Unlocking What’s Possible: Honoring Latinx Heritage through The Abuelas Project

Preservation Grounded in Community

The Abuelas Project, led by Latinos in Heritage Conservation (LHC), focuses on communities often excluded from traditional preservation narratives. Named in honor of the abuelas (grandmothers) who serve as the culture bearers of their families, the project uses interdisciplinary methods—blending oral histories, archival research, and geographic information systems (GIS) mapping—to document the Latinx experience on its own terms.

Rather than following a top-down institutional framework, The Abuelas Project empowers community members to define how their histories are shared. This participatory approach ensures that preservation is ethical, inclusive, and rooted in the lived experiences of the people who shaped these landscapes.

Stories of Resilience and Culture

The latest phase of the project features three new StoryMaps, web-based maps that use geography to tell a narrative with maps, text and multimedia, that elevate sites shaped by Latinx life, labor, and resistance:

• Nogales, Arizona: This StoryMap documents the commercial corridors of Main Street. These storefronts are not just businesses; they are economic and social anchors that tell tales of migration, cross-border identity, and entrepreneurship.
• Tucson, Arizona: Here, food is the primary lens for history. By tracing restaurants, markets, and generational recipes, the project preserves foodways as expressions of identity and survival in the face of gentrification.
• El Paso, Texas: Focusing on the barrio of Duranguito, this StoryMap captures a community’s fight to remain visible. It serves as a living archive of working-class history and collective resistance against forced displacement.

The Impact of Living Legacy 

The Living Legacy Initiative (LLI) is Iron Mountain’s commitment to preserve and make accessible cultural and historical information and artifacts. LLI provided foundational funding to make this phase of the project possible. This support directly impacted several key areas:

• StoryMap Development: Funding supported the creation of four original StoryMaps utilizing rigorous interdisciplinary research.
• Fellowships: The grant funded multiple fellowships, providing academic and professional training to researchers who contributed critical design and analytical skills.
• Community Compensation: In alignment with our commitment to ethical preservation, the funding ensured that community participants were fairly compensated for sharing their time and knowledge.