Expanding the PandemiDiarios Archive: A Story of Community Resilience

Launched in 2020 by the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry at the University of Arizona, the PandemiDiarios project began as a rapid-response initiative to capture stories of resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over three years, the project supported dozens of artists, culture bearers, and community practitioners from Latinx and Native American communities who permanently archived their digital creative works within the University of Arizona Libraries' Special Collections.

While the original archive successfully preserved these vital creative responses for future generations, its implementation left little room for deeper context. Over the last two years, I have managed the next phase of this initiative: Enriching the PandemiDiarios Archive. Backed by a $10,000 grant from the Agnese Nelms Haury Program, the project focuses on producing a multi-modal, deeply contextualized archive of survival.

I assumed end-to-end responsibility for implementing this phase of the PandemiDiarios. To do so, I carried out an extensive oral history project and translated those narratives into a physical publication series. For which I,

• Drafted and secured Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for a human subjects protocol, established ethical consent and data-sharing frameworks, and designed a standardized 1-hour interview protocol focused on cultural preservation and systemic pandemic impacts.
• Coordinated travel, scheduling, and logistics for in-person video oral history interviews with PandemiDiarios awardees in Tucson, Phoenix, Mesa, Tuba City, and Sells.
• Assisted Confluencenter's Communications and Events Coordinator in leading a team of graduate and undergraduate student workers, including Media Specialists and Layout Designers, in the production of video interviews.
• Commissioned three Native artists to design and layout four unique zines featuring the work of 44 artists across the three PandemiDiarios cohorts.

The final zines integrate custom artwork, artist biographies, and embedded scannable QR codes linked to the eight video oral history testimonies, providing immediate public access to the deep community narratives behind the artwork.

In the upcoming months, the project will focus on execution, production, and public dissemination, including obtaining print estimates, updating the dedicated PandemiDiarios landing page on the Confluencenter website, and organizing a regional community launch event to bring contributors together, celebrate collective memory, and officially introduce the enriched archive to the public.