When one woman from El Salvador moved to the United States in 1979, she was alone and worked as a housekeeper, retail employee and babysitter to support her daughter.

Decades later, a partnership between the UCLA Archive of Healing, a digital database, and the Koreatown Storytelling Program is preserving her story – along with nearly 400 others – through a new oral history project called the K-Town Archive.

“It’s a form of healing,” said Katherine Yungmee Kim, the program director for the KSP, which oversees the archive with UCLA. “This process of sharing what you have gone through, it alleviates some of the emotional weight as it enters the world.”

The K-Town Archive, a project under the Koreatown Youth and Community Center, a nonprofit organization, launched in 2020 to connect high school students with older adults in the community and to document those adults’ stories.

Teenagers and older adults were two of the most isolated groups during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Dilan Askew, the program coordinator for the KSP. KSP aimed to solve that by fostering connections between those two groups amid lockdown, she added.

The K-Town archive aims to rethink traditional archiving by making it accessible to the public, said David Shorter, a professor of world arts and cultures/dance who helped develop the archive.

“Koreatown is the beating heart of Los Angeles,” he said. “I’ve had so many people reach out to me and say, ‘I’m from K-Town. I grew up there,’ or, ‘I live there now, and I had no idea there was going to be a resource like this for me to learn much more about my own neighborhood.’”

The K-Town Archive highlights cultures beyond the Korean diaspora, including Little Bangladesh and El Salvador Corridor, Kim said. The program is also working on another project that documents the experiences of the Latino community amid heightened immigration enforcement in LA, she added.

Telling older people’s stories can help them heal from traumatic experiences and remember that their experiences are meaningful, Kim said. She added that sharing those stories with younger people gives them a sense of purpose because they can pass down their experiences and knowledge to the next generation.

The program aims to highlight the beauty of the neighborhood and the people who live in it, helping residents learn about who their neighbors are and the area’s history, Kim said.

“We’re building storytelling and a network of narrators and interviewers and young journalists who are documenting stories and recording them about this part of LA,” she said.

Askew said she hopes that people will use the archive in the future to understand what life was like for immigrant communities, older people and youth in LA.

By preserving these stories, the archive allows people to process and reconnect with their experiences, she added.

“After telling their stories, they’re just lighter,” Askew said. “When you’re in their presence, you can just feel that they are lighter and they have a burden that has been lifted from them.”