From Hashtag to History: Social Media, Performance, and Memory in Digital Archives

The Archivo Covid-19 Perú is a rapid-response public history project at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, Peru (San Marcos Archive) that collected Indigenous Amazonian pandemic experiences. In the archive, social media posts, oral histories, and hashtags such as #SOSAmazonia and #SOSPueblosTransfronterizos functioned as performative acts of witnessing that confronted state neglect and mobilized collective care. Indigenous actors leveraged online platforms to claim public visibility, pressure authorities, and reframe the pandemic as part of a larger history of state neglect. Simultaneously, archival preservation recreates power dynamics. By selecting, mediating, and recontextualizing ephemeral posts, the archive transforms digital objects into historical artifacts, restaging them for new audiences and interpretative frames.