Daria Casinelli Papers
Daria Casinelli (left) with Beatrix Hoffman at a campus protest.
The Daria Casinelli Papers provide a lens into UMass student life in the 1980s via their creator and collector, Daria Casinelli, as well as documentation of her life after UMass in Chicago, Illinois and Waltham, Massachusetts. The papers consist largely of vast correspondence between Daria and her friends during her time at UMass as a student in the Social Thought and Political Economy (STPEC) program, including letters from Berkeley, California when she spent extended periods of time doing political organizing and activism. It contains photographs and records of her early life in Framingham, Massachusetts, including several family photographs that date to the 1940s. Throughout her time at UMass and beyond, Daria kept scrapbooks of photographs, ephemera, and original artwork documenting her life as a student and political activist, as well as collected published materials documenting Occupy Boston, abortion and reproductive rights, women’s rights, shelter work and homelessness, Apartheid in South Africa, Central America and the CIA, and related student activism.
Biographical sketch provided by Daria Casinelli: “My fractured family was part of white flight from Boston to ‘Framingburg’ in the 1970s. In the 1980s the death that moved that relocation along collided with my political awakening at UMass, Amherst. There I learned about the social reproduction of labor: no mother, no labor, reproduction, meh. Today, those realizations underlay my novel, ‘Occupy Shrugged’, forthcoming.
So, me and my sister grew up in the suburbs, without our mother and with only the physical presence of our father. We lived in one of the first cheap condominium complexes. Bishop Gardens opened about a mile from the railroad tracks at a time when manufacturing had just begun to transmogrify into retail, specifically a mile away in the other direction, at one of the first malls in the country, Shoppers World, Framingham. As a teenager I walked there and to the dusty downtown, once just Jewish, Italian American and Irish American, but at the time of this writing, very Brazilian. We were decidedly low-income and the lack of parenting made that worse. After freshmen year at George Washington University, I settled in happily at UMass, Amherst. There I sought out a major that would tell me: Why are people poor?
I loved Social Thought and Political Economy. It set me up for a career as a grant writer, occasional political activist and amatear philosopher, which in turn, led me to become a Buddhist, Taoist, Georgist, Socialist, Acupuncturist who dabbles in astrology. My first foray into Buddhistm was at a Japanese Pure Land Temple in Chicago. Great food, heart wrenching niche of artifacts from the US internment camps. After some seeking, I found the Insight Meditation Society, which influences me to this day. But then in my 60’s I realized I had never stopped believing in some kind of Spirit God, something good that animates the universe, so I became a Quaker. Since the day a Quaker taught me the foundations of non-violence during a civil disobedience training at UMass, I had always said that the Quakers and the Catholic Workers were the most ethical people I had ever met. Their lives follow their values unerringly. I dated a Catholic Worker, in Chicago in the 1990s: David Stein, the artist. I became a member of Friends Meeting Cambridge, MA, this year, 2025.”
Daria Casinelli was a close friend to Beatrix Hoffman, another UMass graduate whose collection is housed at the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center (SCUA) at UMass Amherst. The Daria Casinelli papers were processed by UMass student Yuni Gerzon, with some additional unprocessed accruals, and an inventory is available upon request.
The collection contains Super 8 film footage that SCUA does not currently have the ability to digitize.