Portrait of the Don Diego and Meraz family by Sarahy Plazola. “Voices of Centro Humanitario: Labor, Barriers and Hope in COVID-19 Times” Memory Project. Denver, CO. History Colorado’s Museum of Memory Initiative. 2021

Voices of Centro Humanitario: Labor, Barriers and Hope in COVID-19 Times is a community-led oral history project that explores the lives of low-wage Latino immigrant workers during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Denver (CO) metropolitan area. As a partnership between the Centro Humanitario para los Trabajadores—a labor center in Denver, CO—and Museum of Memory—a public-history initiative at History Colorado—the project addresses the possibilities for imagining the archive as a co-creative enterprise.

http://h-co.org/centrohumanitario

https://www.historycolorado.org/museum-memory-initiative

María Islas-López, PhD, is a cultural sociologist specializing in field-based methodologies and community-engaged research and evaluation in culturally diverse and low-income communities, especially with immigrant families and youth. Her work concerns memory-making, how diverse communities build ideas about the past and the future together, and the possibilities of storytelling for research and community building. As History Colorado’s Museum of Memory Manager, she oversees a portfolio of community-based collective memory projects for communities historically impacted by systems of oppression and inequality.