Being queer, often, means feeling unseen. “We come from a history of erasure that is manifested not only through hate crimes and discrimination, but also through a lack of representation, symbolic violence, and the absence of legal protections,” explains André Mere Rivera, director of the Queer Memory Archive of Peru (Archivo de la Memoria Marica del Perú). The project Mere leads is part of a growing wave of collaborative projects in which Latin American LGBTQ+ communities preserve and share their struggles and triumphs. They digitize photos, collect testimonies, and build databases of letters, personal memories, and other items that have survived dictatorships, censorship, and stigma. Community members scour libraries and newspapers, and dive deep into other, more conventional, archives to show how their identities have been denied. They are also reinventing the idea of a family album, creating alternative ones based on networks of affection. In their hands, technology is used to preserve memory, care for communities, and demand justice even as old prejudices are being reignited with the rise of far-right rhetoric. In Argentina, trans women like Sofia Beatriz Hernández fight for the rights of their community and to assure it is recognized. Trans Memory Archive of Argentina Sonia Beatriz Hernández never imagined she would one day be using a computer to digitize memories that included her. A transgender woman and a senior citizen, she learned everything she knows about being an archivist at her current job. Hernández is part of the Trans Memory Archive of Argentina (Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina), an initiative that not only preserves the history of gender and sexual dissidence, but has also inspired others throughout Latin America and the Caribbean to create their own collections. “The archive was born out of the need to find each other and know that we are alive,” says María Belén Correa, founder and director of the Trans Memory Archive, the largest project of its kind in the region. It’s a space that brings together the past struggles and current demands of trans communities. “Creating an archive is a way of situating ourselves, of showing that we are here, and that we have always been here,” says Queer Memory Archive of Peru’s Mere. “We are not all the same, we are not mere bodies, nor are we an idea imported from abroad. We have been here since the homoerotic huacos [ceramic representations of homosexual intercourse created by the ancient Moche and Chimu cultures of Peru]. We have lived and continue to live through situations that are heartbreaking and that demand justice. Hate crimes must not go unpunished and reparations must be made.” For Aldri Covarrubias, manager of the Transmasculine Memory Archive of Mexico (Archivo de la Memoria Transmasculina México), this struggle is still ongoing: “The uniformity that cisheterosexuality seeks to impose is not real. Memory is not a nostalgic aspect of the past; it must serve as a tool in building a path to a place with room for everyone.”