This digital exhibit offers a preview of work done by the Grassroots Archive Digital Initiative (GADI) during its pilot project in São Paulo, Brazil from 2017 to 2019. GADI aims to create born-digital archives that are co-managed by communities, social movements, and universities. The initiative identifies at-risk documents of historical value and partners with historically marginalized communities to digitize, organize, and make them available for community members and researchers alike. By sharing the management of the born-digital archive, GADI seeks to democratize the traditional institutional archive and ensure that historical patrimony serves the needs of the groups and communities that produced it. GADI's pilot project features documents and oral histories from a broad variety of grassroots movements and community groups in São Paulo's urban periphery. Home to approximately 6 million residents, the "periphery" is a belt of poor and working-class neighborhoods ringing the city center settled by migrants from rural areas of Brazil beginning in the mid-twentieth century. There, grassroots movements led by migrant women organized around day-to-day life to resist Brazil's military dictatorship (1964-1985) and formulate new ideas about citizenship and democracy.
About the Project Director
Daniel McDonald is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Brown University. His research focuses on the history of social movements, citizenship, cities, gender, and migration in nineteenth and twentieth-century Brazil with an emphasis on digital and public humanities. Previously, he served as assistant director for another large-scale digitization project, Opening the Archives: Documenting U.S.-Brazil Relations from the 1960s-1980s.