The After Echo Park Lake Collection was organized by the After Echo Park Lake Archive Collective,   a project of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, facilitated by Kristy Lovich.  

About the Collective: The After Echo Park Lake Archive Collective formed as a project joining university and movement-based scholars to collectively archive an organized encampment community that lived at Echo Park Lake from Fall 2018 until March 2021. The archive’s intent is to make historical record of this community’s practice of collective organization from beginning to end and beyond, documenting the politics, culture, and economy of people whose own histories are excluded from the official record. 

The After Echo Park Lake Archive Collective includes members, Ayman Ahmed, Emma Christie, Amanda Darouie, Lloyd Edward, Greer Little, Kristy Lovich, Jed Parriott, Annie Powers, Adrian “WallSt” Segura, William Sens, Jr., Sonja Verdugo, Leonardo Vilchis-Zarate. 

About the Collection: From Fall 2019 to March 2021, a collective formed around the militant reclamation of Echo Park Lake, bringing together the unhoused people living at the park and housed tenants in the neighborhood to imagine, fight for, and produce in microcosm a world beyond housing capitalism. This archive documents the Echo Park Lake community’s practice of collective organization from beginning to end and beyond, accounting for the politics, culture, and economy of people whose own histories do not typically register in the official record. A critical objective of the archive is to create a resource for future organizers, documenting the practices of collective organization – in even its most banal or contentious forms – that enabled the Echo Park Lake encampment to successfully build infrastructure like showers and a kitchen, a jobs program, a collective security team, and community self-governance.  

The archive includes both physical and digital items and is organized by both item type and era of items. The core of the archive is organized by eras: four separate spans of time between 2019 and the present. The eras include: Making and Defending Community (2019-2020), Comrades in Action (March 2020-Fall 2020), Mass Eviction (Fall 2020-March 2021), and Afterlives (2021 to present). Each folder contains records collected from members of the After Echo Park Lake Archive Collective covering the specific era. Additional folders span the eras, including oral history interviews, social media coverage, records collected by the After Echo Park Lake Research Collective, digital collections from selected journalists, and exhibition materials. The archive reflects the perspective of the Echo Park Lake community rather than the city of Los Angeles or other state entities. That community perspective is deeply multifaceted, and the archive contains a multiplicity of experiences. The archive points to the critical role of organization to the Echo Park Lake encampment’s success – neither spontaneously formed nor perfect by any stretch of the imagination, the organizing between housed and unhoused tenants at Echo Park Lake offers key lessons, ideas, and histories to homeless people’s movements of the present and future.  

Access to the archive, housed at the Skid Row History Museum and Archive, will be predicated on approval by the After Echo Park Lake Archive Collective. To access the collection, please contact: skidrowarchive@lapovertydept.org