Attending to the dead: Christopher López and the Hoboken Fires
On March 16, 2023, Remains // An Archive (RAA) (1) hosted its first public event, Footnotes: A Conversation Lost and Found in the Fires. The event was a celebration of Puerto Rican photographer and arts educator Christopher López’s current work on the Hoboken arsons and latest exhibit at the Hoboken Historical Museum titled The Fires: Hoboken 1978-1982. This conversation also included an important guest, Janet Ayala, a survivor of the Hoboken fires, whose stories and portrait were featured in López’s exhibit. The exhibit opened in late January, 2023, and will be on display through the summer of 2023. The closing date has not been announced.
Janet Ayala stands for a portrait near her home in Deltona, Florida. She is holding a photo of her mother, Francisca Vazquez who died in the Pinter Hotel arson fire in 1982. Courtesy of the Christopher López.
López is originally from the Bronx, and though he did not have ties to Hoboken prior to the project, he felt connected to the city’s history of gentrification and its aftermath, “Gentrification remains a critical subject in small cities like Hoboken as well as on a global scale creating an epidemic of displacement and violence alongside ‘urban renewal’. The visceral ramifications of gentrification are evidenced throughout the living history of Hoboken. This project is a work in progress and will be the first to offer a thorough analysis of the intersecting histories that transformed the city from a working-class community to one of the most expensive and exclusive cities in New Jersey” (2). By way of the exhibit, López seeks to “[retell] the stories of resistance and survival in the face of the city’s reluctance to revisit this pained chapter in its history” (3).
The title of RAA’s event emerged out of previous conversations between the Solidarity Fellows (Kevin & Jessica) and López about the sheer amount of labor that went into his project; the hours of research spent in archives, the hours spent searching for names and making phone calls or traveling long distances; the gripping and sometimes heartbreaking stories the artist shared about the survivors of the fires and their family members, and the lasting impact that something as simple as a picture can have on individuals, families and on their close and extended communities. Footnotes became a useful concept to discuss these observations. Drawing from Katherine McKittrick’s Black feminist articulation of footnotes, the conversation with López and Ayala was one that went beyond noting the more technical features of footnotes such as referencing the sources or body of scholarship or crediting people whose work and methodologies have come before and inspired their own, in which they aim to “share how we know, and share how we came to know [...] sharing information and stories and resources to build the capacity for social change” (4). The pictures featured in The Fires: Hoboken 1978-1982 represent a critical text in the overall body of scholarship on the fires, yet there are still so many real and conceptual footnotes to the original text left to be shared; footnotes containing the unseen and unheard labor, stories, memories and people who are before and behind the camera. For López, honoring these stories was a personal endeavor, “It affected me that I know that so many Puerto Rican people's lives were lost [...] when I learned about the fires, I felt anger. You know what I mean? Like, I operate from that place. [...] I take my anger and turn it into love. You see what I mean? [...] What I choose to do is [to] be as efficient as possible, to turn every stone, to talk to every person, to have those names spelled correctly and to not have people [...] people that could have been my family die in vain” (5).
In describing his research process for the project, López referred to the oftentimes extensive and excruciating lengths that even locating survivors/potential interviewees required. His leads and sources of information could at times be limited to a mere, single name to be pursued in endless lists of phone books and other public records and registers. “It's very much feels like a needle in a haystack when you're trying to break ground with a person that is out there,” (6) says López when discussing his attempts to connect with survivors of the Hoboken fires. Though the process may be arduous, he persists: “I relied very much in the beginning when I didn't know anyone from Hoboken on a public record search. I would search a name and it would populate. Dozens and dozens of names of the same name: José Rodriguez. I would search José Rodriguez [and] Hoboken, and it would be dozens and dozens of names [...] And I would have to contact every single José Rodriguez” (7). It was an exercise in patience and tenacity that for López was deeply personal: “So you'll have to just keep the circle of keeping contact with this balance…Until you find your person, and it takes months. It never comes easy. So when you actually meet that person, I can't even really describe the feeling of finding that person. It's like you can [finally] breathe” (8). While López’s reflections provide a glimpse into some of the technical details of the rigorous research practices behind exhibits like The Fires: Hoboken 1978-1982, even more critically, they provide a glimpse into an equally rigorous and dedicated praxis of care that was imperative to the project’s success and completion. This praxis of care is one that holds resonance and should serve as an example for other artists, scholars, and researchers who seek to give honor and make new sites of remembrance for the dead to follow.
López’s work truly embodies what Christina Sharpe importantly asks in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being - building on M. NourbeSe Philip’s call to defend the dead - “What does it mean to defend the dead”(9)? Indeed, in its urgency to attend to the dead of the Hoboken fires, López’s work and continued relations with the families he has encountered along the way is a persistent insistence upon defending the dead in a praxis that in its effect, demands discomfort, acknowledgment and new forms of (re)memory that refuse the notion of death as futile, and its victims as anonymous, forgotten and irretrievable subjects. As Yomaira C. Figueroa-Váquez importantly writes in response to the The Fires, the exhibit “demands that we bear witness [...] wrestle with the discomfort of official and unofficial narratives as we mourn, remember, and respect those who were effaced in the name of progress” (10).
For the full conversation, here’s the recording on the Diaspora Solidarities Lab’s YouTube channel:
Footnotes: A Conversation on Things Lost and Found in the Fire
Footnotes:Remains // An Archive (RAA) is a Mellon-funded Diaspora Solidarities Lab microlab led by Solidarity Fellows Kevin Ah-Sen and Jessica Newby under the directorship of Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson. RAA explores and theorizes archipelagos of real and conceptual grief and considers how Black feminist principles have made way and possible the practices and spaces of refusal and care in the afterlife of empire.Christopher López, “The Fires: Hoboken 1978-1982,” Hobokenmuseum.org. January 2023.Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, “The Hoboken Fires: A Call to Witness,” Hobokenmuseum.org. January 2023.Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021López, Christopher. 2023. “Footnotes: A Conversation on Things Lost & Found in the Fire,” Diaspora Solidarities Lab Speaker Series. March 16, 2023.Ibid.Ibid.Ibid.Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Durham: Duke University Press, 2016Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, “The Hoboken Fires: A Call to Witness,” Hobokenmuseum.org. January 2023.
Authors’ Bios:
Jessica Newby is a PhD student in History at Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests are slavery in the 18th and early 19th centuries, enslaved women, family and kinship, sexuality, violence and mourning throughout the Black Atlantic.
Kevin Ah-Sen is a PhD candidate in Human Development in the Faculty of Education at McGill University. His work explores theories and practices of diasporic and queer subjectivities by means of aesthetics, death, grief, melancholy, intimacy, and loneliness.