By Cristal Mejia, Staff Writer
The Chicana/o archive collection, titled Unidos Por La Causa: The Chicana and Chicano Experience in San Diego, made its debut in the San Diego State library last month.
The archive was advocated by the Chicana/o Archive Advisory Committee, which included professors, community activists and library employees.
“It has been a community and library partnership that has brought in new collections,” Head Director of Special Collections and University Archives Rob Ray said.
The archive, which has been in the works for about four years, was made possible by two fundraisers held at the Barrio Station and by the President’s Leadership Fund Grant. The grant contributed about $10,000 to process collections and to hold a celebratory event to unveil the exhibit.
Some of the major highlights of the collection are Chicana feminism and the establishment of Chicana/o studies at SDSU.
“That is what is different about this collection in comparison with the collections, say, at UC Santa Barbara and other areas,” Ray said. “What is unique about San Diego is the feminist input, and the feminist role was vital here.”
Rita Sanchez, Professor Emeritus at San Diego Mesa College who taught in the Chicana/o Studies department at SDSU, is currently on the Chicana/o Archive Advisory Committee and was a pioneer in the Chicana feminist movement. She worked on a journal with her students at SDSU, titled San Diego State Chicana Studies Papers, and published a journal with Stanford University that has since become historically significant.
“For me it was kind of a lonely experience because I was the only woman in the department at the time, so I was actually the first woman that was hired on the tenure track position as an English professor in Mexican American Studies,” Sanchez said.
The archive features eight collections and a 10-panel exhibit composed of digitized versions of original documents from the movement.
The Rene Nuñez collection, who organized the UC Santa Barbara Conference that produced the first plans for Chicano studies programs in 1969, is also featured in the archive. Nuñez was one of the first to organize MEChA, the Chicano student organization throughout California.
“We are planning on letting other universities, colleges and libraries display the collections,” Richard Griswold del Castillo, chair of the CCS Archive Committee said. “The purpose is to let people know about civil rights history of San Diego which a lot of people aren’t aware of.”
The archive has already proved itself as a resource for many people who have used the material according to Griswold del Castillo.
“The exhibit shows how folks at the time responded to a certain situation — in this case, a great deal of unjust situations and inequality in education and inequality of opportunity,” Ray said, “So it really asks people today how will they respond to similar situations of injustice and inequality. You can’t really do anything about the past, but you can learn from it and the exhibit asks us how we are going to respond to the challenges we have today because injustice has not simply disappeared.”
