Nuestro Chicago Archives Is Documenting Latino Life In The City — And Wants Your Old Family Photos

LITTLE VILLAGE — A baptism in McKinley Park. A family gathering before a Mexican Independence Day parade. A protest led by a Latino organizer in Humboldt Park.

Through Nuestro Chicago Archives, founder Thais Beltran is preserving family photographs that document everyday Latino life across Chicago.

Launched in October 2024, the digital archive highlights and preserves Chicago’s Latino community through crowdsourced family photographs, videos and stories. The project focuses on pre-2008 images, documenting an era before the widespread shift from physical to digital photography.

The archive website launched May 15 and is collecting submissions from residents across the city. Residents can submit photographs through Instagram direct message or email.

Registration filled up quickly for a VHS digitizing event Saturday at Rudy Lozano Library in Pilsen. The next scanning event will be 2-4 p.m. Aug. 2 at the Little Village Branch Library, 2311 S. Kedzie Ave. It’s scheduled to be a quinceañera photo scanning event in conjunction with the branch’s 15th anniversary. Registration isn’t open yet but will be posted on the library’s website, organizers said.

“The community archive, I’d say it’s the love child of all the things that I’m really passionate about,” Beltran said. “I love Chicago history.”

Raised in Berwyn, Beltran spent childhood visits at their grandmother Carmen Gaspar’s home in Little Village flipping through family albums. Gaspar spent 40 years as a school aide at Gary Elementary and one of the first interpreters in the office, helping families who immigrated from Mexico register their children.

“She’s not just my grandma,” Beltran said. “I share her with so many generations of people from La Villita.”

Beltran sees the archive as a continuation of that work. After discovering similar archival projects in other cities, Beltran realized Chicago lacked a digital space dedicated to preserving Latino family histories.

“We’re people,” Beltran said. “We have families, we have a name, we have a story. See us as that. See us as people.” 

As the archive grows, Beltran is also scanning their grandmother’s collection of nearly 2,000 photographs.

Elena Gonzales, curator of civic engagement and social justice at the Chicago History Museum, said the work fills a gap that runs deep.

Latino communities have been left out of mainstream histories for more than 150 years, and preserving their records is essential to understanding how Chicago came to be, Gonzales said.

“Community-based archival work is vital because when those records are owned and maintained and protected in community, the community retains the power to use them as they see fit,” Gonzales said. “That’s powerful.”

Everyday people often underestimate the historical value of their own materials, she said.

“A lot of times people may have been led to feel that their materials are less important,” Gonzales said. “And that’s just not true.”

Finding Connection Through Family Photos

For years, Kiara Jazmin Flores’ family photos sat in a box.

A first-generation Chicagoan who grew up in Archer Heights, Flores submitted baptism photographs from 1995, including images of her grandparents, after seeing a McKinley Park prompt. The submission sparked conversations with her mother she had never had before, about where the baptism dress came from, who was in the photograph and how her family celebrated back then compared to now.

“Sometimes we don’t acknowledge that the time we were kids here in Chicago, it’s history,” Flores said. “Especially if you’re first generation, you’re literally starting off as a newborn Chicagoan, in a sense.”

Months later, Flores attended the archive’s first anniversary exhibit in Pilsen. Walking through, she saw strangers’ photographs and recognized herself in them.

“Even though they’re not my family and I don’t know them, I relate to that history. I relate to those photos,” she said.

Then she turned a corner and saw her own family on the wall.

“I just burst out crying,” she said.

Visitors left comments beneath her photograph: legacy, love, warmth.

“For people to react that way based on photos that I’ve had in the box was just like, wow,” Flores said. “We need to share more of these photos that we have put away because they’re still history at the end of the day.”

When the archive crossed David Hernandez’s feed, he went back through his mother’s old Facebook posts and pulled out photographs he had never looked at closely before.

The images showed his parents after immigrating from San Luis Potosí, Mexico: swimming at Lake Michigan, playing guitar at parks, building a life in Little Village.

“They weren’t wealthy immigrants coming from Mexico but they still found a way to experience the joy of Chicago,” Hernandez said. “Its great to see them trying to make a home away from home.”

His father bought a camera as an immigrant, documenting a life that might otherwise have gone unrecorded. Now those images were surfacing again, sparking conversations between David and his mother about the people and stories captured in them.

Since then, Margarita Hernandez has moved back to Mexico. The photographs are one of the ways they stay connected to a shared history.

“It’s a link of communication between families to be able to remember us, how we were,” she said. “It’s a way of remembering for future generations.”

Ileana López-Martínez found the archive through a post about the Young Lords, where her father had served as Minister of Information.

López-Martínez, who grew up in Humboldt Park, submitted photographs of her uncle, Obed López, who was involved with the Latin American Defense Organization and other organizing efforts in Chicago. Her uncle was Mexican but deeply invested in Puerto Rican liberation, she said.

“It feels like such a nice tapestry of Latino experiences in Chicago,” López-Martínez said.

She said the archive helps connect stories that can often feel isolated by neighborhood boundaries, migration patterns and different waves of immigration.

One photograph shows her uncle standing atop a desk during a protest at a Humboldt Park school, a story she first heard from family members as a child.

“There are people who were not alive or who were young children who are becoming politically active now, who are becoming adults,” López-Martínez said. “They need access to that history.”

Melissa Chaidez found the archive through a friend and submitted a photograph of her family on their way to a Mexican Independence Day parade in 1970. In it, the kids are lined up in front of the house, dressed for the occasion.

Her mother told her they were among the first Mexican families living in a predominantly Czech neighborhood.

“Back then you really only had like one copy of a photo, and literally it is passed down from hands to hands of different family members,” Chaidez said.

Physical photographs carry something digital images don’t, said Chaidez, who still shoots on a Polaroid camera. Growing up, photographs meant gathering around a table, passing images to each other, learning things about her parents she never knew.

“A story can only travel as far as it gets told,” she said.