By Mark Engebretson

As a child, Lisa Vecoli played “hide-and-seek” with her brother in the library stacks at the University of Minnesota, while waiting for her father to finish his work day at the Immigration History Research Center (IHRC). Rudi Vecoli had moved his family to Minnesota in 1967 to become the first director of the IHRC — a position he held for 38 years.

Over the years, he dreamed of a state-of-the-art building to preserve the IHCR archives and his dream was realized in 2000 when the Elmer L. Andersen Library opened — five years before Rudi retired.

Now, Lisa Vecoli is retiring as curator of the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies — which is also housed in the Andersen Library.

“Andersen Library is now 19 years old, but it’s been part of my life for 50 years,” Lisa Vecoli says. “The fact that my father played a role in getting the building built that now houses the GLBT collection is a source of pride for me.”

That pride is evident in two photos that Lisa holds dear — one of her father, who passed away in 2008, and one of her — standing with arms wide in the middle of the archival stacks in the cavern beneath Andersen Library.

She likens her father’s work at the IHRC to that of her own with the Tretter Collection.

“For him, it was about the recognition and inclusion of Italian-Americans in particular but the immigrant voices more generally. … So it felt real natural for me to say, ‘I’m doing the same thing,’ she says. I’m serving the GLBT community, but it’s the same mission — it’s to allow people to articulate their own authentic experience and to demand that history include that.”

Making the Tretter collection more diverse 

In June 1972, Jean-Nickolaus Tretter and friends organized the first Twin Cities commemoration of the 1969 Stonewall Riots. Forty-six years later TC Pride has grown into one of the largest celebrations in the country — and the Tretter Collection continues to host a history pavilion at Pride.

In 1983, Tretter — concerned that  “Our Gay history was disappearing as fast as we were producing it” — consciously started collecting anything he could about the GLBT community. In 2000, Tretter donated his collection to the University of Minnesota Libraries, realizing that it no longer was manageable in his apartment.

“Jean started with a good base of material, but Lisa has certainly done a lot to broaden the collection,” says Kris Kiesling, director of the U of M Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections. “It was essentially a gay male collection with a smattering of lesbian content and an even smaller smattering of bi-sexual and transgender materials. And Lisa has really built those components of the collection.”

Perhaps the highlight of Vecoli’s tenure at Tretter was her leadership in creating, developing, and managing the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project. Since 2015, the project has focused on documenting the experiences of transgender and genderqueer people in the Upper Midwest. Vecoli hired Andrea Jenkins, who conducted nearly 200 interviews covering identity, family, love, and experiences. These oral histories are posted online.

In November 2017, Jenkins became the first openly transgender African-American woman elected to public office when she won the Eighth Ward seat on the Minneapolis City Council.

Around that same time, Vecoli was granted funding for Phase 2 of the project, which will examine transgender community organizing, policy development, and political activism around the country.

Two national awards

Vecoli’s accomplishments at Tretter have received national attention. In the last two years,