Remember Me as More Than a Place

Remember Me As More Than A Place is an ongoing documentary project that weaves words, archives, documents, ephemera, and photography of my family's migration story from Ecuador to Venezuela to the United States.

My name is Andrea Sarcos and when I was 18 years old I married my high school boyfriend for legal status in the U.S. It was the best choice at the time as I was an undocumented student preparing for college. My parents had proposed the idea to me, I proposed the idea to my boyfriend, and he then proposed to me. We were married two weeks later. What ensued was a long process of paperwork, interviews, and life experiences that compelled me to consider my family’s migration patterns, my role as an immigrant woman in society, and how documentation plays a fundamental part in the storytelling of our lives.

Remember Me As More Than A Place is a documentary project that weaves words, archives, documents, ephemera, and photography. By sharing fragments of my family’s migration story, I believe I can reveal a commonplace story and unite many identities.

I’m inspired by my mother, Gina, who has diligently preserved a bin of documents in her closet, remnants that have traced our journey from Ecuador to Venezuela to the United States, holding immense significance to me. I recently found the original plane ticket of our flight from Caracas to Miami in 97’, letters that my father’s siblings wrote to him after we migrated and old tickets to Disney World, the beginnings of our American Dream. 

My family’s story is multifaceted. Gina is one of 13 children. My father Neptali is one of 9. We have a big Hispanic family currently scattered in six countries. My own marriage story isn’t rare. It’s a pattern that has repeated itself in my family for generations.

Looking further back in our history, I discovered my great-grandmother, Nina, was born on a ship to Venezuela from Spain, a life still an enigma to us. Nina’s mother died giving birth, and so did that part of our history. I had the opportunity to explore my father's childhood home on the coast of Venezuela this past spring. Nina's daughter, my grandmother Nelly, lived there and created a family album that became her most prized possession, carefully safeguarded under her bed. Unfortunately, a flood inundated the home years ago leaving only a few pages preserved.

What’s left is a small but precious collection that serves as an instrument to transcend memory; ephemera is imbued with our story, creating a map of our unrecorded migration across countries, revealing that our identity is deeply intertwined with culture and familial bonds.  

Finding my grandmother Nelly's album and my persistence to record drives me deeper into my questions of patterns while deepening my understanding of diaspora. My goal is to create a book as this history deserves to be bound, celebrated, and held by my family and others too as we trace our paths through pages of time.