I was walking through the Kensington neighborhood of North Philadelphia when I noticed a shrine made of scrap wood and old furniture. Empty liquor bottles were placed inside. A menagerie of stuffed animals, their fur matted by rain and bleached by the sun, covered the top. “RIP Bug” was written in black marker across the chest of a koala.
In answer to my question—who is “Bug”?—I found a plaster heart nearby, obscured by weeds. It was set in concrete along with burnt votive candles. Inside the heart was a baby’s footprint, the words “In memory of Bough,” and a photograph of a young man with a dimpled smile wearing a cap and a sports jersey.
Over the next few weeks, I returned to the shrine again and again, drawn again and again by questions about the very personal work of public mourning it was doing. How had it come to be on this unremarkable stretch of sidewalk? Who had built it, lit the candles, emptied the bottles, and placed the stuffed animals there?
As a professor of communications whose research focuses on collective memory and trauma after 9/11, I am fascinated by the makeshift memorials that pop up throughout Kensington, a neighborhood that has long been at the center of the city’s drug, poverty and violence epidemics.
Over the past seven years, I’ve visited, revisited and documented dozens of monuments in the neighborhood. Some, like Bough’s, are like altars, while others consist of graffiti, hand-crafted benches and even clothing items like T-shirts and trucker jackets.
Cultural theorist Mieke Bal describes these monuments as “acts of remembrance.” They serve as public expressions of private grief in response to the traumas and tragedies of everyday urban life.
Gordon Coonfield/Kensington Remembers, CC BY-NC-ND
“The past becomes present”
People usually think that memory is a purely personal, mental record of the past.
But in his book on the legacy of the Holocaust, memory researcher Michael Rothberg challenges this view. He defines memory as “the past becoming the present” and highlights three important points about the social aspects of memory.
The first part recognizes that memories always have a social dimension. That’s not to say that personal memories of traumatic events like 9/11 aren’t important. Many Americans will remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard that the World Trade Center was being attacked.
But personal acts of remembrance also reflect cultural ideas about what should be remembered and why. Think of the rituals associated with commemorating September 11 – the raising of flags and the slogan “Never Forget.” It’s clear that the significance of this traumatic event is more than the sum of our personal memories of that day.
The second feature of Rothberg’s definition is that collective memory is actually about the present, not the past. “Never forget,” for example, does not mean remembering the historical details of 9/11, but keeping the cultural significance of the event alive in the present. Likewise, shrines, memorials, prayer cards, and park benches keep the memory of loved ones present for those who mourn their loss.
The third characteristic of memories is that they are created. As anyone who has ever studied for an exam knows, remembering is work. Collective memory requires collective work.
For example, a few blocks from Bough’s memorial, another shrine stands in a neighborhood park to commemorate a young man who was shot and killed nearby. In the years since his murder in 2020, the shrine has been repeatedly repaired and renewed with prayer candles and other items. His friends and neighbors continue to remember him publicly together.
Gordon Coonfield/Kensington Remembers, CC BY-NC-ND
Why collective memory is important
We make the past present together. But why? Why don’t we just forget it, like we often do with unpleasant things – especially when it’s traumatic?
An obvious answer is because we understand the present by looking at the past. More specifically, groups use aspects of the past to explain why the present is the way it is, or why it is not the way it should be.
Consider the statue of former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo, which was removed from downtown in 2020. As a Philadelphia Inquirer article explained at the time, the debate over Rizzo’s statue is about who will be remembered – the “flamboyant leader who tolerated no crime” or the man “who was willing to use brute force to nip any hint of unrest in the bud, especially in the black community”?
As communication and memory scholars argue, collective memory is always partial and therefore biased. In the case of the Rizzo statue, the conflict is also a contest over whose traumas count as traumas and whose suffering deserves public recognition.
Likewise, many of the memorials in Kensington are linked to trauma and often stand at sites where tragedies occurred. In this sense, they resemble open wounds rather than scars.
A sidewalk memorial to Frankie Caraballo, a 33-year-old West Kensington man and father, is just such a wound. The memorial, reportedly created by Caraballo’s family and neighbors, is attached to a street sign on the corner where he was shot and calls for recognition and resolution of his still-unsolved murder.
Caraballo’s memorial is one of many attempts to publicly express private grief and to make present and material the scars that frequent violence can leave in a neighborhood. Trauma is commonplace in places like Kensington. But does that make these lives any less “worthy of mourning,” as American philosopher Judith Butler asks?
Memorials like those for Bough and Caraballo use collective memory to expand our ideas about whose traumas matter. Like the collective memory of other traumas, they invite us to expand the circle of compassion.
