L.A. as Subject will host the 19th annual, Los Angeles Archives Bazaar at Doheny Library at the University of Southern California campus on Saturday, October 19.
The theme for Saturday’s event is the history of water in Southern California and attendees will be able to hear presentations about the history of rivers, beaches and waterways in L.A. Attendees will have the opportunity to interact with over 60 exhibitors, including institutions like the Los Angeles Public Library as well as private collectors.
Alison Rose Jefferson, who will be presenting on the experience of African Americans facing Southern California beach cities from 1900 to 1960, said the broad theme of the event can inspire new ways of thinking.
“In terms of this particular event, the theme of water, they’re looking at it in a broad way, from the standpoint of the environmental issues as well as the social issues around people enjoying water,” Jefferson said. “And so I think that’s a really good thing to do from the standpoint of looking at the layered landscape of what water means and how the social and natural environments and experiences intersect with each other.”
Other presentations cover the 1928 St. Francis Dam Disaster, the survival of the Santa Monica pier, preparing archives for storms and climate change and gentrification near rivers in L.A.
L.A. as Subject was founded in 1996 as an alliance of libraries, museums and community organizations with the goal of preserving archival material of the city’s history. The archives bazaar is the organization’s largest event, which it has hosted since 2006.
The bazaar will be held in the center of the USC campus with presentations split between rooms on the first and second floors of the library.
It has been at USC since 2008 and at Doheny Library since 2010 — besides a virtual-only event in 2020.
The event runs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and is free and open to the public, though attendees will have to present a QR campus access pass and government ID to get through security procedures at USC.
Jessica Hall, who will be presenting on streams of L.A. as described in maps, photos and articles, said archives have been important to her work on the blog L.A. Creek Freak.
“Part of the purpose of the talk is to demonstrate how vital archives and recorded information, oral history, all those kinds of things are for us understanding our world,” Hall said. “This is really a way to showcase how having these resources creates opportunities for us to understand what used to be in L.A. and kind of the story of how people lived with the water.”
Jefferson, author of “Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites During the Jim Crow Era,” a book about African American leisure sites in Southern California, said she has found unexpected, unknown records when exploring other’s collections.
“In terms of some private collections that I went to go look at — particular things that people had and that I knew they had or they told me they had — and then they had other things that I wasn’t aware of,” Jefferson said.
Mario Anthony Gallardo, an emergency preparedness consultant for the Northeast Document Conservation Center, said the center will be using the bazaar to connect with other institutions at the event who may be looking for information about document preservation.
“We do think it’s a beneficial program, especially for emergency preparedness in a lot of historical and cultural institutions all over Los Angeles,” Gallardo said. “We’ve barely been scratching the surface at the amount of places that we’ve been to. So we want to get the word out.”