Preserving resistance: Patlatonalli’s archive as radical memory work in mexican lesbian history

This paper examines the archival practices of Patlatonalli, Mexico's groundbreaking lesbian feminist organization founded in Guadalajara in 1986, as a form of radical memory work. Through analyzing the organization's comprehensive collection-which includes photographs, meeting minutes, correspondence, and cultural production -, I argue that Patlatonalli's documentation practices function simultaneously as historical preservation, decolonial epistemic practice, and ongoing political resistance against erasure. The archive's significance lies not only in its unprecedented status as the only lesbian collective archive housed at a public university in Mexico, but in what its specific contents reveal about knowledge production from the margins of the margins: lesbian women organizing in a conservative provincial city, outside the circuits from which Mexican feminist and lesbian activism were being mapped and named. The current digitization project has processed 3,336 documents across eight thematic sections while navigating Mexican archiving legislation to protect personal information. This case study illustrates how memory work in Global South lesbian communities operates as decolonial practice, and examines the tensions and opportunities that arise when grassroots lesbian memory work interfaces with academic institutions.