We’re excited to introduce Zaila Alves to the LMEC community as our Visitor Service & Operations Assistant! Zaila joined us this January as a Northeastern Co-op student and is currently an undergraduate candidate for a BA in Cultural Anthropology, with a minor in Black Feminist Studies. We sat down with Zaila to learn more about her interests, upcoming work at the Center, and Treasure Planet.

Zaila, we’re so excited to have you on board here at the Leventhal Map & Education Center. What are you currently studying at Northeastern and what made you choose to work at the Map Center during your co-op experience?

Hey, thanks, it’s great to be here! I’m currently studying for my B.A. in Cultural Anthropology at Northeastern University. Go Huskies! My favorite classes regarding my major, so far, have been Foundations of Anthropological Theory, DeafBlind History & Culture, Transnational Feminisms, and Environments, Society, and Technology.

As to why I chose to work at the Leventhal Map & Education Center for my first co-op experience, I wanted to find a co-op aligned with what I want to pursue in the future—working as librarian or within a museum. Admittedly, while I’ve never taken much time to learn about the history behind maps, I’ve always felt a kind of nostalgia when observing certain maps, and by extension, recognized the possibility of personal connections that can exist between people and maps.

For example, a personal connection to me would look like finding a map that shows where the population of Cape Verdeans are in Boston, and finding that familiar churches, family homes, and restaurants are marked. For someone else, it could be looking at a map of commercial fishing spots in Maine from 1965-1970, and recognizing the area where their grandfather’s company fished. That connection for a person could even be from looking at of their area from, say from the 2000s, and finding the Blockbuster that they used to go to with their dad before Friday night family movies.

Also, I enjoy the fact that maps can come in so many different formats, and thus provide so many different kinds of information. In short—they’re interesting! Another reason why I chose to work here is because I wanted to get the opportunity to practice working with the public and answering their questions, even if I find myself having trouble with it sometimes. I think the visitors who come into the center are the most exciting part of this job!

As a Northeastern co-op student, you’ll be with us for the next six months! What things are you most looking forward to during this time at the Leventhal Center?

Honestly, I’m really looking forward to the turnover of Processing Place: How Computers and Cartographers Redrew our World to the Terrains of Independence exhibition. I’m very interested in the curation of museum exhibitions, from watching how what’s chosen and how its handled to why objects are arranged a certain way. It’ll be even more exciting to be a part of that process—watching all the pieces being put together in order to create a new narrative out of the maps within the collection.

On a similar note, I’m looking forward to having more experience with archival material, whether that be getting the opportunity to spend time in the physical collections, or maybe connecting directly with BPL’s Special Collections dept. I have a lot of questions about storage, organization, and handling!

How do you see this co-op informing or influencing your idea of life post-college and future career?

As a sophomore in college, having a full-time job while most of my peers are currently doing a second semester of college courses has really established to me how different life post-college will be, as well as my future career. In my professional life, I definitely foresee myself engaging with a different age demographic than the one I’ve been interacting with while in college, which are mostly people within my own generation (or one or two older, in terms of interactions with professors).

If my life guides me to a job like my role as the Visitor Services & Operations Assistant again, I’ll probably be interacting with a wide range of ages. I honestly prefer it, I feel comfortable not expecting every person I’ll interact with to be around my age. In addition, as a student, I’m not entirely used to the idea of tasks during scheduled time being strictly for that scheduled time. Most of my life, I’ve been used to taking work home! It is a nice change being able to separate my professional life and personal life.

You’re starting in the middle of Processing Place: How Computers and Cartographers Redrew our World. Are there any parts of the current exhibition that you’re especially drawn to?

As someone who has always been fascinated in watching the processes of things, I find the tools used to create maps the most fascinating, especially since they can communicate so much about the social realities present when maps were being created with those tools. With the assorted drafting tools in the Transforming Tools portion of this exhibit, I found it interesting that those tools lend to a knowledge base that was not only based on cognitive expertise, but a physical component as well with analogue methods of drawing maps.

I was also strongly drawn to the Government Center urban renewal area map plan because of the Boston Redevelopment Authority’s choice to utilize bold colors. However, what I didn’t know until reading the caption, was that those colors were an intentional choice in order to distract from the fact that the neighborhoods that were being developed in were typically nonwhite and lower-income neighborhoods. That fact that color on maps could be used to market a certain reality was something I hadn’t considered before. Color as a socially conscious choice is very interesting to me as an anthropology student.

What is your earliest memory of maps?

My earliest memory of maps, that I can think of right now, would be the planet map to The Treasure Planet in Treasure Planet. Treasure Planet is a futuristic Disney retelling of the Treasure Island novel about pirates on a quest for gold with a young boy as the main character. I distinctly remember this map because when the main character pressed on a circle engraved on this mysterious sphere, a three-dimensional sphere-shaped holographic projection of a star chart appeared! I found it fascinating because each celestial body had its own unique iconography—if there was a key for the map, I imagine it would be extensive.

I always thought it would be interesting to imagine that the map was also trying to convey information about this universe’s social dynamics based on the map’s creator thoughts on certain planets. Perhaps some of the map icons are meant to signify danger within this culture, and even then, that danger could be 100% subjective or based upon certain power dynamics between the map creator’s cultures and others.

We know you’ve just gotten here, but do you have a favorite map that you’ve found in the collections during your initial browsing?

This may be biased, but the Atlas of the City of Quincy, Norfolk County, Mass: from official plans and actual surveys (1897) by Geo. W. Stadly & Co. It is not a traditional map (it’s actually a fire insurance atlas), but I enjoyed flipping through this atlas and recognizing (or learning) certain facts about my hometown.

For starters, one of the atlas pages has evidence to suggest that the reason for Faxon park or Faxon Commons, the apartment complex, being named so in the current day, was due to the prevalent land ownership of H.H. Faxon back in the late 1800s. I found out through some research, that H.H. Faxon was actually a descendant of an early colonialist, Thomas Faxon, who had arrived to the area from England back in the 1640s and created a family dynasty of land owning. I was also able to find out that the property that my family’s home resides on was once owned by a Mrs. G. T. Bigelow. Upon further research, I found out this former property owner shares the same first initials and last name as George Tyler Bigelow, the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court from 1860 to 1867, who resided in Quincy for a short time.