It was in the early 2000s when Steve Frangos gave a name to the then intensifying cultural phenomenon of grass roots activism to preserve community history and heritage. He called it “a new preservation movement.”
Since that time this activism has been burgeoning, the question of preservation propels all kinds of projects: production of oral histories and documents (production and not collection because the knowledge one gets about the past depends on who is interviewed, the questions asked, or the archives researched). There have been documentaries, workshops, the writing of histories.
The question of preservation inevitably raises an array of sub-questions: who decides what merits preservation? What heritages have been historically neglected or even censored? Why is it that some major projects to create a Greek American archive have not been supported by national organizations which celebrate heritage? Why some of our institutions with the stated mission to produce historical memory have been notoriously selective in their curation?
With the exception of a few scattered accounts, I have not seen a serious national discussion on these issues.
Preservation projects often attach value to their work by asking how the pasts they produce help answer the (identity) question “who we are”––which obviously can only be answered in the plural form. We cannot genuinely explore this question without openly engaging with the sub-questions I indicate above. Who are we when we routinely celebrate heritage but lack a substantive national policy and the allocation of funds for its (inclusive) research, documentation, analysis, and broad dissemination?
These were my thoughts a few nights ago while listening to the interview Meletios Poulopoulos, founder of the Greek Cultural Resources (https://greekculturalresources.org/index.html), gave for the Oral History Archives of the Hellenic American Project at Queens College, CUNY. Let us really listen to what Meletios is telling us (https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1182953000332084&set=a.135519291742132). It should serve as the starting point for a broader conversation, action, and policy.
Yiorgos Anagnostou
September 25, 2025
