My photo collection documenting beauty, violence, and raves show what it was really like growing up as a Chicano girl in East Los Angeles in the 1990s

• Guadalupe Rosales is an artist best known for her social media projects capturing '90s Chicano youth culture.
• Rosales was inspired by memories of her own childhood growing up in East Los Angeles.

This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Guadalupe Rosales, an artist and educator. She's best known for her community-generated archival projects on social media, "Veteranas and Rucas" and "Map Pointz." The essay has been edited for length and clarity.

I grew up in East Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s, right off Whittier Boulevard and Leonard. For people who don't know what The Boulevard is, it's a street where people socialize, cruise, and hang out.

The Boulevard was literally my backyard. It was a social site, but also a target. It wasn't safe. There was always this push-and-pull energy, but there was also beauty in that eerie energy.

Growing up in East LA was beautiful and complicated. For women, especially, there was beauty and celebration, but also violence and grief.

I started collecting photos and ephemera to share my grief and my celebrations and to revisit those memories. With these photos I share or that people share with me, it's not just because they're aesthetically pleasing — it's about humanizing these people or the city. I think that's really beautiful because for women, that hasn't really happened. Our stories haven't been validated this way and to this degree.

Revisiting memories, both ugly and beautiful

It's interesting to think about how objects can activate memory. Like, this could just be a damn payphone. But what does it mean? What does it remind you of?

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, these payphones had numbers, so people could call us any time of day or night. For my siblings and I, the payphone across the street from us became our phone. We would always hang out by that payphone, which also meant that we became targets.

My sister told me a story about when she went to the payphone and a guy walked up to her and put a gun on her. She stayed calm and used the payphone as a weapon, hitting him until he ran away.

Another time, my brother was near that payphone and a rival gang drove up to him. He was able to run away, but he said he could still hear bullets going past and hitting the wall.

There are these stories of violence in East LA, but at the same time there are also beautiful stories of teenagers in love. There was a sexual energy that existed at the time that we felt so good about.

I remember stepping out of the house with friends, walking up and down the street just to see what would happen. Boys in cars would turn around and want to talk to us. We'd come back home with our pockets full of little pieces of paper with telephone numbers. Things like that were really beautiful.

Reframing and celebrating our pasts

When I started my photo archival project "Veteranas and Rucas" dedicated to the women of East LA, I was living in New York. I'd left LA in 2000, feeling a lot of rage, disappointment, losing people that I loved. I'd begun noticing the darkness of living in East LA.

But in New York, I also started to miss home. I wanted to have a new conversation about growing up in East LA by asking questions.

People weren't talking about their youth because many of them felt so much shame around it, especially women. Women would hear things like, "I can't believe you used to dress like that," "I can't believe you used to hang out at these sites," or "I can't believe you partied like that." Culturally, a lot of Latino families don't talk about these things or they sometimes shame women because of them.

I wanted to own that story and make it about beauty and empowerment, instead. I felt like I had so much to say, and I was sure that there were thousands of other women who felt the same way.

Collecting memories

I started the archive with my own images, and then I opened it up to become a community-generated project where other women could share their own photos and stories. It became a chain reaction where one woman would post a story and then another person would respond, "Oh my god, that story reminds me of my own story."

That's why it blew up — we were all sharing something personal that we had kept to ourselves for so long.

I also started collecting physical materials, like clothes and flyers. Sometimes people I would meet up with would say, "You can have these, I don't care what you do with them." But I've also had experiences where people wanted to sit down and talk about the ephemera and share their stories with me.

That's always stood out to me — how these materials can be so meaningful, but can also be something people are so ready to let go of.

When I take these boxes of ephemera from someone, sometimes I can still smell the perfume or cologne that's been sitting on these materials. For me, that's the shit right here. It's not just a document. It's a reflection of someone literally embodied in there.

My other archival project, "Map Pointz" captures the music and the rave culture among Chicano youth in the 1990s. When people think of raves, they often think of white people, but in reality, it was very mixed. I remember going to raves and sometimes I didn't see a single white person there.

Organizing is also an art form, and I often think about the people organizing all these parties. Who was designing these flyers I've collected? They were teenagers, and they were people of color using whatever resources they had at the time.

Politically speaking, youth have also always led the way for change. Even in the 1960s, the Chicano movement — there were high school and college students organizing.

This work isn't just about speaking about the past, but it's also about reminding people that the youth is always putting in the work, even now.