Talk: Jocelyne Sanchez presents “Lo que pasa con el alma es que no se ve”

Jocelyne Sanchez, CSRC archivist, presents “Lo que pasa con el alma es que no se ve”: Communing with Queer Archival Lineage and Forming Collective Memory with LGBTQ Latine Collections" at the second annual Queer Bibliography conference to be held between July 25-27, 2024, on the UCLA campus and hosted by the UCLA California Rare Book School. Queer Bibliography makes explicit the connections between queer theories and methodologies and the multifaceted field of bibliography.

This year’s conference will focus on CalRBS’s 2024 theme “Borders, Boundaries, and Margins”. This conference explores how the theories and practices of queer bibliography inhabit areas of liminality and in-betweenness, and will interrogate how queer orientations and approaches can reshape the cartography of bibliography and its allied areas of inquiry.

In processing the CSRC collection of Latina lesbian, activist, and archivist Yolanda Retter, Sanchez pieced together guidance on how to approach the care and collection of LGBTQ materials. Her dual role as writer and archivist provided insight into how Retter's political beliefs and activism impacted her archival practices. Though Retter died in 2007, the knowledge Sanchez gained through processing these materials created a mentorship that traversed time and traditional notions of what it means to be connected with an elder who has passed away. Queerness, in its eternal fluidity, disregards  the binary of life and death and calls for queer archival material to be an active part of community formation. 

This talk is supported in part by the Latina Futures 2050 Lab.