 2024). Cook (2011) states that “as Verne Harris has remarked, following Derrida, the archive, and archiving is fundamentally political, and, not surprisingly, invites–and reflects–controversy, contestation, and challenge.” The impact of the Zionist settler colonial project on the displacement of generations of Palestinians and the loss of material and immaterial knowledge sources about tatreez situates Tirazain squarely at the intersection between politics and the archive. 

Tirazain founder Zain Masri is clear that the archive exists in “equal parts to make tatreez more accessible and [as] a way to preserve its existence” (Sato, 2023). Archives exist to meet users’ needs and to be used (Lawrimore, 2024). Before Tirazain was created, tatreez artists like Barkawi had to buy expensive pattern books to expand her tatreez vocabulary. With the advent of Tirazain, tatreez artists of all skill levels have easy access to high-resolution patterns, demonstrating how Tirazain centers user need and surpasses mere preservation of tatreez motifs. Caswell et al. (2016) relate how “community archives can have important epistemological, ontological, and social impacts of members of marginalized communities.” Tirazain embodies this by reconstructing a repository of tatreez knowledge that would have otherwise been inaccessible or even lost entirely. Ghnaim encourages her tatreez students to stitch “resistance motifs that were produced post-1948, when Israeli militaries forcibly removed and displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes” (Sato, 2023). The emergence of resistance tatreez motifs is a refusal to forget the past, and a commitment to building a Palestinian future. Tirazain is an invaluable resource for Palestinians to use tatreez as a way to assert their cultural identity and historic ties to the land.   

References 

Aranguren, T., & Barrilaro, S. (2024). Against erasure: a photographic memory of Palestine before the Nakba (R. Davis & H. R. Aranguren, Trans.). Haymarket Books. 

Barkawi, L [@linasthobe]. (2022, October 10). It’s all about the details [Photograph]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/CjiKYkiMXZf/ 

Caswell, M., Cifor, M., & Ramirez, M. H. (2016). “To suddenly discover yourself existing”: Uncovering the impact of community archives 1. The American Archivist, 79(1), 56–81. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.79.1.56 

Cook, T. (2011). “We are what we keep; we keep what we are”: Archival appraisal past, present and future. Journal of the Society of Archivists, 32(2), 173–189. https://doi.org/10.1080/00379816.2011.619688 

A., K. (2023, March 2). Palestinian Tatreez: Embroidering resistance and remembrance. Atmos. https://atmos.earth/palestinian-tatreez-embroidery-radical-history-resistance/ 

Lawrimore, E. (2024, June). Unit 4-A: Archival Use and Users. [Written lecture]. Canvas. https://sjsu.instructure.com/courses/1587126/pages/unit-4-a-archival-use-and-users?module_item_id=15468714 

Sato, M. (2023, August 21). Stitching together an archive of an endangered Palestinian art. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/23833322/palestinian-embroidery-digital-archive-tatreez-wafa-ghnaim-tirazain 

Schwartz, J. M., & Cook, T. (2002). Archives, records, and power: The making of modern memory. Archival Science, 2(1–2), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435628   

Tirazain. (n.d.). Library. Retrieved July 10, 2024 from https://tirazain.com/archive 

Tirazain. (n.d.-a). Qowara/Vase (5). Retrieved July 10, 2024, from https://tirazain.com/archive/p/lily-f5j49-2ydlp-jkdr3-8rb6p?rq=qowara%20vase%20(5)