When you see the archive, you see there is a long history of recurring injustices, every single year dating back to 1970, but you also feel you are not starting the struggle anew; you feel you are not alone. There is a whole legacy of Latin Americans fighting for workers’ rights. I remember asking a participant from the Latin American Youth Forum during my residency what an archive means to her. She responded: ‘It’s where you put your ex-boyfriends, “archivado”’ — and I loved that idea. It suggests an archive is a place for things you don’t need to see every day but want to keep as a reminder of the past; it serves as a point of reference.

When I visited CAIWU and other unions, their materials were not yet organised. Placards were scattered here and there, and banners were piled up without any kind of order. The unions kept the materials because they thought they were important, but organisers have no time to sort through everything on top of their other work. I proposed to digitalise and categorise all the materials. I hope to make a bridge between the different Latin American organisations. Despite their sometimes strained relationships and disputes, they all recognised the importance of coming together to visually narrate the Latinx presence in the UK.

So much! British banners are beautifully stitched together, you can see the time and care taken. The banners in the Latin American Archive are made of cheap household materials. They show an urgent desire to express yourself. Protests happen every day. You have to move fast and make quick decisions, and there is no budget. The banners and placards and so on are beautiful in their own right, registering decades of resistance and unity, Latinos standing against discrimination and poor working conditions. I love the process of making, everyone coming together, salsa music playing in the background, empanadas are everywhere. Everything is put on an open table — the glue, the scissors, the paint, the cardboard. These banners are not meant to last, and you can see that in the archive — some of the objects are heavily worn or broken, but what lasts are the bonds people build when they come together.

In the book Protest: The Aesthetic of Resistance, one of the authors described placards and banners as ‘carnivalesque props’. As you can see in the archive, carnival aesthetics are rooted in spectacle and performance, using colour, humour, exaggerated imagery and satire to challenge social norms and power structures. There is a quote in the book I like: ‘spectacle is the language of neoliberalism, and spectacular protest is its critical response’.

Yeah, exactly. Music in the streets is embedded in Latin American culture, in the way we celebrate ourselves. Look at the carnivals in Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia. As a kid back home, I remember always hearing music in the street from my house.

CAIWUʼs general secretary Alberto told me one time they were protesting against a business. The neighbours became so annoyed by the noise, disturbing their peace and quiet, they eventually joined in, helping workers to push for a resolution, just to stop the music! You can’t help but get caught up in the carnival.

We aim to expand across the country but keep it within the UK. There are a hundred more scanned banners, placards and flyers to upload. I’ve had a lot of help from Ana Aguirre, who is part of the communications team at CAIWU, but I’ve been scanning alone up until now. After the talk I gave at Gasworks though, two people volunteered to help on the project and another person wants to help find funding to continue the archive. Gasworks have paid the website domain for five years, but now we need to look for more support. An archive can easily die out; keeping it alive is an active process of resistance.

I’m currently organising meetings with union members, representatives, legal advisors and volunteers who participated in past campaigns documented in the archive. The goal is to capture their stories to provide more context for the archive, incorporating their memories of those materials and events — whether from the time they were created, during the marches, or reflecting on them now.

The archive is, in part, defined by what is missing. Some stories are forgotten over time or lost when those people sadly die. The banners, placards, flyers and reports are the facades of hundreds of people standing behind them. By recording the voices attached to these materials, we hope to safeguard radical personal histories.

In London, most of the people working in cleaning services are from the Latin American diaspora, and I saw the same living in Madrid, and then in Dublin I had a cleaning job where management used CCTV to check we were doing a good job. After Dublin, I came to study at the Royal College of Art in London, and I learned about decolonial studies and challenging class and race hierarchies in an academic setting. But most academics were white European. The cleaners were all South American, the security staff, North African, all outsourced. Who is allowed to speak in these conversations in the classroom? At first, I started doing volunteering work at CAIWU, and the more you know how some people are treated at work, the harder it is to not do anything about it. Since then, the work of cleaners has been one of the cores of my research practice as an artist.

My Lancaster project has been running for four years, and a few months ago, there was a final exhibition called Out of Hours, which presented a combination of different works made with cleaners as well as security staff and porters, whose labour is also invisibilised. For one piece, we cut all the bristles off an old broom and used them as tickets for people to enter the gallery — something you don’t want to touch because it’s so dirty, questioning the racist and classist preconceptions about the work of cleaners. A phrase that you can see many times on placards in the Latin American Protest Archive says, ‘We are not the dirt we clean.’

For all the events and workshops Iʼve run over the residency, Venezuelan food was always present. Food helps create a feeling of belonging for Latin American people living in the UK, and then for other people who maybe havenʼt tried the food, it becomes a doorway to the culture. In Venezuela, where I grew up, generosity was part of our upbringing. If anyone was visiting our house, my parents always offered anything we had.

I made a work about the process of making arepa viuda or widow arepa, which is an arepa that has no filling, nothing inside. I made this piece in Helsinki a few years ago, in one of the countries that is most difficult to obtain a right to work if you come from Venezuela. The empty arepa is everything that is missing when youʼre taken from your home country: the right to fully belong.

Mixing, kneading and shaping the dough reveals the history of emigrated people. Re-amasar means to ‘reshape’ in Spanish. Amasar means ‘to knead’. Amasar comes from masa, and masa is like ‘dough’, but in Spanish, masa means a ‘mass of people’, like a mass of people coming together in a space. When you migrate to another country, you try to reshape yourself to a new environment that might provide new opportunities, but you have to detach yourself from your past, you always miss home; itʼs not something you ever forget, everything you leave behind, that is the widowed part of yourself, but you try to reclaim some agency, control the process, like kneading the arepa, you are deciding how to shape it, you are deciding how you are reformed when you come to a new country.