SPECIAL ONLINE PROJECT
Where We Were Safe
Looking for a taste of soul-warming salsa music in an interactive, digital setting? This transmedia documentary project is a perfect way to spend an evening. Explore the history of the salsa scene in New York City on your own time, with a virtual map that transports you to a variety of significant historical locations and provides oral accounts, recordings, and video.
Delightful, educational, and musical!
Marcos Echeverria Ortiz is an award-winning multimedia journalist, photographer, and documentalist. For the last eight years, he has invested efforts to develop transmedia projects and cover stories related to culture, music, social movements, immigration, and human rights.
Originally from Ecuador, through Radio COCOA, Noisey VICE, and more he has written, filmed, and photographed the underground music and cultural scene of Latin America. Marcos was a fellow of the provost scholarship at The New School and graduated with honors from the Media Studies MA program. He has recently covered social justice movements and his photos have been published in The New York Times and Business Insider. Through documentary and hybrid forms of media, he chronicles the Latinx experience in New York City through stories interjected by music, inequality, memory, and history.
Where We Were Safe
Marcos Echeverria Ortiz
2021 - USA - Idoc/Transmedia
2022 Best Interactive Media Award, SVA Film Festival, American Anthropological Association
"Where We Were Safe" is an interactive documentary/oral history archive that focuses on collecting memories about the historical but destroyed Salsa music places in New York City, such as ballrooms, clubs, record stores, and outdoor venues. By combining digital mapping, cultural memory, and archive material, this project aims to reconstruct historical space and recover these sites' heritage through a lens of social, racial, and cultural dynamics that fed the Latin experience in the 1970s.
