or, HOW TO READ THIS ARCHIVE
As an ongoing, living project, I WORK IN NEW YORK is assembled from fragments of immigration forms, letters, memoranda, interview fragments, annotations, family memory, and speculative reconstruction. Like its sources, this project will proceed unevenly.
Readers can expect excessive mentions of certain years where others entirely disappear, or for individual posts to jump decades, life stages, or perspectives.
In all my research for this project, which has included correspondence with several American and Brazilian archives and institutions, I have learned that gaps in the archive and sometimes cold silence where one expects insight, are simply part of the record.
Further, this is an archive built from colonial sources. Cresencio’s legal status shifted without warning and without his consent, and this is clear in the language of the primary source documents. Terms such as alien, laborer, yellow, national and similar will be preserved as they appear in source materials.
I Work in New York 