Category Archives: History

Reports from July 2016 Latina/o Studies Association Conference

panelists pictured

Panelists Beatriz Tapia, Alexandro Gradilla, Anita Tijerina Revilla, and Magdalena L. Barrera. Photo by M. Barrera. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Latina/o Studies Association 2016: Nourishing the Mind and the Spirit

By Magdalena L. Barrera

The 2016 LSA conference was a wonderful experience, for many reasons. To situate myself: I am a faculty member of the Mexican American Studies department at San José State University. My primary area of research is analysis of textual representations of Mexican Americans in early twentieth century American cultural production; however, in recent years I have developed a secondary research area that explores the retention and mentoring of first-generation and underrepresented students in higher education. This second area was inspired in part by the learning curve I underwent as my environment changed from the R1 settings of my undergraduate through postdoctoral training to working in the California State University system. Although I have maintained my primary research area, it requires some effort to stay in touch with emerging trends in the field, as I am the only person at SJSU who does Humanities-based work in Chicanx Studies. Moreover, I had not attended a conference in a couple of years, and so I welcomed this year’s LSA as an opportunity to fully engage as both a presenter and participant, and to expand my professional network. Continue reading

On the Colonial Legacy of U.S. Universities and the Transcendence of Your Resistance

By Prof. Oriel María Siu

Oriel María Siu is Assistant Professor and the founding Director of Latino Studies at the University of Puget Sound.

Oriel María Siu is Assistant Professor and the founding Director of Latino Studies at the University of Puget Sound.

(This is a copy of the Keynote speech I gave at the University of Puget Sound’s Graduates of Color Ceremony in May 2015. I dedicate it to all students of color at this and any other institution of higher learning in the U.S.)

As people of color, you were never meant to be at a university. I was never meant to teach at one. And your family and I were never meant to be here celebrating your graduation today.

The establishment of universities you see, were a direct result of the European colonization of the Americas and later white settler expansion all over the globe, a process begun in 1492. From the beginning, universities served as a crucial tool for the introduction and retention of a white Eurocentered power structure in these occupied territories. In the Americas, universities were created and run by British and Spanish settlers and later by their descendants for the purpose of founding and retaining the colonial order of things. The founding years of the first universities in this continent should therefore be no surprise; they directly paralleled the English and Spanish processes of colonization north, center, and south: the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (1538), Universidad de San Marcos of Perú (1551), Real y Pontificia Universidad de México, today the UNAM (1551), and Harvard University (1636), to name but a few.

Through savage processes of forced displacement, genocide, racialization, and the enslavement of Natives and Africans, whites self-proclaimed themselves superior to other people upon entering the Americas. From 1492 to 1592 –or the first 100 years of the occupation alone– it has been estimated that Europeans decimated more than 90 million indigenous people in the Americas, making it the bloodiest holocaust in the history of human kind (other estimates place this number above the 100 million people mark). Aside from this genocide, more than 11 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic, with death rates so high during that atrocious Middle Passage that many lives were lost at sea. Engendered by a system of slavery and the decimation and removal of Native life, the colonial order of things in the Americas consisted of the formation of a particular economic system; one which controlled, confiscated and reserved productive Native lands for the use of the white settler; one which ensured the flow of exploitable, cheap and free labor for the occupiers’ benefit; and one which ensured little to no upward mobility for the colonized. Universities, as I was saying, were crucial to the retention and functioning of this colonial order.

As spaces for the creation and retention of systems of thought, universities contributed to the eradication of indigenous educational institutions and to the displacement, invalidation, destruction, and subalternization of indigenous and African ways of knowing. In the minds of missionaries and “men of letters” –as scholars were called back then–, indigenous knowledges were dictates of the devil and thus had to be disciplined, punished and eliminated. These knowledges and epistemologies neither corresponded to the history of the so-called West the colonizers imposed here in the Americas nor were they recognized as valid or beneficial to the colonial system. Native knowledges did not support racial, class nor gender hierarchies –all organizing principles of colonial America. As Duwamish Chief Seattle said to the settlers that later appropriated his name and this land in the Northwest, Native ways did not see land as belonging to people as the white man understood it, but rather that people belonged to the land. As sites for the development and preservation of ideology, universities thus became the mechanism through which these indigenous knowledges were made inferior and obsolete by the white colonial settlers, replaced instead with Eurocentric lenses of the world. These new lenses were channeled through the academic disciplines that universities engendered –Math, Sciences, Humanities and Philosophy– disciplines all designed to rationalize the Eurocentric white power structure in place still to this day.

From Types of Mankind (1854) by J.C. Nott, and Geo. R. Gliddon. In arguing for the superiority of whites, scientists claimed that the world’s “races” had different “origins” and were therefore different “species”. Photo by APS Museum. CC BY-NC 2.0

From Types of Mankind (1854) by J.C. Nott, and Geo. R. Gliddon. In arguing for the superiority of whites, scientists claimed that the world’s “races” had different “origins” and were therefore different “species”. Photo by APS Museum. CC BY-NC 2.0

Universities were essential to the development of scientific racism. For more than two centuries, from the 1500s to the 1800s, colleges and universities throughout the United States and the Americas supported research and implemented curricula that argued for the enslavement of black people, the superiority of the white man, and the inferiority of Natives and their ways of knowing. Scholars such as Josiah Clark Nott, Robert Knox, George Robins Gliddon, and Samuel George Morton among many others lived to prove that the racial inferiority of people of African, Pacific Islander, Asian, Caribbean, and Indigenous descent, justified conquering them, enslaving them, exterminating them, exploiting them, segregating them, and/or occupying their land. Be this within the newly created U.S. borders, or south of the U.S. borders, or in Africa, or in Asia, or the Pacific Islands, all regions colonized by Europe and/or the U.S. during the 17th, 18th, 19th 20th, and 21st centuries. In arguing white superiority, these scholars measured the skulls of diverse populations, put forth theories of polygenism supporting the classification of human populations as distinct races stemming from different origins, and spoke of the “primitive psychological organization” of slaves. Their research and the value given to it by way of the university institution made it possible to create the logic for the colonization and occupation of vast territories and peoples during the forming years of European and US imperialism world-wide.

Universities both in the North and South of the United States participated in the economy of slavery. As scholar Craig Steven Wilder’s work most recently demonstrates (Ebony and Ivey, 2013), in the South many colleges owned and used enslaved blacks to build and maintain university campuses. Fully at the disposal of the universities that owned them, campus slaves were forced to commit their labor to the campus which held them. They served the students, the faculty, and the administrators. Slaves took care of administrators’ and faculties’ children, rang campus bells, prepared meals, cleaned students’ shoes, made beds, obtained the wood for fires, and tended farmland owned by administrators and universities. In some instances, students, administrators and faculty even paid special fees to their respective university to be able to bring their personal slaves to campus. Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Brown, and Princeton among many other prestigious universities of the North, were no. These institutions suitably accepted into their student body the sons of wealthy slave-owners, including sons of wealthy slave-holder elites from the Caribbean (Wilder)[i]. Both directly and indirectly, universities all throughout the nation supported the economy of slavery, benefited from it, and played a crucial role in retaining the racist and racial order of things in the newly created white settler nation.

Engraving from 1827, University of Virginia. Female slave carrying baby. Zoomed in image of Rotunda and Lawn, B. Tanner engraving from Boye’s Map of Virginia from the University of Virginia Library Materials.

The sons of plantation owners who studied in Europe were seen as experts on Natives and enslaved Blacks because of their close contact with them (Wilder)[ii]. Insisting on the economic benefits of slavery while also furthering the case for U.S. genocidal politics at home, these slave-owners’ sons wrote entire dissertations and gave lectures on the physical and intellectual inferiority of these groups (Wilder)[iii]. Their work’s objective was to dehumanize their subjects or rather objects of study. Their lectures not only helped validate and explain the system of racist economic, social, and political rule in place in the U.S., it also argued for its perpetuation.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Blacks and other people of color in the U.S. as well as Jews and non-Protestant Christians were still not admitted into universities. Black colleges and universities were created for this very particular reason in the 1800s. Throughout the U.S. students of color were not legally allowed into higher education until the second half of the 20th century. That is approximately 50 years ago.

The very university from which you graduate today was founded in 1888, just a few years into the occupation of the Puget Sound area by its white settlers. Even though the area began to be “visited” by English “explorers” in the late 1700s, permanent European settlement was achieved in this region in 1852 when a Swedish man by the name of Nicholas De Lin discovered there was lots of money to be made by exploiting the area’s lumber. The Nisqually and Puyallup regional tribes fought back and in 1855 the settlers were forced to flee, being able to return only after Native populations of the area were put in a nearby reservation by the U.S. government, leaving the Puget Sound area free for its exploitation by the returning settlers. Founded in 1888, our university is directly and indirectly a product of this occupation.

But just as these academic institutions have historically wanted to make you and your bodies of color invisible, there is also a long history of struggle for visibility, inclusion and the right to existence that precedes you; one that also dates back to more than 500 years ago; from Native and slave rebellions, to organized walk-outs, hunger strikes, sit-ins, street protests, to people writing our own excluded histories and creating spaces within academia so that you and I could learn about our own histories and struggles as well as recuperate lost ancestral knowledges. Many students and educators before you even paid with their lives for you to be able to be here today; for you and I to be here today and to celebrate you. During the 1960s young women and men fought the police, racist administrations, went to jail and sacrificed spending time with their own families to create the possibility for you to be able to get the very degree that will soon be in your hands. Your immediate communities and families have also sacrificed a great deal and gone through many difficult moments in life in order to make this day a reality for you. I sincerely congratulate them on this day, only your parents know all the struggles they have endured to make this day possible for you.

During your time at the University of Puget Sound all of you graduates have pushed and struggled and studied late nights and long days to arrive here and you made it to graduation. But always remember that you are exceptions. Despite us now having an educational system that is color-blind in theory, Blacks, Latinos, and Natives specifically, continue to be under-represented among those making it to college and graduating with bachelor degrees. In high schools, Latino and African American students nationally are disproportionately represented at every stage of the school-to-prison pipeline and only 53% of Native students graduate from high school [iv]. In today’s corporatized university system moreover, students of color are shouldering the most student debt, disproportionately higher numbers having to drop out of college because of the economic burden that academia now represents. You graduating from here today is that much more symbolic because of all of this.

But I want you to know you have a long road ahead of you. Twenty years ago a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science degree held a lot of weight; it was an accomplishment. Today it is still an accomplishment but it does not carry the weight that it once did. So therefore I urge you to go further; I urge you to go get your Masters and your PhDs, to continue your education in one form or another. And I challenge you once you’re out of these spaces to create opportunities for those in your communities of origin. Too many in our communities who make it to far places too easily forget their origins; choosing to distance themselves from their communities and their own community’s history of struggle and survival. I urge you to not be one of them.

I wanted also to tell you you’re definitely not graduating from this institution with just a Bachelor’s degree. By now you all have a PhD in surviving and knowing these dominant white spaces of power that you will continue to navigate after graduation; these are places that will continuously try to shape and mold you and your spirit; dictate who you should be; what you should think; where you should go in life. The University of Puget Sound, while not always the most welcoming space for students and people of color, does in my mind do something beautiful. It challenges you and in doing so prepares you for what is to come ahead. Consciously or unconsciously you’ve met this challenge. While here, the dissident, non-conformist, rebel in you learned how to create what bell hooks would call our own communities of resistance to spaces that in subtle and not so subtle ways too often told you: “you don’t belong here”. That resistance may have looked different for every one of you. For some of you it looked like student activism on social justice related issues, building solidarities between students of color, while for others it may have been selecting particular friendships; or choosing your mentors or simply knowing when to seek spaces away from whiteness. While here, consciously or unconsciously you managed to create for yourself communities that helped you find your way through the daily micro and macro aggressions, the assumptions, the presumptions, the comments inside and outside the classroom, the burden of having to explain yourselves and your experiences –all the time–, the loneliness, the alienation, and yes, the depression. While here, the dissident, non-conformist, rebel in you pushed you to create communities that allowed you your voice whenever you needed to speak, yell and cry; to create communities that also allowed for your silence whenever you didn’t feel like speaking, yelling or crying. While at Puget Sound, the dissident, non-conformist survivor of 500 years of colonization in you also learned to question that which you have been taught in the classroom; that which you read in color-blind texts presenting themselves as universal knowledge.

So you leave here knowing when to separate useful knowledge from that which will not serve you, but further estrange you and worse, assimilate you into what the dominant culture wants of you, thinks of you, and desires of you. There is therefore very little I could advise you today in this art of survival you all know very well and have PhDs in by now. The art is actually now more than 500 years old, passed on to us by our ancestors, our parents, and the collectivity of our resisting spirits.

What advice I can offer however is to not ever let the resister and creator in you be silenced; if you spoke too soft here, amplify that voice; if you found your voice here, solidify and strengthen it. If you feel you are still in the search of your voice, be compassionate and honest with yourself, your interests, and your passions. Dream big and in following those dreams be as persistent as you can be and do not give up or let others take you in different directions.

Be creative. The world that awaits you out there is at times too ugly, too vicious; too inhuman. It is a world replete with racism, fear of your bodies, a world continuously in crisis and at war; a world submerged in a neoliberal economy that thrives on the imprisonment of bodies of color, war, forced migrations, the continued destruction of our mother earth, and the commodification of absolutely everything including love. This is a world that too often will seem to leave little to no air to breathe. So please go out and create your own breathing spaces. Continue in the creation of resisting, loving communities because you didn’t and don’t ever get anywhere on your own. As our Native sisters and brothers will always remind us, we are all connected to communities that transcend time. We’re connected to the first ancestors who walked the earth; to their struggles and their deeds. But we’re also connected to those who are not yet here, those generations who will be born tomorrow and thereafter; those who will walk this earth in the future long after we’re gone. Our job in the middle is to bridge the gap, take on the inheritance from our ancestors and our past, add our own deeds, our struggles, and leave this a better place for those that will follow. The responsibility, to say the least, is tremendous.

So make yourself and your communities visible. Resist becoming invisible; and resist becoming that which others and dominant spaces want you to become; resist it with all of your passion, your love and your humanity. Stay connected and grateful to those who’ve helped you and loved you along the way and those who will continue to be there for you. And give back.

Above all, don’t ever forget we were never meant to be here celebrating you today. Love you all.

Notes

[i] Information based on Craig Steven Wilder’s excellent book on the subject of universities and slavery, Ebony and Ivey (2013). I highly recommend this read.

[ii] From Wilder’s book Ebony and Ivey (2013).

[iii] From Wilder’s book Ebony and Ivey (2013).

[iv] “Tolerance in Schools for Latino Students: Dismantling the School to Prison Pipeline”

From The Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy, May 1 2015.

Oriel María Siu is Assistant Professor and the founding Director of Latino Studies at the University of Puget Sound. She earned her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles; her Masters from the University of California, Berkeley; and her BA degrees in Chicana/o Studies and Latin American Literatures from California State University, Northridge where as an undergraduate she was involved in the establishment of the first Central American Studies Program in the nation. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary Central American cultural productions from the diaspora, de-colonial border thinking, Latina/o cultural productions and diasporas, and narratives of race and racisms in the US. She has published several articles on these topics and is currently working on her book on novels from the Central American diaspora. Siu is also a mother and a dancer. She is from San Pedro Sula, Honduras and lives in Seattle, Washington.

Contending Worldviews in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

by Theresa Delgadillo

This essay, originally prepared in 1996 for Professor Cherríe Moraga in her course on “Prophets/Scribes of Aztlán” at UCLA, has been updated and edited to meet Mujeres Talk requirements. Professor Moraga required students to do a kind of writing different from that typically required in a graduate seminar. She asked us to put ourselves into our critical work, and I took this to mean that we should write in a way that explicitly acknowledged the perspective from which we wrote, making clear and concrete, in writing, our investments and histories in the intellectual projects we undertake. For me, what it yielded was a creative non-fiction essay about a piece of literature, a form different than the academic article and made more so here through editing into a blog essay, a form that also calls upon authors to share more of oneself that one might in an academic journal. The blog essay is also a form necessarily focused on a small part of the literature under discussion, meant to provoke reflection, discussion, and further reading. I refer interested readers to the many excellent articles on Silko’s novel on the MLA International Bibliography.

In Almanac of the Dead (1991) Leslie Marmon Silko re-writes the history of the encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples in the Americas. It is no longer the story of “civilization” meeting the barbarians, not the moment at which Indians begin to disappear, but a brutal, cunning, bloody, savage conquest that spawns equally brutal societies. It is almost as if Silko, in one massive novel, attempts to reverse generations of schooling on the history of this continent, though one has to be open and ready to hear new stories in order to understand the Almanac.

Growing up Chicana anywhere in the United States presents many challenges to one’s “story,” because our experience is undervalued or denied. We live in a nation where ours is not the official story, and yet it is ours. Like the speaker in Lorna Dee Cervantes’ poem who says, “I’m marked by the color of my skin” (35-7), so, too, have I been marked in every school I’ve been in since childhood. Though I knew it from my first day in school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I only began to understand it in seventh grade. One of my older brothers gave me a copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), which I read while my Social Studies class studied the period of westward expansion into the Dakotas and the Black Hills Gold Rush. I was stunned by the glaring difference in these narratives. The two books had completely different things to say about the same events. While Indians were nowhere to be found in the school textbook, they were everywhere in Dee Brown’s account, prompting me to ask our teacher about this discrepancy.

My question to the teacher was not simply about facts or words, it was, as Linda Hogan says, about “ways of thinking and being in the world” (12). Around that time, there were a series of marches and protests by Wisconsin Native Americans in the news. Having already been mistaken for Native American, I knew that discriminatory treatment toward Native Americans was not unlike that directed against Mexican Americans. I was disturbed by how our textbook completely erased Native American peoples from history. Our teacher, however, insisted that our textbook was accurate. He dismissed my question. When I tried to explain what Dee Brown reveals in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, he told me to be quiet. I continued, but the teacher yelled at me. I then did something completely surprising to all, myself included: I yelled back. Another supervising teacher was called in. Lots of tense whispering, then the bell rang, and so did discussion.

When I read Almanac of the Dead, I thought back to this youthful confrontation with history. Today, I also have to wonder about where Latina/os were in that curriculum, but back then I was just beginning to understand then what the novel illustrates so well — the difference between dominant history and story/ies/histories. A conception of history in the singular as the static and unchangeable past shields it from inquiry and allows it to be compartmentalized and separated from both the present and the future. New knowledge cannot alter it. History in that sense is perhaps why the teacher could not accept another version of the same events in the Dakota Hills and why he did not even consider it important enough to discuss–the events were safely in the past and therefore not of major concern, not to mention that Dee Brown’s version of events was in conflict with the textbook narrative.

In Almanac of the Dead, there are two conceptions of the past diametrically opposed to one another: dominant history versus story/ies/histories. These distinct conceptions are really competing worldviews and they create conflicts for individual characters, who must decide which view will guide their lives. One character who experiences this conflict is Sterling:

[He] had been carefully following advice printed recently in a number of magazines concerning depression and the best ways of combating it. He had purposely been living in the present moment as much as he could. One article had pointed out that whatever has happened to you had already happened and can’t be changed. Spilled milk. But Sterling knows he’s one of those old-fashioned people who has trouble forgetting the past no matter how bad remembering might be for chronic depression. (24)

The past Sterling wants to forget is his banishment from Laguna Pueblo, yet he was raised on the stories of his Pueblo, including the dispossessions and indignities imposed upon them by  government and dominant knowledge systems (31). He cannot forget one portion of the past without forgetting it all. He enjoys reading the Police Gazette, with its stories of criminals past, in part, because this is one place where Indians to appear in the history of the West with some attempt at understanding their perspective (39-40).

An awareness of the contrast between dominant history and story/histories also operates for the character of Clinton, who, as an African-American Vietnam veteran now homeless, tracks on the discrepancies between the two. Clinton remains highly critical of what he learns in university classes  yet he also finds there, in Black Studies, research that confirms his sense of his people as more than mere pawns of history, and gains a wealth of knowledge on the experiences and cultures of Blacks (414-431). When he critically recalls how wealthy Cherokee Indians had been rounded up by orders of Andrew Jackson, Clinton insists that a “a people’s history” must include all the stories: “That was why a people had to know their history, even the embarrassments when bad judgment had got them slaughtered by the millions” (415).

In the novel, characters who refuse the stories of others are racked with fear, and in the novel, doomed to failure. As Linda Hogan observes, “the Western tradition of beliefs within a straight line of history leads to an apocalyptic end” (93). This is what the characters Beaufrey and Serlo see in the future–cities burning and anarchy reigning–which is why they want to develop modules to survive in space (542). An apocalyptic ending is also what the character Menardo sees and why he is obsessed with insurance and security (266). In the novel, his first wife, Iliana, too, proud of the historical pedigree of having been descended from the conquistador De Oñate “still was gnawed by the fear that disaster was stalking all of them” (270). That fear is also one shared and preyed upon in the novel by characters representing the military regimes of Latin America and their U.S. collaborators.

Another view of the future emerges in the novel from the character of the Barefoot Hopi, who presents a perspective challenging for humans when he says:

            You destroyers….don’t know how much the spirits of these continents despise you, how the earth hates you….All the riches ripped from the heart of the earth will be reclaimed by the oceans and mountains. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions of enormous magnitude will devastate the accumulated wealth of the Pacific Rim. (734)

Unlike Serlo’s view or Menardo’s view, this prediction of cataclysmic events is not a prediction of end, but of beginning. In the Hopi’s view, the world does not revolve around humans and therefore the end of things human is not a catastrophe. He predicts that the Earth will cleanse itself and continue; this he does not fear. His view parallels Yoeme’s, who says that the sacred Earth “would go on, [it] would outlast anything man did to it” (718). This is what Sterling comes to understand, too: “Burned and radioactive, with all humans dead, the earth would still be sacred. Man was too insignificant to desecrate her” (762). In the course of the novel, several characters arrive at this understanding of the earth’s story, and must re-consider human interaction with it. Yet, do the Barefoot Hopi’s words leave us off the hook for what happens to the Earth or inspire responsibility?

The old woman Yoeme’s notebook, carried by the children in the novel, says, “sacred time is always in the Present” (136). Though it may sound like the same message of the magazines Sterling reads to cope with depression, it is not. Instead, it is akin to what Linda Hogan’s grandmother articulates: “Our work is our altar” (148); or what Hogan herself describes as “what happens to people and what happens to the land is the same thing” (89). The idea of the sacred in the present recognizes the web of existence that links humans with the natural world. It is also an idea that imposes demands on characters in this novel. As Silko says in an article in Artforum, “for the old people, no one person or thing is better than another; hierarchies presuming superiority and inferiority are considered absurd.”

The conception of story in the novel knits together past, present, and future. Story is alive and everything has a story, but not the same one. Story in this novel is not only the narratives characters create to make meaning of life, but movements and experiences of peoples, the variety of plants and animals in the natural world, the Earth itself. To embrace story appears as a way to embrace a worldview that accepts the interconnectedness of organisms through time.

Many characters in Almanac struggle to make sense of their story, trying to fit their past with their present and future. Some try to forget their own story and instead embrace history, like Menardo; some are rejected because they are evidence of a past that their families want to forget, like Root; some think that their own history is everybody’s history, like Bartolomeo; some see only part of the past and therefore mistakenly think they know what the future will be, like Beaufrey and Serlo; some make connections between other stories and their own and organize people to act with others, such as Angelita and El Feo; some people tell their own stories/histories, such as Clinton, Tacho, the Barefoot Hopi, Wilson Weasel Tail Clinton, Angelita and Lecha; while others, most, struggle to understand the relationship between their stories and other stories. Like the children carrying the pages of the almanac north (246-253), each person in Silko’s novel carries a story that is incomplete without the other stories/histories.

The almanac-carrying children are fleeing “the Butcher” who is enslaving and murdering their tribe, an allusion to both a historical genocide and contemporary circumstances forcing children to flee north. In this storyline, the novel represents the very real experience of the Yaqui tribe, who created a testamento of their creation and their land that is passed down today in handwritten notebooks, and even, as Evers and Molina point out, has been carried by messengers who had the document sewn into their clothes (32). Like Silko’s fictional almanac, both a document and an oral story altered with the additions of each narrator, it is expected and necessary that the Yaqui testamento be “unfixed” by those re-telling it (Evers and Molina 23). These are only two examples of the many stories and histories that are embedded in Almanac of the Dead.

As the character Clinton points out in the Almanac, denying people their histories helps to ensure submission and subordination (431), cutting people off from the stories of their ancestors means stranding them in madness and meanness (424). The novel seems to ask us: Do we recognize story/ies/histories, recognize “differences” as Calabazas says (203), and learn from them? Or do we continue to privilege destruction?

Works Cited

Cervantes, Lorna Dee. Emplumada. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981.

Evers, Larry and Felipe S. Molina. “The Holy Dividing Line: Inscription and Resistance in Yaqui Culture.” Journal of the Southwest. 34:1. (1992): 3-46.

Hogan, Linda. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. New York: Norton, 1995.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. “The Fourth World.” Artforum. 28:10. (1989): 124-125.

Theresa Delgadillo is an Associate Professor of Comparative Studies and Coordinator of the Latina/o Studies Program at The Ohio State University. She has served as Editor of Mujeres Talk since January 2011. 

 

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.

From Repatriation to Representation: Latina/o Participation in Detroit Electoral Politics

by Elena Herrada

I am an elected member of the Detroit School Board under an emergency manager. I am also a candidate for Detroit’s 6th Representative District. Entering the race is a victory in itself. I am running without the giant funding the other candidates have, but I am running as an act of public service, to speak truth, to stand up for our elders who were intimidated out of public participation and remained private. It was during the late 1970s in the Chicano Boricua Studies classes at Wayne State University (CBS-WSU) in Detroit that classmates and I began to put together the story of this intimidation. We began to understand what happened to our families and why they acted as they did. This became essential to understanding where we are now and how it came to be that we have so little political power in Detroit and Michigan.

Mexicans began arriving in Detroit en masse around 1920 to respond to a call by Henry Ford’s auto plants. The promise of $5.00 per day and the chaos of the Mexican Revolution converged to send Mexicans north.  Approximately 15,000 Mexicans came to Detroit, including my grandparents. My grandfather married my grandmother, Elisa Hernandez Carranza in San Antonio Texas where she had been working as a governess for an American family who had brought her from Mexico to care for their children.  He worked on the railroad in New York and in Kansas and was drafted into World War I.

Here in Detroit, they started their family. My grandfather was fortunate to get hired by Ford, but with uncertain times, he was laid off in 1922. He worked odd jobs to support the growing family. When the Depression hit, as we have now learned, the welfare department came knocking on Mexican’s doors. Their four children were born in Detroit already when the deportations came.

Between 1929 and 1939, one million Mexicans – 60% of who were born in the US – were “repatriated.”  This is not the word for all; many who were born here and kicked out were depatriated, a word now used in our research of this sad period. This was done through a program cooked up  and never codified into law – to scapegoat a people and blame them – the most vulnerable and conspicuous (race, culture, language), rather than an economy built on a house of cards in a system riddled with contradiction and greed. A discussion for another time, but noteworthy here, is a comparison to today’s Detroit pensioners and the privatization of our city. Nearly identical play books were used for the hate mongering justification of removal of a people through state power and theft of pensions.  Racism is an essential for carrying off such a feat.

My family, like thousands of others, went back to Mexico. I have spent my life getting this story. Mexican Detroit was hardest hit between 1930 and 1932 because of industry recruitment in the better days of the early 1920s; so there were many to seek and many to deport.  It was when I was in the CBS-WSU program in the late 1970s that I learned about the repatriation from reading  Abraham Hoffman’s “Unwanted Mexican Americans.” When our little local Detroit Oral History Committee, made up of repatriados and descendants reached out to scholars Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez, they came to Detroit for a book signing and then wrote a second edition with much of their research on Detroit included. 

We do not know how many of those repatriated returned.  We do know that many died along the way back and that many did not come back to Detroit; they went to other cities. Others returned during the Bracero Programs and found out then that they were US born repatriados. We lost track of thousands of our people in that decade and beyond. Children born here were not always told they were US citizens and lived their entire lives without ever claiming their birthright.

It was in the 1970s that the Chicano Movement gave rise to our pride. It was a time when we realized that our elders had been treated badly for things they did nothing to deserve and that our culture and language were to be embraced, not rejected. And it was a time for a new influx of Latina/os. In 1974, there were demands for bilingual education in the schools and Michigan passed the law for bilingual education.

Because we were based in an auto industry where no formal education was needed to make a good living, we had few Chicano or Latino people to fill the jobs of bilingual teachers and administrators. Detroit was considered the Promised Land because one could come here and change one’s life without changing one’s class. Thus, we had few college grads that could be teachers. Chicanos/as arrived in Detroit from Texas, California and New Mexico to fill the need. The 60s and 70s in Detroit, like the rest of the world, ushered in a new day for many oppressed peoples. Latinos here saw the passage of the Bilingual Education Act, the creation of new community based organizations run for and by Latinos and the creation of Latino en Marcha, later to become CBS-WSU. Many of today’s agency directors came through this important leadership/ academic program.

Among the organizations that came into existence in a heavily Mexican and Latino populated southwest Detroit were:  LASED (Latin Americans for Social and Economic Development), SER, (Service, Employment, Rehabilitation), CHASS Clinic (Community Health and Social Services) and Latino Family Services.

LASED was created as an incubator to start other projects. Its mission was to get Latinos included in positions where we had previously been excluded: government, civil service and education. It was the primary advocacy agency that sued the State Department of Education for failure to provide language instruction to Spanish speaking students, thus ushering in bilingual education. There was an active Brown Beret chapter here as well as a thriving UFW boycott office. The UAW was a strong supporter of the farm workers, so our autoworker parents were part of the growing UFW movement for justice in the fields. We were part of a movement that uplifted us; no more hiding who we were.

At the same time these organizations were forming, another community organization formed called Southwest Mental Health (SMH), now known as Southwest Solutions (SS). Its director, unlike the Latino agencies, was and is non-Latino. It is important, also to note that most of the people who started these organizations in the 70s are still there, either as board members or as directors. In 1979 SMH began to expand its mission into housing. It has since acquired hundreds of properties located in the Latino community and again expanded its mission far beyond mental health. It includes its own housing office, real estate corporation, construction company, its own mortgage lender and educational contracts and has also expanded into health care, having opened its own clinic in SW Detroit.

An elder activist in our community, Sister Consuelo Alcala asked me to look into why the Latino agencies were losing so much ground to SS. She had been part of the creation of the agencies and was concerned that the existing Latino agencies were receiving very little funding now from their traditional sources: the United Way of Southeastern Michigan, the Neighborhood Opportunity Fund, etc. While the buildings and the organizations still exist, they are shadows of their former selves. The services once offered by LaSED, CHASS, SER, Latino Family Services all are now offered by the mega non-profit Southwest Solutions, who are also the largest landlord in the community.

I set out to interview the directors of the agencies, not sure how to approach an issue which many in our community had quietly complained about for years. We decided the best way to present our findings was to hold a hearing on the issue of hegemony in SW Detroit. This is where we learned how much influence the philanthropic world truly wields in Detroit and its negative impact on the Latino community as well as its impact on our ability to get our own people elected to office.

Our first Detroit Latin/o elected to office was Representative Belda Garza D-8th District in 1998. She was a determined political outsider who won, making history for Detroit. Her second term she ran unopposed, but the third term she was beat by a non-Latino, followed by his staff person who were both term-limited. The now heir apparent in the race is also non-Latina/o. Lots more money than our community has ever seen is in the mix now. Very little is left of public life in Detroit. As we speak, our trash pick up has been privatized, our water is about to be seized and pensions are up for grabs. The Detroit News reported that the heads of the foundations that rule Detroit met with the bankruptcy judge but because they are private entities, they do not have to report what they talked about. Our lives. Privatized. I mention this because our political races have been privatized; the non profits  (banks in drag) control all public life.

My first action as an elected school board member was to stop the efforts of the non-profits that went to city council and asked them to abolish the school board and put it under mayoral control, the first move before dismantling public education and parceling it out to charter schools. Jones Day, a bankruptcy law firm has replaced the government in Detroit; there is a  possibility of taking away Detroiters’ pensions to pay illegal swap loans to the banks it represents. I am running as an act of public service. To speak truth, to stand up for our elders who were intimidated out of public participation. Entering the race is a victory in itself, a victory of embracing public participation.


[1]  B alderamma, Francisco E, and Raymond Rodriguez.  Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s. Albuquerque: University of New

Mexico Press, 2006. 

Elena Herrada  is a lifelong, second and one half generation Detroiter and daughter of a repatriado family (Detroit-Aguas Calientes-Detroit). Herrada is the daughter, granddaughter and mother of auto workers and an urban activist, critic and feminist. She is a co-founder of Fronteras Norteñas, an organization which chronicles the life of Mexicans in Michigan and a co-founder of Centro Obrero de Detroit, an immigrant rights organization formed in 2006. Herrada teaches at Wayne County Community College, volunteers with LASED ( Latin Americans for Social and Economic Development) teaching ESL and worker rights. She is currently running for State Representative in House District 6 on a platform of defense of public education and freedom from emergency managers for all communities of color and the restoration of their voting rights.

María Teresa Márquez and CHICLE: The First Chicana/o Electronic Mailing List

By Miguel Juárez

These days we take e-mail and electronic lists for granted, but imagine a world where there is no e-mail or exchange of information like we have now?  That was the world for Humanities Librarian María Teresa Márquez at the University of New Mexico (UNM) Zimmerman Library and creator of CHICLE, the first Chicana/o electronic mailing list created in 1991, to focus on Latino literature and later on the social sciences. [1] Other Chicano/Latino listservs include Roberto Vásquez’s Lared Latina of the Intermountain Southwest (Lared-L) [2] created in 1996, and Roberto Calderon’s Historia-L, created in March 2003. [3] These electronic lists were influential in expanding communication and opportunities among Chicanas/os. CHICLE, nevertheless, deserves wider recognition as a pioneering effort whose importance has been overlooked.

In many instances the Internet revolution was shepherded by librarians in their institutions. Libraries and librarians were early adopters of this new technology. Márquez used computers and e-mail in her work in the Government Information Department at UNM. However, it was in the Library and Information Science Program at California State University, Fullerton, where she first learned about and used computers in a federally-funded program in the 1970s that sought to increase the number of Mexican American librarians. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Márquez earned a Certificate of Advanced Study in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, where she learned more about computers and databases.

In April 1991, Márquez attended the Nineteenth Annual Conference (Los Dos Méxicos) of the National Association of [Chicana and ] Chicano Studies (NACS) in Hermosillo, Sonora, México. One of the panels, moderated by Professor Francisco Lomelí, University of California, Santa Barbara, presented papers on “Literatura Chicana.”  While discussing the topic, scholars raised problems encountered in communicating with each other and in sharing information on new publications and current research. Márquez volunteered to create a listserv or electronic mailing list and explained how it could be of use in keeping scholars informed. At UNM, she developed the list and Professor Erlinda V. Gonzales-Berry, then a faculty member in the UNM Spanish Department, coined its name-CHICLE (which translates into gum in Spanish). CHICLE stood for Chicana/Chicano Literature Exchange.

According to Márquez, most faculty members were not willing to join CHICLE, citing no experience with computers nor did they wish to consider its potential use in academic work. Yet, Márquez launched CHICLE with eight subscribers. She attended numerous academic conferences to distribute fliers and talk to people about the list and recruit subscribers. Furthermore, she attempted to impress upon her listeners the need to be at the forefront of technology, but Márquez said she had few takers. Believing in the importance of the list and in this new form of communication, she persevered and she states: “One day, all of a sudden, membership went up to 800!” As more institutions and faculty members started using computers, the list exploded in the number of subscribers.

The idea for the list evolved from Márquez’s work in a library setting that was used to basically communicating internally. At first Márquez sent out all of the information on the list because she had most of it. She would use librarian’s tools and lists of new books, information of upcoming conferences, calls for papers, and articles that would be of interest, but she received very little in return. The list was limited to her contributions in its early years. Later, as the number of subscribers in the social sciences increased the list moved away from literature. Numerous topics were discussed over the list’s ten–year history (1991-2001), but eventually its popularity led to its demise. Subscribers often stated that the list contained too much information and was time consuming.

Among the active subscribers to CHICLE was archivist Dorinda Moreno, [4] who later went on to work with Lared as well as with Dr. Robert Calderón‘s Historia-L. Moreno contributed history-related information. In contrast to Márquez’s effort, Calderón changed his list to a closed list with a finite number of subscribers where he posted items of interest to the Chicano/a academic community, as opposed to CHICLE which was an open forum. [5] Initially CHICLE was designed as an open forum to encourage broad participation. Dr. Tey Mariana Nunn, now Director and Chief Curator of the Art Museum and Visual Arts Program at the National Hispanic Cultural Center Art Museum in Albuquerque, played a large role in promoting the list in its early days. Nunn was a graduate work-study student. Additionally, Renee Stephens, now at San Francisco State University, then a graduate work-study student at UNM, was also editor for the list, a task inherited from Janice Gould. All these women were instrumental in the success of CHICLE. Eventually, the expansion of the Internet eclipsed Chicana/o listservs.

When CHICLE began, Márquez acted as the sole moderator, but over time, as it gained popularity, she trained students to run it. The popular list existed until her funding to hire work-study students ran out. Her institution was reluctant to provide further support. CHICLE was not considered an appropriate academic part of Márquez’s professional responsibilities. Management of the list competed with duties at the library and as subscriptions grew, it became overwhelming and difficult. Márquez who often managed the list on her own time, stated she would have continued the list but that  it would have required more energy than she was willing to invest. When Márquez decided it was time to move on and discontinue the list, she approached the UNM Technical Center to store the CHICLE files. The Center claimed it did not have sufficient storage space for her files. As news of CHICLE’s imminent shutdown spread, people volunteered to keep the list going but were deterred by the amount of work entailed.

Dr. Diana I. Rios, who has a joint appointment in the Department of Communication and El Instituto at the University of Connecticut among others, made attempts to create an archive of CHICLE.  She made copies of conversations via cut and paste. There were attempts to incorporate CHICLE into another list but Ríos did not want that to happen. Eventually, Latino literary blogs such as Pluma Fronteriza [6] and La Bloga [7] emerged to continue where CHICLE left off.

After CHICLE, Márquez took her energy and enthusiasm in supporting Latina/o students and created a program called CHIPOTLE. [8] She used CHIPOTLE to familiarize Chicana/o rural students with the academic environment and to reach out to surrounding communities. Via grant and affiliated department funded sponsorship, Márquez would take posters and boxes of books by Chicana/Chicano writers to give to students when she visited Hispanic-dominate schools. As part of CHIPOTLE, she created a forum to bring Latina/o speakers into the library and encouraged Latina/o students to utilize the research resources available to them. She directed two programs funded by Rudolfo Anaya: Premío Aztlán and Critica Nueva. Premío Aztlán recognized emerging Chicana/o writers and Critica Nueva was an award honoring the foremost scholars who produced a body of literary criticism based on Chicana/o literature. For many years, Márquez was the only Latina librarian at the University of New Mexico University Libraries. Presently, she is an Associate Professor Emerita. No Latina/o librarians have been hired since her retirement.

In the era of search engines, web browsers, blogs, wiki’s, intranets, and social media, it is important to recognize the efforts of a pioneering Chicana librarian and a pioneering electronic list that was a unique cultural creation. It was given life by so many who read it, posted on it, and worked on it. CHICLE brought many voices together and established a foundation for the future. As Márquez stated, “CHICLE was the catalyst for many things.” [9]

[1] María Teresa Márquez, interview by the author, Albuquerque, April 28, 2007.  [2] Lared Latina of the Intermountain Southwest, was established in the Spring of 1996 by Roberto Vásquez, as a World Wide Web Forum, for the purpose of disseminating socio-political, cultural, educational, and economic information about Latinos in the Albuquerque/Santa Fe Metro area and the Intermountain Region which includes Metropolitan Areas such as the Salt Lake City/Ogden region, Denver, Phoenix, Tucson, Boise, Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada, accessed January 30, 2014: http://www.lared-latina.com/bio.html.  [3] Dr. Roberto R. Calderón, interview by the author, College Station, Texas, December 20, 2007. Historia-l, focused on Chicano/a history, started as “96SERADC” with 200 subscribers in May 1996 and continued through October 1997. Originally housed at the University of Washington, it helped mobilize the first Immigrant Rights March on Washington, D.C., held on Saturday, October 12, 1996. The march had upwards of 50,000 participants, half of whom were Latina/o college students from across the country. The listserv list then changed venues and was housed at the University of California at Riverside becoming “2000SERADC,” from November 1997 through August 1999, at which point the listserv list was discontinued. This twice-named listserv list project lasted three-and-a-half-years. [4] Dorinda Moreno, Chicano/native Apache (Mother, Grandmother, Great Grandmother) has worked bridging Elders, Women of Color, Inter-generational networks and alliances, with a focus on non-racist, non-sexist (LGBT community), non-toxic–Chicano/a, Mexicano/a, Latino/a, Indigenous communities, projects and networks that give voice to under-represented groups and enable feminist empowerment through social change networks and innovations. As an early Web pioneer and archivist, she has been actively using the Internet since 1973. [5] Calderón interview.  [6] Pluma Fronteriza began as a printed newsletter, then became a blog and currently has a companion site on Facebook:  Accessed February 8, 2014: http://plumafronteriza.blogspot.com/  [7] La Bloga hosts various bloggers who write on Latino/a literature.  Accessed February 8, 2014: http://labloga.blogspot.com/  [8] According to the Memidex Online Dictionary and Thesaurus, Chipotle comes from the Nahuatl word chilpoctli meaning “smoked chili pepper” is a smoke-dried jalapeño, accessed January 30, 2014, http://www.memidex.com/chipotles. [9] Márquez interview.

Miguel Juárez is a doctoral student in Borderlands History at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). He has a Masters in Library Science (MLS) degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a Masters of Arts (MA) in Border History from UTEP. In 1997, he published the book: Colors on Desert Walls: the Murals of El Paso (Texas Western Press). Miguel has curated numerous exhibits, as well as written articles in academic journals, newsletters, and newspapers focusing on librarianship, archives, and the cultural arts. From 1998 to 2008, Miguel worked as an academic librarian at the following institutions and centers: State University of New York at Buffalo; Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona; Texas A&M in College Station, TX; and the Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) at UCLA. He is also co-editor with Rebecca Hankins of the upcoming book Where Are All the Librarians of Color? The Experiences of People of Color in Academia, part of the Series on Critical Multiculturalism in Information Studies of Litwin Books. The author would like to thank María Teresa Márquez, Dr. Roberto Calderón, Dorinda Moreno, Dr. Tey Mariana Nunn, Renee Stephens, Rebecca Hankins and Dr. Diana Ríos for making suggestions and recommendations for this article. This work is part of a larger body of research on Chicana/o electronic and digital projects during the advent of the Internet.

We Need Documentaries About Latina Americans, Too

Chicana Power by Flickr User Kris Kables

Chicana Power by Flickr User Kris Kables, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

By Miroslava Chávez-García

A few months ago, while I screened Sylvia Morales’s La Chicana (1979), a film about the historical and contemporary roles of Mexican and Mexican American women in the United States, it hit me that before this film no one had pieced together a comprehensive look at the continuities between Chicanas and Mexicanas on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Sitting in my class, along with ninety of my students, I realized that Morales was among the first to create a documentary on the lives of women of Mexican- and indigenous-descent as they shaped and influenced the histories of their families, communities and societies through the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also struck me that no one had done anything similar since then. Morales’s follow up thirty years later, A Crushing Love (2009), for instance, focused primarily on a smaller group of Chicanas. Today, we have yet to see a comprehensive film tracing women’s roles and relations in areas of the economy and polity as well as in the cultural and social life of Spanish-speaking peoples. In my view, this is a sad commentary on the state of Chicana and Mexicana history in film.

Unfortunately, the PBS Latino Americans (2013) series does little to rectify the gaping hole in the filmic representation of Chicanas, Mexicanas and Mexican American women, particularly in the first two episodes. It is true that women are mentioned and do appear in the Latino Americans series, but it is as members of the elite or as “women worthies.”  Seldom are the ordinary women’s lives rendered in a way that gives us a sense of what their lives were like in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Moreover, in no instance do the early episodes in the series focus on the role of gender and sexuality in shaping conquest and colonization – a theme explored by many historians of Spanish-speaking women in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Antonia Castañeda for instance, has described vividly the ways in which Spanish soldiers’ rape of California Indian women was part and parcel of the Spanish Crown’s attempt to retake control of its northern territory. Those same acts of war, however, nearly threatened the entire enterprise when California Indians launched repeated reprisals against the indignities suffered by their communities. Gender, as many scholars now agree, was pivotal to many other areas of life, including family and community formation, inheritance, and family networks as well migration and immigration. However, the film granted little attention to the ways in which ideas about men and women’s roles in their families, communities and societies influenced Spanish-speaking communities.

As a historian, I recognize that Latino Americans addresses many of the themes I cover in my Chicana and Chicano Studies introductory courses, and does so in a way appealing to a general audience. I enjoyed, for instance, learning about the personal experiences of repatriation as told through the eyes of the woman whose family was returned in 1935 when she was a young girl. I found her story heart breaking and not just because she — along with up to 500,000 peoples of Mexican-descent – were forced to go to a country many of them had never known before, but also because of her mother’s earlier death to tuberculosis, a disease that ravaged Mexicanos living in Los Angeles at the time. Motherless and now landless, she and her family were forced to come to terms with survival. I was left wondering as to how the loss of her mother had re-arranged their family dynamics and how it impacted her in the long term. While we learned that she left school to help her father, we know less about how that experience shaped her future as a young woman coming of age in Mexico and later, the United States.

I note these gaps not to blast the “failures” of the Latino Americans series, but rather to remind us and everybody else that we – as members of the public — still have little understanding of the ways in which gender and sexuality shaped Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S. Southwest. What we need is a richly textured, nuanced and in-depth filmic representation of Chicanas, Mexicanas and Mexican American women in the past and present. We currently lack representations of Latinas in all their diversity, including regional, racial/ethnic and class status. Such representations are long overdue. It is my hope that the Latino Americans series has inspired others to take a long look at the role and relations of mujeres shaping their families and communities as well as the larger society. These are stories that still need to be told.

Dr. Miroslava Chávez-García is a Professor in the Department of Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Chávez-García is the author of States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) and Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

What the Film “Latino Americans” Offers and Misses

Orozco, Cynthia02

By Dr. Cynthia E. Orozco

Kudos to all the people who developed the PBS six part Latino Americans (2013) film series. The lenses of race, class, nationality, transnationalism and citizenship are successfully woven throughout six different eras. Despite the inclusive voices of Chicana and Latina historians Vicki L. Ruiz, Maria Cristina Garcia and Virginia Sánchez-Korrol, and despite excellent stories about women like Apolinaria Lorenzana, Rita Moreno, Dolores Huerta, Julia Alvarez, Gloria Estefan, and Maria Elena Salinas, the film series lacks a focused lens on gender and sexuality throughout the film. The problems of sexism, heterosexism and homophobia are ignored.

I will look at each episode highlighting key aspects of each episode and offer ideas as to what could have been included. Educators may supplement their teaching accordingly.

Episode 1: “Foreigners in Their Own Land” (1565-1880) provides a broad sweep though most attention is to post-1836. A focus on 1492 to 1821 or 1848 would have been more appropriate. The “Spanish colonial era” included Spanish presence in twenty-five states of the current U.S. and key civil settlements. Their interaction with Indian nations is essential in accounting for the pandemic that European disease brought to the Americas; Spanish genocide of Indians; Spanish slavery (encomienda system); mestizaje as well as the foundational race/caste/gendered/sexed status of Spanish, mestizo, caste and Indian peoples; and sexual violence. “Our” Spanish lands were Indian homelands.

Episode 2: “Empire of Dreams” (1880-1942) should have been two episodes. This episode provides excellent treatment of the Spanish American War and U.S. incorporation of Puerto Rico, the Mexican Revolution and resulting immigration to the U.S., and deportation of Mexican descent people in the 1930s. An 1898-1941 episode is needed to address the rise of racial segregation, the struggle for women’s suffrage, the rise of the Mexican American civil rights movement, and school desegregation cases in the 1920s and 30s. Adelina Otero Warren, suffragist and Congressional candidate is missed as was Concha Ortiz y Pino, state legislator in New Mexico in the 1930s.

Episode 3: “War and Peace” (1942 to 1954) addresses the “birth” of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, the rise of Dr. Hector Garcia, the Bracero Program, Operation Wetback, and Rosita the Riveter. World War II is the focus so as to provide redress for what filmmaker Ken Burns did not do in his PBS World War II series. In fact, this six part series resulted from numerous Latino and Latina protests of Burns’ film. Yet, the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement did not just emerge from World War II, the American GI Forum, and Dr. Hector Garcia. Instead, a focus on World War I is needed to explain this historical development that includes LULAC and activist/lawyer Alonso S. Perales. Garcia was a LULACer and without LULAC there would be no American G.I. Forum. Civil rights activism in the 1920s and the 1930s, including significant political activism by Ladies LULAC and in New Mexico is unfortunately ignored. Moreover, a Latina/o film focus on World War II must mention U.S. Senator Dennis Chavez and the Federal Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), the first federal civil rights agency which outlawed racially-defined wages for people of Mexican descent and Puerto Ricans.

Episode 4: “New Latinos” (1946-1965) is excellent. It addresses the second major migration of Puerto Ricans to the U.S. due to Operation Bootstrap; reveals the welcome of Cubans by anti-Communist U.S. forces; the rise of Herman Badillo, Puerto Rican Congressman; and the arrival of Dominicans in the U.S. due to the dictatorship in their country. The film mentions how women took on gender-prescribed employment. Birth control experimentation on Puerto Rican women is excluded from Latino Americans as is any mention of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first out lesbian organization.

Episode 5: “Prejudice and Pride” (1965-1980) focuses on the rise of the Chicano Movement.  Much like the 1996 documentary Chicano! the focus here is on regional movements and well-known male leaders although Latino Americans also includes Willie Velasquez. Attention to movement machismo/sexism/homophobia is, however, ignored as is the rise of Latina feminism. How are we to explain the rise of Latinas in the 1970s including Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor without this? No Stonewall Uprising either.

Episode 6: “Peril and Promise” (1980-1910) covers the second wave of Cuban immigration; the arrival of Guatemalans, El Salvadorans, and Nicaraguans; and the diaspora of Latina/os into every U.S. state. Likewise it shows the rise of English-only efforts and anti-Latina/o immigrant sentiment/policies. Linda Chavez, Republican, speaks favorably toward immigrants and Dreamers. Feminist moments and LGBT activism are ignored.

The year is 2013; filmmakers must account for sexism and homophobia in the history of communities of color. These added lenses would have made a good film great.

Dr. Cynthia E. Orozco is Chair of History, Humanities and Social Sciences at ENMU Ruidoso. She is the author of No Mexicans, Women or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement; associate editor of Latinas in the United States: An Historical Encyclopedia; co-editor of Mexican Americans in Texas History; author of 80 articles in the New Handbook of Texas; and author of over 50 newspaper articles and letters. She is also co-founder of the Chicana Caucus in the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies and the daughter of Mexican immigrants.

 

The Goal is Simple: Protect, Conserve and Archive the Chicano/a and Latino/a Experience in the Southwest

2011 photo "Miner Mural, Detail (Superior, Arizona)" by Cobalt123

2011 photo “Miner Mural, Detail (Superior, Arizona)” by Cobalt123

By Dr. Christine Marin

Chicano and/or Mexican American student activism during the era of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement was the “mother” of that creation known in 1969-1970 as Chicano Studies Collections, usually housed in university library departments called Ethnic Studies or Archives and Special Collections. Since then, the southwestern states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas have seen the rising interest in the research and scholarship of Chicana/o, Mexican American, Hispanic, and Latina/o students and faculty, and others of course, who continue to press their libraries to collect and house primary and secondary sources in Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies. For example, the Chicano/a Research Collection at the Hayden Library at Arizona State University; the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the Library, University of Texas-Austin; the Chicano Studies Library at the University of California-Berkeley; the Chicano Studies Research Library in Los Angeles; and the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives at the University of California-Santa Barbara have enjoyed great success in the decades following the Chicano Civil Rights Movement.

Archivists at Chicana/o and Latina/o repositories and university libraries seek to document and protect the rights of these cultural communities by capturing their collective memories. Through these efforts, we work to ensure access to Hispanic/Mexican/Mexican American and Latina/o histories and expand future opportunities. We work, in short, to preserve these legacies for students, faculty, researchers, writers, and scholars today and in the future. It is easy to understand why it is the duty of the archivist to value and appreciate the complexity and diversity of Mexicana/o and Latina/o communities and to collect, preserve, and make accessible materials that are representative of their culture and history. Materials acquired are often unique, specialized or one-of-a-kind. For example, they might be rare legal or business documents in Spanish; or written letters that describe life experiences across the U.S.-Mexico border; or marriage, school or religious documents of the late 1890s or early 1900s. They are to be preserved for use today and also for future generations of researchers. They are to be protected from theft, physical damage, or deterioration. It stands to reason that Chicana/o and Latina/o archival repositories are now the intellectual gate-keepers of cultural knowledge with archivists playing a significant role in their university’s ability to attract and retain Latina/o faculty and students.

At the Society of American Archivists’ (SAA) Annual Meeting at the University of California in Los Angeles in 2003, a pre-conference event titled Memoria, Voz y Patrimonio (Memory, Voice and Heritage) challenged participants to consider their roles as archivists and representatives of local communities in Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies. The gathering addressed questions about the acquisition, preservation, and maintenance of archival materials in light of new technologies in archiving Latina/o history, identity, and spirit. Those present discussed the importance of preserving primary sources in print, but also addressed the necessity of preserving and archiving films, photographs, ephemera, broadsides (posters), videos, cassette tapes, and reel-to-reel tapes.  This work requires archivists to learn new technologies, and in 2003 those at the SAA pre-conference were coping with new challenges in using computers, electronic databases and records, and other new technologies — all so that they could teach patrons and students how to access information in their archival repositories. Those of us working in Chicana/o and Latina/o archival repositories or libraries learn to interweave our duties and responsibilities in collection development, reference services, outreach, research, publishing, and service. This interdependence represents the highest level of professionalism in the work of an archivist, historian, or librarian. The 2003 SAA pre-conference made it clear, too, that financial and human resources are important tools in calling attention to the importance of Chicana/o and Latina/o archives and libraries in the southwestern region and elsewhere. That point is still important to consider today in these times of lean archives and library budgets.

Chicana/o and Latina/o archivists take very seriously their role in supporting repositories and libraries and in ensuring access to collections that house the cultural achievements and records of contributions to state and regional development of Chicana/o and Latina/o communities. They work with potential donors, community activists, labor organizers, teachers, educators, entrepreneurs, performing artists, writers, historians, and others whose personal archives provide meaning and context to their own legacies.

Many archivists work with local high schools and programs aimed at increasing the admission rates of Latina/o students to community colleges or universities and their success in higher education. A case in point: an archivist at an Arizona university provides workshops on oral history and methodology and helps high school teachers learn how to train students in capturing the stories and narratives of Latina/o and Chicana/o community members. The completed oral histories or filmed documentaries produced by these students and gathered by the teacher are placed in the university library’s Chicana/o and Latina/o archival repository where they are accessible to researchers and others with an interest in that community’s history. In so doing, high school students gain a better understanding of how and why their research becomes an important resource for others. Another archivist might provide orientations or tours of a Chicana/o and Latina/o archival repository to high school students as a way for them to understand the importance of using the resources in a university library and archives.  In 2004, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) conducted the “Archival Census and Education Needs Survey in the United States.”[1] At least 108 Latina/o or Hispanic SAA members reported that they “learned about the value of archives from using them.”  Perhaps these archivists were exposed to archival repositories as high school students and grew to understand the role they would play in their own experiences as college and university students. Today, our work with K-12 students may spur them on to want to become archivists in a Chicana/o and Latina/o collections.

There are new challenges, however, on the western horizons of Chicana/o and Latina/o history and its archives that may impact their continued availability to researchers. These new challenges are not merely financial ones. Instead, they are political challenges to Chicana/o and Latina/o communities that are also linked to the work of the archivists. In 2010, for example, new controversy and tensions surrounding Chicana/o Studies and recent legislation in Arizona makes archivists question their work in a southern Arizona high school district. Arizona’s state superintendent of public instruction said the Mexican American Studies (MAS) program taught in the public high school in an urban center violated a state law banning courses that “promote resentment toward another race or class.”[2] The school district appealed and in late 2011, a state administrative law judge affirmed the decision and the MAS program was eliminated from the public school curriculum. Elimination of a high school curriculum not only makes it more difficult for students to be successful at a community college or university level, but it also curtails a successful collaboration between the university library and high schools in collecting archival materials.

In 2010, political tensions in the Chicana/o and Latina/o communities of Arizona surrounding immigration laws began anew. Individuals of Mexican or Latina/o heritage currently represent over thirty percent of Arizona’s citizens.[3] They make important contributions to Arizona in many ways. Arizona’s history is rich in cultural diversity and its history must be preserved in order to enable as complete an understanding of the state as much as possible, yet these new tensions impact the collection of primary source materials, relationships with donors, and funding or endowment projects to preserve individual and family archives. Would monetary donations for the preservation of Chicana/o and Latina/o collections need to be returned? Are Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies programs, courses and archives all at risk? Is financial support for and use of Chicana/o and Latina/o archival repositories at these university or community college libraries also at risk?

The political ramifications of questions like these impact a wider range of constituents,  archivists and major university libraries outside the state of Arizona. These risks have been met with another wave of Chicana/o and Latina/o student and faculty activism that has created fresh  support for new Chicana/o and Latina/o archival repositories and programs and for new positions and appointments at major university libraries. For example, in the summer of 2010, the Chicana/o archival collection  “Unidos Por La Causa: the Chicana and Chicano Experience in San Diego,” made its debut in the San Diego State University Library.[4] This Chicana and Chicano Studies Archive was created through the efforts of a committee of librarians, archivists, library staff, professors, and community activists. In another example, the California State University at Los Angeles (CSULA) Library recently celebrated the establishment of the East Los Angeles Archives to “advance scholarship in Chicano/Latino studies and Los Angeles history through the collection of primary research materials.” Other university libraries are seeking Chicana/o and Latina/o archivists to fill newly created academic positions and appointments. Their main responsibilities are to begin and build new Chicana/o and Latina/o archives in folklore, music, rare books, and manuscripts. We can see this at the University of Texas-Pan American, which offers a new archivist opportunities to engage in research and writing and to develop manuscript collections that focus on Latina/os, Border Studies, and Mexican folklore. The University of North Texas Libraries in Denton sought a Latina/o archivist to coordinate with a high-level university library administrator in acquiring new Chicana/o and Latina/o archival collections. The Mexican Studies Institute opened at the City University of New York (CUNY) with a goal of establishing Mexican, Mexican American, and Chicana/o Studies courses in New York City high schools. A Latino/a archivist or librarian will most likely assist faculty in the creation and implementation of this endeavor and begin to collect books and materials for the Institute.

At the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archivists in San Diego, titled  “Beyond Borders,” Latina/o archivists engaged in discussions and presentations about the importance of collecting the experiences of Latinas whose stories continue to remain invisible or ignored; the collection of  Spanish-language primary sources to tell the history of the American West and Mexico; and the  importance of collaboration between archivists on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border in order to gather research on the experiences of undocumented Mexicans in today’s politically-charged borderlands environment, one that views Mexican immigrants unfavorably.

Archivists are guided by professional core values and codes of ethics that outline their professional responsibilities. These include collection of a “diversity of viewpoints on social, political, and intellectual issues, as represented…in archival records.”[5] That is our commitment, because we know that the public will benefit from the knowledge and insight generated through study of these materials.


[1] Beaumont, Nancy P, and Victoria I. Walch. Archival Census and Education Needs Survey in the United States, 2004. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2005. Internet resource.  [2] Grado, Gary. “Arizona’s Ethnic Studies Attorneys Use TUSD Officials’ Words Against Them.” Arizona Capitol Times [Phoenix, AZ] 22 Nov 2011.  [3] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/04000.html  [4] “A New Chicana/o Archive at SDSU: Unidos Por La Causa.” La Prensa San Diego [San Diego, CA] 08 Oct 2010: 8.  [5] http://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics

Dr. Christine Marin is a Professor Emeritus of Arizona State University where she led the Chicano/a Research Collection in the Department of Archives and Special Collections at the Hayden Library.

The Deconstruction/Reconstruction of the Community and Institution Collaborative Model

February 18, 2013

'Archives' by Marino Gonzalez. Flickr/Creative Commons License.

‘Archives’ by Marino Gonzalez. Flickr/Creative Commons License.

By Linda Garcia Merchant

(Crossposted from Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory with permission of author)

These Digital History projects define how existing collecting methods have been tested, challenged and reconstructed to achieve their successful outcomes. Each project takes the basic idea of creating an online resource on knowledge that historically hasn’t been available to interested audiences.

 The community collaborative projects are based on these general ideas.

• A model based on acquisition, preservation and distribution of an existing cultural history parallel to, but not included in the American narrative.

• An anecdotal history through interviews and a history based on material acquisitions in danger of being lost without this effort to acquire and preserve it.

• A history presented in visualizations that organize large amounts of data into a manageable visitor experience. Content that has a goal of informing a range of visitors, engaging a community eager for this history and encouraging future scholarship.

Featured Practitioners:

1. Thuy Vo DangVietnamese American Oral History Project
 (Email:  thuy.vodang@uci.edu)

2. Janet WeaverIowa Women’s Archives, Mujeres Latinas Project
 (Email:  janet-weaver@uiowa.edu

)

3.  Samip MalickSouth Asian American Digital Archive (
Email:  samip@saadigitalarchive.org



)

1. Origins: How did you come up with the original idea for the project? Did the idea come as a response to a community request? Did you approach the community as a result of your research? Did personal experience play a role in your project choice?

Thuy Vo Dang (Vietnamese American Oral History Project)
The Vietnamese American Oral History Project assembles, preserves, and disseminates the life stories of Vietnamese Americans in Southern California. The idea for the Vietnamese American Oral History Project (VAOHP) came after many years of conversation between academics and community leaders who wanted to see some efforts made to assemble and preserve the stories of Vietnamese Americans. Since the Vietnam-American War ended in 1975, the population of Vietnamese Americans has dramatically increased and the majority of Vietnamese Americans are concentrated in Southern California. With a population of about half a million here, we’ve seen scattered efforts to conduct oral histories, but without institutional backing. I wasn’t until UC Irvine’s School of Humanities received a generous grant from a donor (who wishes to remain anonymous) that we were able to begin this project in the Fall of 2011. I was hired to be the project director and in my first few months on the job that looked at existing models of oral history projects from the Jewish, Japanese, and Chinese American communities (to name a few). Besides connecting with other projects, we also outreached to the Vietnamese language media. In the first year of the project, VAOHP was covered by all 3 Vietnamese-language daily newspapers in Orange County and a handful of radio and television outlets.

I have experience with interview methodology, from my ethnographic field work in San Diego. I am also fully fluent in speaking, reading, and writing Vietnamese, which was a preferred qualification for this position.



Janet Weaver (The Iowa Women’s Archive Mujeres Latinas Project)


The original idea of the Mujeres Latinas Project grew out of the priority of the Louise Noun – Mary Louise Smith Iowa Women’s Archives (IWA), an archival repository located in the Main Library of the University of Iowa Libraries. The Archives was created to preserve the papers of Iowa women from all walks of life.

IWA staff started the Mujeres Latinas Project in 2005. Its impetus lay in our realization that at that time no archival repositories within Iowa were actively seeking to preserve the history of Iowa Latinas, whose contributions remained hidden in Iowa history. We originally conceived the project simply as an oral history collection. Between 2005 and 2007 three part-time oral history interviewers Georgina Buendía-Cruz, Teresa García, and Iskar Nuñez were hired to conduct interviews in different parts of the state.  During the same period, additional interviews recorded by IWA staff members Janet Weaver, Kären Mason, and UI reference librarian Rachel Garza Carreón.  During this period over 100 interviews were recorded, the majority of them in four areas of the state along the Mississippi River, and in Mason City in northern Iowa. Since the start, participants in the project have donated a variety of documents to the Archives and the collection has expanded beyond individuals’ papers to include records from organizations important to Latina/o history.  The individual and family papers are preserved under the individual or family name in about twenty collections. Among the organizational records now preserved in IWA are the records of the Davenport League of United Latin American Citizens, LULAC Council 10, the records of the Muscatine Migrant Committee and the records of Iowa state LULAC.

Samip Malick (South Asian American Digital Archive)
We started SAADA because of a critical need not being addressed by other existing archival repositories. Very few materials relating to South Asian Americans are currently included in any other physical repositories. For the vast majority of archives, materials relating to this community fall outside the scope of their collection development policies. The archival materials that do exist are spread widely across collections around the country, making it difficult even for individual researchers to access the materials they need for their work and especially difficult for members of the community to consult them.

SAADA’s digital-only approach to archives presents a major re-conceptualization of traditional archival functions. This innovative, dispersed approach to archives reinterprets the post-custodial model for the digital era. Original archival documents remain with the communities, institutions or individuals from which they originate, while digital access copies are made available for use online.

Like many first and second generation South Asian Americans, I grew up completely unaware of the long and diverse history of South Asians in the United States. I was surprised to learn that Dalip Singh Saund, the first person of South Asian American heritage (and also Asian American heritage), was elected to serve in Congress in 1956. Or that in 1923 the Supreme Court ruled that South Asians should not be allowed to become American citizens, a policy that lasted for the next twenty-five years. Or how in 1913 South Asian immigrants on the Pacific Coast founded the Ghadar Party to fight for India’s independence from the British. These are the very kinds of stories that SAADA helps to preserve and make better known.

Since 2010, we have collected and provided access to over 1,000 discrete archival objects, each of which helps to uncover overlooked narratives from South Asian American history. Through outreach, public events, community forums, presentations in classrooms, reference interactions, and the use of blogs, traditional and social media, SAADA also works to create greater awareness about these histories. Materials from the archive have been included in documentary films, books and journal articles. In 2012, the SAADA website received over 73,000 visits.

2.  Structure: Describe the support structure for this project. How was the support developed? Support from your institution (financial, staffing, network space), did this have challenges, if so, what kind, if not, why not? (If you would rather not speak to the challenges, that’s fine, but please do speak to the process).

Thuy Vo Dang (Vietnamese American Oral History Project)


The VAOHP is housed in the Department of Asian American Studies at UC Irvine, thus the department has provided support in terms of an advisory committee, a faculty mentor, and administrative staff that help with tracking the donor budget, equipment, and hiring work study interns to help with transcribing and other related work. I teach a course for the department called “Vietnamese American Experience” once per academic year where I teach students historical-social context and train them in oral history methodology. From this class, we generate one fully-processed oral history per student. I recruit from this class for an independent study/research program for VAOHP where students can continue to conduct oral history interviews or work on community outreach, social media, and website maintenance. Additionally, Professor Linda Vo, gives her Research Methods class the option to work with me on an oral history project and receive course credit through her course. These are all ways we generate interviews and train students in the process. I conduct interviews as well–between 5 to 10 oral histories per month.

We also partner with the Southeast Asian Archive at UC Irvine, which provides us with network/server space through the libraries’ UCI-Space. The libraries staff worked on the design and general maintenance of the digital repository. We will house the entire VAOHP Collection (hard copy and digital records) in the Southeast Asian Archive.

Finally, I have reached out to community organizations that have conducted oral histories, such as the Vietnamese American Heritage Foundation’s 500 Oral Histories Project to acquire their Southern California interviews so we can process these–transcribe, translate, and digitize them for online dissemination. The VAHF owns the copyright to their interviews and out of their 500, they have given us approximately 100 interviews.

Some challenges that have arisen are mainly budget-related. We are working with a very small budget and thus have to utilize volunteers and students to get the interviews processed. The UCI Libraries has kicked in tremendous support in terms of network space, but we anticipate needing to provide them with some support to sustain the website and make the interviews available to the public. The restrictions have affected us in our choice of media, as we only audio-recorded at this point. The cost of video is prohibitive for the libraries.



Janet Weaver (The Iowa Women’s Archive Mujeres Latinas Project)
We were able to begin the project with small grants from the State Historical Society of Iowa’s Resource Enhancement and Protection-Historical Resource Development Program and the State Historical Society, Inc. As the project grew we secured additional funding from the University of Iowa Libraries and from the University of Iowa’s Year of Public Engagement and Year of the Arts and Humanities.

The IWA’s Mujeres Latinas Project is able to call on resources from the UI Libraries, including access to technology support, state-of-the-art conservation and preservation facilities, and the Iowa Digital Library.  The permanent two-person, full-time staff of the Iowa Women’s Archives continues to maintain the Mujeres Latinas Project as part of its ongoing commitment to preserve the papers of Iowa women and their families.  The IWA website is an essential component of making its collections visible and the UI Libraries supports the maintenance of our website and provides server space for digitized materials.

Samip Malick (South Asian American Digital Archive)
SAADA is an independent non-profit organization. In 2008, the founding board members each chipped in a couple hundred dollars to purchase server space for our first website and submit the necessary paperwork to register the organization. From its inception until mid-2012, SAADA existed as an entirely volunteer run effort. However, in an effort to ensure that the organization is well situated to care for and curate the archive, we have begun to work towards building the organization and ensuring its financial sustainability.

In 2011, we applied for and received our organization’s first grant funding and also conducted our first annual fundraising campaign. In 2012, we expanded our fundraising efforts and began working towards hiring our first staff member. In July 2012, I left my position as the Director of the Ranganathan Center for Digital Information at the University of Chicago Library to begin volunteering with SAADA full time. Our fundraising efforts in 2012 went well and I am now SAADA’s first full time paid staff member.

SAADA is a start-up non-profit organization, and we face the same challenges as many other non-profit organizations. One of the primary challenges, of course, is that of fundraising. However, we are fortunate to have a Board of Directors that fully supports the organization’s growth and a volunteer Development Director with expertise in fund development who has helped us approach our fundraising efforts more strategically. I believe that we have the right elements in place to build a financially sustainable organization.

3. Sustainability:  How long has the project been online? What has the feedback been from the community on usability?  From the institution? Has any of the feedback been incorporated into adjustments or additions to the site, the collection or the process of acquisition? How has the collection/acquisition/curation process changed from the beginning to now? When did the development of site infrastructure enter into the process? If you would like to share, what are plans for the future? How have you addressed issues like ‘scope creep’?

Thuy Vo Dang (Vietnamese American Oral History Project)
We had a “soft launch” of the website in April 2012, just 5 months after getting UCI’s IRB approval for research. Then in October 2012 we had a formal website launch when we hosted a community reception in Little Saigon (Orange County, California) to demo the website. The event attracted over 250 people, from the community mainly. We had a great amount of media coverage, including an Associate Press story in the days after the reception.

The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from the community so far. We have yet to receive any constructive criticism about the actual website, only requests for expand the project beyond Southern California and to incorporate video interviews.



Janet Weaver (The Iowa Women’s Archive Mujeres Latinas Project)


The Mujeres Latinas collections in the IWA have been included in its website since the project’s inception in 2005.  Collection guides for papers of Iowa Latinas, their families and organizations are added to our website as they become available.  A search for Latinas and their Families currently yields a list of collections with links to their finding aids. Additional collections of varying sizes wait in the wings to be processed and added to the website.

All IWA collection guides are described through the UI Libraries Archon database that allows for detailed description of collections and enhanced searching.  In addition to collection guides, a sampling of documents and photographs are scanned with consent of donors and made available to the public through the Iowa Digital Library.

We are in the process of updating the Mujeres Latinas page of the IWA site to enhance visibility of the Latina collections and provide detailed information about the interviews and related documents.

Our plans for the future include creating a digital version of the 2012 Pathways to Iowa: Migration Stories from the Iowa Women’s Archives and an expansion of the project to offer offsite digitization in the homes of donors and to expand the scope of the project to encompass central Iowa. Through the UI Libraries digital department we are able to guarantee that the digital materials preserved in our repository will continue to be accessible in a future that brings new technologies that cannot be anticipated by today’s archivists and technology specialists. In this way IWA can promise those who entrust their family papers to us that no matter what the digital world of tomorrow holds, their papers will continue to be accessible.

Samip Malick (South Asian American Digital Archive)
We put a website online in 2008 with some basic information about the organization. But it was not until 2010, when we began collecting materials in earnest, that we built the website with its current structure and using our current content management system (Drupal 6). The website has undergone some aesthetic changes and added new features over time (such as the visual browsing, map browsing), but the interface and structure of the site have remained relatively consistent. We are just now beginning a process of refreshing our visual identity, branding and updating our website to Drupal 7.

The feedback from the community about our website has been overwhelmingly positive. We have not done any systematic usability testing or user surveys, though this is something that we hope to do in the coming months. However, based on anecdotal feedback, users have found the website easy to use and navigate. We have added some features to the website based on user feedback, such as the visual browsing and map browsing. Other feature requests are on the back burner, but will be implemented at a later date, such as a request to be able to download PDF versions of public domain materials.

SAADA is guided by a collection policy that was approved by the Board of Directors at the organization’s inception. However, given the breadth of the materials included in the collection policy, this year the Board of Directors has outlined three collecting priorities for 2013, which fall within the scope of the collection policy, but specify areas that we would like the archive to grow in the coming year. These priorities will be assessed again in 2014.

Feedback from the community through both informal and formal channels has been important in helping determining the priorities for collecting. For example, many community members have indicated the importance of documenting the South Asian American community post-9/11 and consequently, that is one of the collection priorities for 2013.

4. Building community: Projects like this can create generational and transformational experiences with students, staff and community that create related points of cultural, social, and historical awareness. These types of projects build new communities both virtual and real. What has been the multi-generational experience for your research group? For the community?  What has the larger global community’s response been?

Thuy Vo Dang (Vietnamese American Oral History Project)
This project has been a tremendously successful vehicle for forging stronger relationships between the university (mainly the Southeast Asian Archive) and the community and between the different generations in the community. One vehicle that was truly effective was a weekly radio show on Vietnam California Radio (FM 106.3) that I co-hosted bilingually. The show was called “Oral History: Stories between the generations” and the goal was to make the stories we collected even more accessible to the community. The show also served as a recruitment tool to get a wider sampling of narrators to share their life stories with the project. I had students come on air to talk about what they learned in interviewing their parents or those of the first generation. I had narrator clips air thematically to showcase different types of experiences such as family life, migration, and education. This show has reached a really diverse audience in the Vietnamese American community and it proved to be a great media tool, since we were able to publicize our community reception through that show.

Aside from the radio show, the website where all the oral histories are presented has been used by a high school class as part of its curriculum. I invited that high school class to come for a tour of the Southeast Asian Archive and when they were able to get funding for a bus, they came to UCI for the tour. In addition to the Archive tour, I worked with an organization on campus called Southeast Asian Student Association to put together a college panel for the high school class. All these “extramural” activities are really crucial in helping to strengthen the relationships between the VAOHP, Southeast Asian Archive, and the local communities we serve which is multi-generational and quite diverse.

Another example of an inter-generational collaborative initiative through the VAOHP is a student-lead summer research project at a senior apartment in Orange County. My students came into the senior apartments and presented on the VAOHP at an opening social mixer and then recruited narrators to interview from that facility. After 2 quarters, they collected 8 interviews and shared their “findings” at a closing social mixer. The product of this initiative will be a bounded copy of life stories for the senior apartments’ library, individual CDs for the narrators, and a presentation on campus in Spring 2013. This initiative pushed students outside the university and allowed for an engagement between seniors and students.

Janet Weaver (The Iowa Women’s Archive Mujeres Latinas Project)
The digital world represents a critical point of access for younger generations through which ties with older generations and community can be strengthened.  By providing ready access to information in undergraduate and graduate classes, students develop an understanding of the contributions of Latino families to Iowa history and recognize familiar sites and stories from their own family histories.  They encounter primary source materials in their own time and through technologies with which they are familiar. We encourage them to visit the Archives and look at the physical collections in our reading room. IWA is also able to take reference questions by phone and email through our online reference account.  Visitors to the IWA – whether in its physical or virtual space –  develop an appreciation for the interconnectedness of family and community networks and the place of Iowa Latinas within a larger context of regional, national, and transnational history.

The connectedness of our IWA staff to communities with which they engage is strengthened by the process of reaching out, conducting interviews, collecting documents and building trust.  In the community of Davenport, Iowa, the League of United Latin American Citizens – LULAC Council 10 – after reconnecting with its significant history of civil rights activism, now boasts the largest membership of any council in LULAC’s Midwest region.  And the Council continues to work for educational opportunity, preserving traditions such as fiestas, its scholarship program, and reunions of residents of the community’s early-day Mexican barrios. These events provide an opportunity to connect younger members with a Latino past that stretches back over a hundred years. This year the Council has asked the IWA to charter a bus to bring community members, families, and individuals who have donated materials to the Mujeres Latinas Project for a day-trip to visit their papers, see how they have been preserved, and remember Iowa’s Latina/o past.  Iowa LULAC’s recent leadership in the struggle for voter rights in Iowa has garnered Iowa state LULAC this year’s Louise Noun Award from the ACLU of Iowa.  A former president of the ACLU of Iowa, Louise Noun was also the co-founder of the Iowa Women’s Archives.

Samip Malick (South Asian American Digital Archive)
We have used social media and other online forums extensively to create an online community around SAADA’s archive. We have more than 1,300 followers on Facebook, 250 on Twitter, and nearly 600 subscribers to our email list. We post items from the archive, news about the organization, relevant articles and links to other archives that will interest our online community. In response, the SAADA’s social media community has remained active and engaged with our posts. Our most popular post on Facebook last year (a photo of students at the Women’s Medical College, Philadelphia PA from the 1920s) received 58 likes and 42 shares.

Additionally, we have tried to find ways to make the materials from the archive relevant to our users by connecting historical items with current news and events. For example, after the tragic shooting at the Sikh Gurdwara in Wisconsin, we posted materials from SAADA with more information about Sikhism and that demonstrate the long history of Sikhism in the United States. We also put out a call requesting submissions of photographs and other materials documenting the community’s response to the shooting. We received photographs of vigils, official proclamations of mourning and flyers for community events. These materials were added to the archive.

As another example, before the 2012 presidential election, we posted an article from 1923 describing the U.S. Supreme Court decision to ban South Asians from becoming American citizens. This article was shared by many of our subscribers with added comments encouraging others in the community to vote. This item was liked 340 times on Facebook and shared 21 on Twitter.

In addition to our online presence, we have organized ‘community forums’ as a venue for community members to learn more about archives, see materials from SAADA’s archive and offer feedback and suggestions for our organization. We organized 2 forums in 2012 that were open to the general public (one in Chicago, one in Cleveland) and 1 forum specifically targeted to contemporary South Asian American artists in Chicago. We plan to have more such events this year. We have also presented in classrooms and at workshops and conferences. Altogether, we did over 20 public presentations in 2012 all over the country.

5. All things analog: Each of your projects engages in related creative products (art installations, performance events, print culture). How has this ancillary production influenced the project? What has been the most interesting or inspiring moment, material discovery, or interview experience in the work so far?

Thuy Vo Dang (Vietnamese American Oral History Project)
For the website launch/community reception in October 2012, we partnered with a local artist who was also a narrator for the VAOHP. Her artwork layers family and community history into visual pieces, so we wanted to have her art exhibited on one wall. On another wall we presented the Vietnamese American Heritage Foundation’s 500 Oral Histories Project and on the third wall we had the UC Irvine libraries laptop stations with volunteers to help community members navigate the website. This multi-pronged approach to presenting oral history shows the aesthetic/creative possibilities that life stories can initiate, features the collaboration between grassroots efforts to preserve community history, and brings technology directly to the community.  

This community reception really cemented the notion that oral history can be exhibited, discussed, and used in a variety of ways that make it accessible to all.



Janet Weaver (The Iowa Women’s Archive Mujeres Latinas Project)
One of the best moments of discovery occurred when our staff along with staff from the conservation department of the UI Library visited the LULAC center in Davenport to assist with refurbishing an exhibit in the LULAC center. One of the elders from the council suggested exploring the attic space above the old portion of the building where he believed a box of records of the council’s activities during the 1960s had been stored.  When the younger members of the council brought down the box – it did indeed contain precious documents that told of the council’s leadership in the grape boycott campaign, flyers supporting the passage of Iowa’s first migrant child labor legislation, and handwritten meeting minutes of the Quad City Grape Boycott Campaign. This was a signal and exciting moment and highlighted the active role that historical archives can play in enriching community life for people too often overlooked in the historical narrative.

The Mujeres Latinas collections in the IWA provide primary source material for scholars and researchers from all backgrounds – junior high school students participating in National History Day competitions, undergraduate students from across the state conducting course research assignments, independent scholars and interested members of the public and institutions.  We conceptualized our recent exhibition Pathways to Iowa: Migration Stories from the Iowa Women’s Archives to showcase our Mujeres collections and celebrate IWA’s twentieth anniversary.  We are currently reconceiving this exhibition as an interactive digital exhibit for the IWA website.

IWA’s Mujeres Latinas collections helped provide an impetus to the decision of three UI faculty members to organize and host a symposium in 2012 on The Latino Midwest, which was held at the University of Iowa. The symposium in turn provided inspiration for a February 2013 Iowa Alumni Magazine article, “The Invisible Iowans,” which drew on many of the collections featured in the Pathways to Iowa exhibition. Among the photographs it included was an especially moving and significant one of Florence Terronez with her daughter and granddaughter visiting the IWA exhibit, which featured her mother’s migration story.

Samip Malick (South Asian American Digital Archive)


For me, the most rewarding moments have been in working with community members who have materials saved in their basements or attics and who, for the first time, are given an opportunity to share these materials with the world.

One such example is our work with S.P. Singh, whose grandfather, Bhagwan Singh Gyanee, arrived in the United States in 1914. Gyanee was born in India in 1884 and from an early age became involved in the anti-colonial freedom struggle. In 1909, as the British began strongly suppressing the freedom movement, Gyanee began to feel that his and his family’s lives were in danger. He decided to flee India, leaving his wife and three young children behind and for nearly the next 50 years he lived in exile, traveling to Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, Burma, Panama, Canada and finally arriving in the United States in 1914. Here, he became a leader of the Ghadar Party, an organization based in San Francisco agitating for India’s independence from Britain. In 1917, Gyanee and his compatriots were arrested and imprisoned for amassing weapons, which they hoped to use to fight the British in armed combat. After his release from prison, Gyanee became a philosophical and spiritual leader and delivered lectures across the United States. Finally, in 1958, after nearly 50 years away from India, he was allowed to return. He spent his last years living in a small town near where he was born.

After his passing, his grandson, S.P. Singh inherited all of his grandfather’s materials. When Mr. Singh moved to the United States in the early 1970s and settled in Atlanta, he brought these materials along with him. His grandfather’s materials were important to him, and he thought they would be important to others as well.

I came across this story in a short article Mr. Singh had written about his grandfather that was published online. At the end of the article, Mr. Singh had included his email address.  I emailed him to ask if he might consider working with SAADA and allowing us to digitize any materials he had in his possession. Mr. Singh was visiting India when he received my email, but he called me right away. He was so thrilled that an opportunity had finally presented itself to have his grandfather’s story heard by the world.

In April 2012 I flew to Atlanta, and along with a volunteer, sat in Mr. Singh’s house for three straight days as we digitized all of his grandfather’s materials. Mr. Singh would regale us with stories he had been told by his grandfather as we looked through page after page of correspondence, community publications, photographs and diaries. This incredible collection is now digital preserved and available online through the SAADA website. It has been featured in the New York Times and I have shared this incredible story at many of our community events.

For me, this experience embodies the possibilities of SAADA’s approach to building a community-based digital archive.

Linda Garcia Merchant is an independent documentary filmmaker and the Technical Director of the Chicana Por Mi Raza Digital Humanities Project. linda@vocesprimeras.com

Comment(s):

Anonymous    March 23, 2013 at 5:51 PM

I applaud you for your efforts!
I believe it is very important to preserve a community’s history so that future generations can study the changes that communities undergo. The interviews that were conducted are and will be extremely rewarding. They will provide researchers with a better understanding of the personal circumstances that members of that community faced. I am glad to see that you have received support from different organizations and your communities. I agree that projects like this create cultural, social, and historical awareness and I hope in the future to have the opportunity to perform research in my community. Thank you.

Alejandra Cervantes
Latina/o Studies 2322; The Ohio State University