Oakland archivist Esperanza Bey received the 2025 Nomadic Archivist Project (NAP) Scholarship to support her collaborative work on Black memory and displacement.
The annual scholarship supports early career and independent archivists of African descent attend the Society of American Archivists conference.
Bey is a third-generation Black Oaklander. She attended Oakland’s Sojourner Truth Independent Study at King Estates. Bey later attended Berkeley Tech. She went to college at UC Riverside. She recently completed the Masters of Library and Information Studies at UCLA. Her specialization: archival studies.
Bey’s personal history inspires her passion for archives and her love for the Town. Her family’s experience with gentrification and displacement influences her work.
In Oakland, she’s worked with the Eastside Arts Alliance’s community archive.
The NAP award will support the archival project, “Fragments of a Bip.”
Bey co-created the project with her sister, ethnomusicologist and memory worker Mariyam Bey. The project is a zine and community archive that explores memory in Black Oakland. The NAP scholarship will support the Bey sisters to create a website for their project.
Bipping is slang for a common car break-in method. Bippers smash car windows and remove personal property from the victims, often within seconds.
Fragments of a Bip is a post-custodial archival project. People who contribute documents, photographs, or other items to the project will keep them.
They’re currently looking for photographs from Eastmont Mall in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For more information about Fragments of a Bip, visit project’s Instagram account or upload your images.
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