Monthly Archives: May 2014

Reflections on Language and Identity

"Zine Study XIV: [language]" Photo by Flickr user Shawn Econo. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
“Zine Study XIV: [language]” Photo by Flickr user Shawn Econo. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

 by Lucila D. Ek

When my ten-year old niece was a toddler, my mother taught her to say the parts of the body in Yucatec Maya. My niece repeated the words that my mother slowly and carefully pronounced. My mother would then quiz her: “¿Dónde está tu chi?” and my niece would point to her mouth. “¿Dónde está tu pool?” and my niece would point to her head. They played this game repeatedly.  While I was glad that my mother was trying to teach her these words, as a bilingual education scholar, I knew that memorizing isolated words and phrases was not enough for my niece to acquire our Mayan language. After all, my sisters and I never really learned to speak Maya despite hearing it spoken by our parents and adult relatives who spoke it with each other. We did learn some vocabulary but cannot carry on a conversation in our heritage language. As kids growing up in Los Angeles in the 1970’s and ‘80’s, my sisters and I spoke Spanish at home and in our community while English dominated at school. There really were no resources to help us develop and maintain Maya.

I used to think that my sisters and I didn’t learn Maya because we grew up in the United States. However, the lack of support for developing and maintaining heritage languages was the same in Mexico, as my cousins who grew up and still live there did not learn to speak it either. In our native Mexico, Yucatec Maya, like many indigenous tongues, has low prestige and its speakers are stigmatized. In our pueblo, Spanish is the dominant language in town life and the language of instruction in school. The loss of Yucatec Maya in my family both in the U.S. and in Mexico is distressing because identity and culture are inextricably connected to language as Chicana feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa so profoundly claimed, “I am my language.” She was referring to the Spanish of the Southwest found in her native Texas, yet her assertion applies to all languages and their varieties.

Many scholars from multiple disciplines have shown that language is inextricably linked to our notions of who we are and to how we signal our identities in our everyday lives. For example, anthro-political linguist Ana Celia Zentella demonstrates how English and Spanish and their varieties are used by Nuyorican youth to signal various identities. Linguistic anthropologist Norma Gonzalez’ research on Mexican origin women and children in Tucson emphasizes the links among language, emotion and identity. My own work emphasizes youth’s use of Central American varieties of Spanish for maintaining and practicing Guatemalan and Salvadoran culture in Los Angeles. These are a few of many studies that underscore the language-identity connection.

Seeing that her daughters have lost their Mayan language, my mother struggles to keep that from happening to her granddaughter. Yet, the threat is not only to Yucatec Maya but also to Spanish, our family’s other native language. For my sisters and I, developing and maintaining Spanish was challenging enough given that there was no bilingual education program in our K-12 schooling. Then (as now), English-only ideologies and policies created a context that was hostile to the development and maintenance of languages other than English, particularly Spanish. Among immigrants in the U.S., the heritage language is lost by the third generation—unless there is some sort of intervention/maintenance effort. Knowing the propensity toward language loss, my family and I were determined that my niece be bi/multilingual. Indeed, my niece’s first language is Spanish. Both sides of her family agreed that they would speak to her and expect her to respond in Spanish.  Spanish-speaking family members include four grandparents whose dominant language is Spanish, as well as her two parents and three aunts whose first language in Spanish. Furthermore, my niece has attended a dual language program since kindergarten. In addition, she has spent two-three weeks in Yucatan every year since she was five. Nevertheless, today in the fifth grade, she is defaulting more and more to English.

No, en español no, Tía,” she pleads.

Sí en español, dímelo en español,” I tell her.

“¿Por qué?” she asks.

Porque español es el idioma de mi corazón.” I respond. “Y tú eres my corazón.”

She beams.

By connecting her to Spanish and to my heart, I emphasize the emotive dimensions of language and identity. To be a tía to my sobrinita must be done in the language best suited to express the love that I feel for her. However, the Spanish that my family and I speak is not “standard” or academic Spanish. Rather, when I am being most myself, my Spanish includes English words, phrases, and loan words, and sometimes even a Mayan phrase or two. As Ana Celia Zentella has shown, code switching is a complex identity signaling and identity building practice by bi/multilinguals. She argues for an acceptance and validation of bi/multilinguals’ linguistic realities and calls out the “bilingual language patrol” who attempt to police and contain Latina/o languages. Patrolling and policing Latino/a ways of speaking further stigmatizes certain varieties of Spanish contributing to language-identity shame and loss.

I bring these deeply personal linguistic experiences to my work as a bilingual teacher educator in San Antonio. I start by interrogating what we think of as “correct” or “good” Spanish, the kind that the Real Academia Española, would approve of. I share my stories of language and identity loss with my Latina/o students, many of whom have similar experiences. They share their experiences in Spanish courses that dubbed their Spanish—and by extension, them–as inferior. Given the hostility and violence that their non-standard ways of speaking elicited, these teacher candidates are caught in a bind: How do they accept and validate their students’ Spanish while at the same time teach them the more prestigious, academic variety? How do they accept and validate their own Spanish which they’ve pegged “mocho,” “pocho,” “pobre,” “incorrecto”? They must learn to first accept, validate and feel proud of their Spanish so that they can teach their students (and their children) to love their languages and themselves. It’s not an easy process given the continuing English-only, anti-immigrant, anti-Latino/a ideologies that are rampant in the U.S. but together we can continue to resist these beliefs and practices so that my niece and other Latina/o children do not suffer needless loss of their languages and identities.

References

Anzaldúa, G. (2007). Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA:  Aunt Lute Books.

Ek, L. D. (2010). Language and identity of immigrant Central American Pentecostal youth in Southern California. In N. Cantú & M. Franquiz (Eds.), Inside the Latin@ Experience: A

Latino Studies Reader. (pp. 129-147). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

González, N. (2001). I Am My Language: Discourses of Women and Children in the Borderlands. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

Zentella, A. C. (1997). Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Lucila D. Ek was born in Yucatan, Mexico and immigrated to the U.S. at the age of four. She attended public schools from K-12th grade in Los Angeles, California. Before earning her PhD in Urban Education from UCLA, she was a bilingual-bicultural elementary teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in Bicultural-Bilingual Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her research centers on the language and literacy of Chicana/os and Latina/os, and bilingual teacher education. Her work has been published in Anthropology & Education Quarterly, International Multilingual Research Journal, Bilingual Research Journal, and the High School Journal.

Finding My Home in Psychic Restlessness

by Lizeth Gutierrez

“Because I, a mestiza

continually walk out of one culture

and into another

because I am in all cultures at the same time,

alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro,

me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio.

Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan

Simultáneamente.”

Gloria Anzaldúa

Gloria Anzaldúa is my academic godmother. She has provided me the tools to create a sense of home. A space of survival. A space to call my own in the academy. This piece is inspired by Anzaldúa’s work, specifically her writing in Borderlands/La Frontera. Anzaldúa provided me the tools to name my restlessness. “Finding My Home in Psychic Restlessness” is about my journey to self-discovery. In this poem I recite ‘culture’ and ‘race’ as homogenous markers of identity only to strategically address the multiple identities I wear on my body. I do not seek to homogenize identity or discipline racial categories of identification. Culture and identity, as Anzaldúa’s writing reveals, are complex, multifaceted and fluid.

I wrote this piece when I was an undergraduate student at Grinnell College. As a current PhD student at Washington State University this poem continues to speak to me in painful ways. I am a first generation Chicana college student from Los Angeles, California who decided to pursue her Bachelor’s degree in small town Grinnell, Iowa. I oftentimes felt dislocated there and swore to myself that I would never go back to rural towns. I did not belong in those spaces. Ironically, my distaste for small towns brought me back to a similar rural town: Pullman, Washington. Maybe I am a masochist. Perhaps it is in that masochism that lies my sense of home. Who knows, but it is with this knowledge that I offer you a piece of who I am.

 

!Ya no!

No quiero sentirme marginalizada por tu hipocresía

Me exotizas por ser Latina.

Me llamas “lazy” por ser Mexicana.

Y te burlas de mi acento porque no es como el tuyo.

Tú dices “pizza” cuando yo digo “piksa.”

 

You tell me I can achieve the American dream, and yet set boundaries that aim to intimidate me and make me question my own abilities.

Si, vivo en un lugar de contradicciones.

I am in a college where I am the “exotic Latina,” pero soy la “outsider” en mi familia.

La “pocha.”

La “ya te crees muy miss thing porque vas a coh-ledge”

No me encuentro ni aquí, ni allá.

 

Why do you make me feel like I have to choose only one culture?

Soy mestiza, una hybrid, una mixture.

Anzaldúa me lo grita al oído in my dreams.

 

I, like Anzaldúa, believe in the new Latina consciousness.

Una conciencia que reconoce y tolera las contradicciones de mis dos culturas.

I love frijoles y las tortillas hechas a mano, and let’s not forget the smell of el cilantro en la salsa roja.

Y adoro el crispy chicken sandwich with large fries de McDonalds.

 

Soy Mexicana como mi abuela, like my mother who must constantly fight against the machismo of our patriarchal culture.

Y soy Americana: conquering my dreams and goals a como de lugar is the mentality of my gobierno capitalista.

 

Tú  te sigues sintiendo perdida, abandoned, ahogada en un mar that restricts your identity

because it tells you constantly that you are not enough Mexican, ni suficientemente Americana.

Date cuenta that you are more than one culture, no te de vergüenza, no te escondas.

 

Do not let the waves of assimilation trap you.

No te dejes.

Nada. Nada más rápido. Defiendete, you can do it.

 

Our history has shown us that Chicanas are guerrilleras.

Tú como yo somos la negotiation of two distinct worlds.

Anzaldúa dice que vivas sin fronteras.

 

No dejes que la corriente del mar te lleve.

Do not let it make you choose one culture over the other.

¡Lucha!

Lucha por tu crossroads.

 

This internal fight no acaba hasta que hagas tu propia negociación de identidad.

Revolutionize your sense of self.

No eres prisionera.

 

You are not less than one culture or more than the other.

You are all cultures.

La güera. La negra. La india. La mestiza.

Eres la voz de la nueva Chicana and you have the inner-strength to create your third space of survival.

 

A space Anzaldúa so proudly calls “una conciencia de mujer.”

 

Lizeth Gutierrez is a graduate student in Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University. She researches representations in popular culture of gendered and raced Latinidades and is particularly interested in the commercialization of mainstream Latinidad in relation to U.S. discourses on second-class citizenship.

Holders of the Light

People holding placards with lighted letters spelling out words.

Overpass Light Brigade at American Indian Sovereignty and Resource Management Conference, UW-Milwaukee, April 2014. Courtesy of Overpass Light Brigade.

by Kimberly Blaeser

In 1986, when I should have been writing my PhD dissertation, I was reading boxes (no exaggeration) of Department of Energy materials regarding the planned siting of high level nuclear waste repositories. One of the sites proposed was on my home reservation at White Earth, amid Minnesota’s basalt and granite hardrock deposits—very near the headwaters of the Mississippi River.  I don’t now remember details of the science I learned during that time about crystalline rock, fractures, and ground water, but I do remember the urgency with which I investigated, the weeks and months during which I wrote, went to meetings, knocked on doors, and testified.

I had reason to recall that urgent dedication recently when Edith Leoso, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Bad River Ojibwe of Wisconsin, spoke of the way her life had shifted unexpectedly with the proposal of mining in the Penokee Hills of Wisconsin. Likewise, Bad River Tribal Chairman, Michael Wiggins, Jr. was forced to quickly educate himself in the pertinent science and legal intricacies in order to lead the ongoing anti-mining efforts, to protect the land and the people, to guard the future.

Of the many ways to say please stand, I have chosen a few.

∂, Partial Differential Equation

All things being equal, things are never equal. Think of scope. Like the reach of the imperial.  Or consider variables. Value. Or commodity. Ways of seeing. Angles and perspectives. Or how to solve for survival. 

The consideration of seven generations. This wisdom rule has become common knowledge. Leaders teach that tribal decisions should be made taking into consideration seven generations in the past and seven generations in the future.

The national sacrifice.  Lesser known, and frequently unacknowledged, this convenience policy has marked many generations. Uranium mining. The fallout from atomic bomb detonation at White Sands.

What we erase from polite conversation. Bodies on fire. The historic cleansing of the landscape, the sweep of humanity west, west, west. Environmental r  ism. 

Zongide’en, Be Brave.

Another partial differential equation. Let’s say a corporation proposes a mine. Variables include Tyler Forks. Bad. Potato. Rivers. A 22-mile, 22,000-acre strip of land. Jobs. Maanomin. Open pit. Exceptional or Outstanding Resource waters. Legislation. Iron oxide.  Fish. Blasting and pulverizing. New legislation. The functions depend upon the continuous variables. Fluid flow, for example. And changing laws. Somewhere along the granite line, someone enters. Let’s say they have put down one life and taken up another: the solution of the PDE. They face arbitrary functions. Changing laws. Guards. Guns. If the life is stretched over two points.  It vibrates. We cannot measure that vibration in this generation. We can sing it, or make it into light. (See above for a partial illustration.)

Minobimaadizi, Live Well.

This past week an environmental warrior from the Pacific Northwest passed away. Billy Frank, Jr.  Frank was quoted as saying about himself, “I was not a policy guy. I was a getting-arrested guy.” But in the end he changed policy. A Nisqually tribal member, his battle for tribal sovereignty in resource management protected the salmon and left its mark on contemporary understanding of treaty law. To accomplish that he was jailed, beaten, tear-gassed, and chose to sacrifice much of his time and liberty. A life stretched over two points.

The Anishinaabe word minobimaadizi translated gives us the English live well. But it means something more. To live this good life in ways both obvious and less so. Though we may feel dwarfed by the largeness of passion and action of people like Billy Frank, Jr., we remain variables in the equation and can tip the balance one way or the other.

When we held an American Indian Sovereignty and Resource Management Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus recently, we invited my colleague Lane Hall and his Overpass Light Brigade to participate one evening. Lane’s idea to create lighted letters and spell out protest messages above freeways has caught on around the country. At our event, we spelled words in Anishinaabemowin. (For these Lane needed more vowels!)  I am not an OLB regular holder of the light, but I volunteered to be one of those to carry and display the large placards. You will find me at the “I,” the third “O,” and the “G.”  One lighted letter in a 14-letter word? Only a pair of legs beneath a billboard? Ahem. Can you spell m  taphor without me?

Gego Googiibike, Don’t Dive Into the Metal.

I’d like to ask you to fold up your deck chair and head to the Penokee Hills protests. But the truth is, you probably have an environmental threat within biking distance. Or canoeing distance. Mining companies are pushing to conduct a toxic new form of extraction for sulfide, right next to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota, near the 1,090,000-acre (4,400 km2) wilderness area that is located in the Superior National Forest.  Where insistence is a function of insanity. If x then why.  A mine parallel to 1,000 miles of canoe routes, in the habitat of moose, beaver, wolves, bear, lynx, deer, bobcats, bald eagles, peregrine falcons and loons, within easy polluting distance of our once remote family cabin. We’ve hardly hands enough to hold all the signs or mics needed in this indifferent world of resource capitalism.

And yet.

Poetry is one letter when we spell resistance.

Debwetaan, Believe.

Eloquence of Earth

Nominal signs, these words we use—future, ecology, seven generations

have yellowed into clichés, editorials that line the cages

of captured birds, or burn in unransomed stone fireplaces

of America’s aspiring, royal mining families.

These green futures cast as fairy story,

sealed beneath the calloused ideals of legislators—

sleek smiling handshakes who seal bargains like Jabez Stone;

Our I-do-solemnly-swear paper-promise leaders

enticed by industry frenzy, slight of lips,

the short-sighted tally (seven hundred jobs)

coveted like Stone’s seven years of prosperity.

Though publicly professed (against all enemies, foreign and domestic),

and leather-oath sworn (will bear true faith and allegiance),

still quid pro quos reign, sell the soul of this land—

our waters our manoomin our children, abiinoojiihnyag.

Each season gavels strike new bargains with our oldest enemies

maji-manidoog, handsome fast-talking strangers disguised as prosperity.

 

Daily we watch patient warnings swim the Wolf River,

migrate to absent wetlands, trumpet old calls.

How do we translate the flashing fins of poisoned fish?

What other alphabet do you know to spell contaminated waters?

Like banned books words still burn on my tongue—reciprocity,

sacred, preservation, earth, tradition, knowledge, protect.

Even the vellum of justice has crumbled in fiendish fire.

Meanwhile we gather here, descendants of ajijaak and maang

lift our ancient clan voices in longing, for a chant of restoration

in a Faustian world.

Before a jury of the tricked and trapped and bamboozled,

before the very devil, Daniel Webster sang

the healing brush of common memory

a child’s wonder at each day’s waking

the freshness of a fine morning—waaseyaaban.

 

If I say Gichigami—Lake Superior—a turquoise plain, stretches

infinite, gete-gaming. If I say Wiikonigoyaang, she invites us to her feast,

how many will remember the eloquence of earth itself?

At dawn when jiibay mist backstrokes across the copper of northern prairies

eerie white hovering, damp and alive,

will you stretch out your hands in hope

cup the sacred like cedar smoke,

draw it toward you—a gesture

fervent and older than language?

Now I say wiigwaasikaa, everywhere we look

there are many white birch,

bark marked with sign, scrolls a history.

I say ritual, continuum, cycle of belonging,

I say daga, please; ninandotaan,

you must listen for it—aki.

Yes, our very earth speaks.

Who among us will translate?

Kimberly Blaeser is a 2014 Contributing Blogger for Mujeres Talk and a poet, critic and essayist. She teaches Creative Writing, Native American Literature and American Nature Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she is a Professor. Her publications include three books of poetry: Trailing You; Absentee Indians and Other Poems; and Apprenticed to Justice. Her scholarly study, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, was the first native-authored book-length study of an Indigenous author. Of Anishinaabe ancestry and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, Blaeser grew up on the White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota and worked as a journalist before earning her MA and PhD from the University of Notre Dame. Her poetry has also been translated into several languages including Spanish, Norwegian, Indonesian and French.

Collecting Memory: Chicana/o and Latina/o Lives Outside the Southwest

Documents from El Calendario Hispano de Michigan, from the Papers of Juana & Jesse Gonzales Held by Michigan State University Library

Documents from El Calendario Hispano de Michigan, from The Papers of Juana & Jesse Gonzales Held by Michigan State University Library

By Diana Rivera

Dr. Christine Marin’s (ASU) January essay here on Mujeres Talk brought attention to the work she and other Chicana/o and Latina/o archivists and librarians performed in building collections that document the history of our communities in the Southwestern US (21 January 2014). It brought to mind the fact that Mexican and Puerto Rican communities have also, for the past 100 years, been in areas beyond the Southwest and East Coast, including the Great Plains, the Pacific Northwest and in particular, the Great Lakes region. Their stories, their lives and sometimes their contributions have been documented through independent, government and academic narratives, reports, demographics, statistics and historical studies. Scholars such as Paul Schuster Taylor, Norman D. Humphrey and George T. Edson have written on Mexican migration and immigration to region while Lawrence R. Chenault, Clarence Senior and Abram J. Jaffe surveyed and recorded Puerto Rican migration early on. This work charted our migration routes, our living conditions and early settled-out communities. They also studied our labor and dependability patterns and sometimes touched on culture, tradition and history. None of these types of studies relied on the kept materials, keepsakes or oral histories of the Mexican and Puerto Rican communities. Instead, these reports and statistics provided a sanitized narrative of our growing presence in the early years.

Even though it should not fall only to Chicana/o or Latina/o librarians or archivists to build a Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies (CLS) collection, more often than not, it does. Regrettably, the number of Chicana/o and Latina/o graduates from Library & Information Science Degree Programs are not keeping up with a growing Latina/o  population in the US. Dr. Marin’s essay prompts the question: What is being done to preserve and conserve the history of Chicana/o and Latina/o communities not only in, but also OUTSIDE of the Southwest?

Internationally known Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies (CLS) librarians Dr. Christine Marin, Margo Gutierrez (UT-Austin), Lilly Castillo-Speed (UC Berkeley), Dr. Richard Chabran, Dr. Maria Teresa Marquez (UNM) and Nelida Perez (CUNY) laid the groundwork for me and my peers at libraries across the country to emulate. My predecessors, and some contemporaries, in libraries and archives who have built excellent collections have established a model that I have followed to develop and to build collections that document Chicana/o, Puerto Rican and Latina/o stories in the Great Lakes Region. These materials are now available for scholarly research, including government reports and academic work.

In a January comment on Dr. Marin’s essay here on Mujeres Talk, I noted that one of my first areas of responsibility as a new librarian was working with a small collection of maps stuck in the back of the Art Library at the Michigan State University Libraries (MSUL). As one of maybe two librarians of color there, I felt an affinity for this format, which seemed so out of place in a collection composed primarily of monographs. I was asked to take on Mexican Studies (mostly because I was of Mexican heritage) but went “rogue” by buying more titles on Chicana/o Studies than what was established in our collection development policy. In 1995, Chicana/o and Latina/o student protests on campus led to the university creation of a space honoring Cesar E. Chavez. The Cesar E. Chavez Collection is a multi-format and multidisciplinary collection on the life of Chavez, as well as the Mexican American and Puerto Rican presence and experience in the US.  With the assistance of Chicana/o and Puerto Rican students, we developed a healthy CLS collection unselfishly guided by Margo Gutierrez, the Mexican American and Latino Studies librarian and bibliographer at the UT Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection.

Our “multi-format” collection was initially a small collection of ephemeral vertical file material like flyers, brochures and newsclippings. It served a minimal role in the writing and teaching that students and faculty were doing on local and regional subjects in Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies. Instead, researchers were finding the histories, accounts and statistics in texts or in manuscript archives back in Texas, the rest of the Southwest and Mexico. There was little collected at MSUL that provided researchers with regionally unique or unpublished materials by organizations or individuals about local activities, including correspondences, speeches, pamphlets, agendas or meeting minutes. It was an apparent need and challenge to start archiving our history in  Michigan and the Great Lakes region. Although our language, culture and traditions pulled our hearts back to the Southwest, Mexico and Puerto Rico, our families, our memories and our stories began within the Great Lakes, Northeast or Great Plains regions. Now that we have more than a 100 year presence in these regions, it becomes more than important, actually critical to start gathering the histories and experiences of early Latina/o  communities in “el norte,” histories beyond the popularly understood geographic boundaries of “Aztlan” and Borinquen.

Collections of note that have included Chicana/o and Latina/o voices and materials are relatively new. These include the holdings of the University of Iowa Libraries Iowa’s Women’s Archives with the Mujeres Latinas project that includes the papers of 15 families dating from 1923, over 80 oral histories of Latinas/os, organizational records dating back to the 1960’s and other related collections; the University of Michigan Bentley Collection with a growing number of personal manuscript collections (6) and organizations (3); Hope College  (in Holland MI) with an early collection (1970s) of oral histories (many transcribed) and the MSUL  Jose F. Treviño Chicano/Latino Activism Collection with 18 manuscript collections (processed) with content dating to the 1940s. Our small vertical file at MSUL developed into the manuscript collections of donated papers of Mexican American community members in Michigan.  These collections now include photography, political buttons and other ephemera.

Although the manuscript collections donated by Michigan families are nowhere near the volume of those collections found in the Southwest (or now the Northeast at the CUNY-Hunter College Collection), they have provided a starting point for researchers focusing on Latina/os in the Great Lakes region to learn about the presence of Chicana/o and Latina/o  communities dating back to the early part of the 20th century.

Collections that encompass the range of eras, locations and subject matters that will provide a one-stop source for researchers inquiring about Latina/os in Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana or Wisconsin are hard to come by. However, we as librarians and archivists are at a pivotal point in time when the student activists, community leaders and closet archivists of the 1960’s no longer need or want their collections of papers, documents, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, scrapbooks, garage-printed-mimeograph machine of the ’60s chapbooks and publications, flyers, bumper stickers, buttons, posters and bandanas or t-shirts.  Some potential donors are not ready to entrust materials to an institution to which they have no history, affinity or connection.  Some are fearful that their long and carefully collected materials will be seen as unimportant or tossed. Others do not see their materials as important enough to donate or do not remember what is in their own collection that may unify or supplement the papers found in the collections of others.   And then some do not know how to approach an institution about archiving their materials or are confused about their ownership and access rights.

For academic or family archivists seeking a location to deposit or donate their teaching and research materials, or family papers consider these simple rules:

  1. Donate: Libraries and archives accept materials given to an institution. Once donated, materials become the property (except for the intellectual property rights / copyrights, which may be negotiated) of the institution.  A signed Gift Deed is important with the  conditions of ownership transfer and possible tax deduction opportunities clearly listed.
  2. Access and Restricted Access: Who can view materials, what they can view and when they can view them depends on the condition of the material, the institutions’ policies regarding use and duplication, the library speed in processing materials for public use, as well as any restrictions donors create on sealing sensitive materials for their and others’ protections for a specified number of years.
  3. Copyright: May be legally transferred to heirs or others.
  4. Inventory: The organization and inventory of donated materials is critically useful. It provides staff a useful guide to work from, limiting the number of hours required to process and make the manuscript collection available.
  5. Storage Expectations: The institution should re-house materials into acid-free, preservation quality boxes, folders, preservation sleeves (for fragile or aged material) and apply  appropriate curation methods.
  6. Monetary Donations: These are not a condition of having ones’ papers accepted by an archive. However, because many libraries and institutions are non-profit organizations, they might welcome any donation —  if one has the means — to be applied to the processing of donated materials.
  7. Find an Information Specialist: If you do not know of or can’t find an institution in your community to best help preserve and document our history, please do not throw it away. Please. Reach out to an information specialist (librarian, archivist or even a professor) for guidance, or even a  Mujeres Talk editor, for help on where to place potential material donations.

Diana Rivera is the Chicana/o Latina/o Studies Subject Specialist and Head of the Cesar E. Chavez Collection at the Michigan State University Libraries.