Salvador “Lolo” Gonzales, the first of his family born in the United States, was a semi-professional baseball player. This was long ago. Before he moved to California’s Central Valley. Before he met my great-grandmother. Before me or my father or his father before him. Papa Lolo died when I was young and no one mentioned much about his life before moving to the Valley. I first learned about his baseball career several years ago while searching his name in an online newspaper database. I was searching for some sense of where I came from. Some sense of who I was, trying to make sense of the Whiteness that I was born into. I was hoping to find some answer, some revelation. Instead, I found dozens of mentions of his name in the sports pages of the local paper. I lay each clipping out in chronological order and begin to remove the surrounding articles and advertisements. A hollow rhythm starts to form. An emptiness. The art of removal. There was a thrill, still, in finding his name, over and over, and tracking his career. I wonder how he felt, seeing his name in the paper? I try to picture him talking with the local reporters post-game. I wonder what he dreamed, then, that his life might become?

“Lolo” is the first is an anthology of archival books which together form an autobiographical sketch of my Great-Grandfather, Salvador “Lolo” Gonzales . I began researching Papa Lolo as way to better understand my own relationship to Americanness, Whiteness, and my family. Each book is a stand-alone body of work, using individual archives—both public and private—which speak to different moments and facets of his life.