Introduction

This essay presents a community oral history and archiving project that documents housing displacement and gentrification against a Latino community in East Boston, Massachusetts, USA. We use this project as a case study to demonstrate how as archival educators we can become involved in and contribute to the development of social justice oriented archival practice by participating in community engaged scholarship. Community engaged scholarship focuses on the public good by forging partnerships with community groups to address pressing societal issues. This collaboration can serve as an example to archival scholars who are interested in combining community archiving with social justice principles and integrating them into their research and teaching.

Background to the project

On 3 August 3 2015, at 173–175 Maverick Street in East Boston, Massachusetts, ten families were displaced when the shared back wall of their apartment building collapsed (WBZ 4 CBS Boston, 2015). The building had structural code violations and a lack of maintenance that, according to Boston's Inspectional Services Department, is what likely led to the wall giving out (Lynds, 2015) (Figures 9.1 and 9.2). It turned out that the owner had hired construction workers to conduct maintenance on the property without the proper city permits. Just a month earlier, the tenants of the apartments had received letters first stating that their rents would increase from US$800 to US$2,000 per month and later that their leases would be terminated (Lynds, 2015). It is unclear if the illegal construction work was intentionally aimed at getting rid of the tenants, but that is what eventually happened. The landlord never renovated the living quarters and by November, when the landlord no longer had to pay for the tenants’ temporary housing, the families had nowhere to go.

Around this time, I started working on a community oral history project in East Boston with Stand for Democracy, an interfaith group focused on issues in the Latino community. Some of the displaced families from 173–175 Maverick Street had sought refuge at Our Saviour's Lutheran Church where Stand for Democracy meets every week. The impact of witnessing this crisis, primarily affecting Latino families in the neighborhood, triggered the group's desire to document what was happening.