Community Archiving in Skid Row: Preserving a Neighborhood's History with Henry Apodaca

In this episode of The Archive Room, we sit down with Henry Apodaca of the Skid Row History Museum and Archive to explore what community archiving looks like when the archive itself is embedded in the neighbourhood it documents. Henry takes us through his own path into archival work, from record collecting and a background in anthropology to earning his masters in library and information science at UCLA, and eventually landing at the Los Angeles Poverty Department.

We talk about the history of the Skid Row neighbourhood and where the name actually comes from, the decades long fight between the city's redevelopment plans and the community's own response, and how that fight shaped the single room occupancy housing that still stands there today. Henry explains how the archive is funded, how researchers and members of the public can access the collection, and why some parts of it carry deliberate restrictions rooted in the community's own history.

We also get into a choice that says a lot about how Henry approaches this work: preserving people's own words and language exactly as spoken in oral history transcription, rather than smoothing them into something tidier. And we talk about why Henry sees history as cyclical rather than linear, drawing a direct line between the sweeps of the 1984 Olympics and the concerns already building around the Games returning to Los Angeles in 2028.

This is a conversation about what it means for an archive to genuinely serve and reflect a living community, not just store its past. Henry also joins Sandra for the Quickfire Round before we wrap up.

You can learn more about the Skid Row History Museum and Archive, explore the collection, and support their work directly at lapovertydept.org

The Archive Room is presented by Silver Salt Restoration, the UK's foremost film and television restoration company and part of the John Gore Studios family. Learn more at silversaltrestoration.com