Episode 26 – What is the Chicana Por Mi Raza Project?

Episode 26: What Por Mi Raza project? I’m your host Karma Chavez. This is Latinxperts. For marginalized groups, if we don’t preserve our history, our histories will likely not be preserved. It continues to be the case that most major archives continue to hold the collections of the elite in this country.

That means that the majority of preserved records are those of white owning elite men. It is no surprise then that the people fitting these kinds of profiles are often the primary actors in historical narratives. Archives and the histories told on their backs are partial and political. Over the past few decades, a number of archives created by historically marginalized groups effort to preserve those groups.

Histories have emerged. such archive is Chicana por mi Raza digital repository of thousands of objects designed to preserve the history of Chicana feminist praxis in the United States. This archive was founded by Dr. Maria Cotera and filmmaker Linda Garcia Merchant in 2009. Fall 2020 Dr. Cotera joined the faculty in the department of Mexican American and Latina Latino studies at UT as an Associate Professor Chicana Por Mi Raza with her. I’m excited to talk with her today on this episode, Cotera, welcome to Latinxperts.

I’m so happy to be here at Karma. Thanks for having me.

Definitely. So I didn’t want to give away too much in the intro because I really wanted to hear in your own words, how you describe this project. So what is it and how did it get started?

Well, basically it is a digital collection of archives and oral histories, that we have conducted since 2009 with Chicanas from across the Southwest and the Midwest. When I say we it’s usually Linda and I and sometimes the small team of students that accompanies us, but basically what we do is we interview women and gathered their testimony.

The interviews are more open ended and they’re really about getting an understanding of the political development of these women. And so the questions are geared towards that, but usually the women just take off and narrate their lives in very interesting ways.

We also scan and digitize materials in their personal collections and their personal collections can range from like two or three folders or maybe a box of documents to the size of my mother’s collection, which is an entire room billed with hundreds and hundreds of linear feet of documents that are incredibly rich and complex.

We’re actually accessioning meaning, we’re going through my mother’s archive right now and pulling some stuff to scan for the Chicana Por Mi Raza project. So these collections can really vary, but they include posters. They include letters. We have like personal correspondence between Betita Martinez, who recently passed sadly.

And Enriqueta Vasquez, right? Talking about articles that Enriqueta wrote for El Grito del Norte. They’re one of the preeminent Chicano Movement newspapers. And, you know, we have posters, we have photographs. Thousands of photographs. We have manuscripts that were never published. So it’s an incredibly rich archive that stretches across multiple geographic and regional spaces, multiple organizing spaces.

And the wonderful thing is through digital technology, we can interconnect these. I like to think about it as we have this amazing network of Chicanas from the 1970s who were active in the Chicano movement and other movements for social justice and the women’s movement, and who came into contact with each other very frequently at conferences and meetings.

I feel like this project is in many ways, reunifying that network of women activists. And so that is Chicana Por Mi Raza. It got started because Linda and I, both grew up in the movement. Our mothers were movement activists. My mother and her mother, Ruth Mojica-Hammer.

Were really interconnected through Raza Unida Party politics, but also through their political activities and the National Women’s Political Caucus, which was a national organization started by people like Betty Freidan and Gloria Steinem and others. Chicanas played a huge role in that organization and Ruth Mojica-Hammer was one of the people who was really, really active at the executive levels of that organization.

And so our mothers had very big archives and we were both very cognizant of it. Linda had just made a film about the Mujeres of the Chicano Caucus within the National Women’s Political Caucus. And so we just came together to put together this resource. We didn’t want to write an academic or scholarly book.

We wanted to create a resource from which many dissertations, articles, and academic books could be created. An archive seemed to make sense to us and a digital one that can be shared with many others, seem the logical way to go.

I think wonderful that your mother, both of your mothers have you in this project. And I want enough, you just want to talk a little bit about your mother’s work in the movement.

Right. So my mother got involved, actually, my mother grew up in El Paso, but she and my dad moved to Austin in the early 1960s. And at that time there was a pretty strong, civil rights movement going on a lot of activity among students and around housing segregation and police brutality.

And they became very involved in that. As the sixties progressed, she became more involved in more radical projects. In ’68, my parents moved down to Mercedes, Texas where my mother and my dad helped found the radical Chicano university, Colegio Jacinto Treviño, which was a project that they worked on with other people.

She developed a library and information center there. She was always a librarian. She was trained as a librarian and she took her librarianship into really radical and interesting directions. And so they were there for about a year, establishing the college. Then they joined the Raza Unida Party, or they help found Raza Unida Party in Texas.

They became very involved in politics in Crystal City, which was the birthplace of the Raza Unida Party. Within the party, she began having meetings with women and helping to organize women and later with Evey Chapa, Lydia Espinosa and other women founded the Mujeres Por Raza Unida

In Crystal City, she ran the public libraries, made into a radical space for information sharing. They were there through the seventies and then they moved back to Austin where she continued to be involved in Raza Unida politics, but more and more she began writing around women’s issues, Chicana issues.

And in 1976, she published a collection of her speeches and essays that had been published in newspapers and magazines called the Chicana Feminist, sorry, 77. ’76 she wrote the first History of Chicanas in the U.S. A book called Diosa Y Hembra, which was widely adopted in early Chicana feminist classes or classes on La Chicana.

So she had this interesting career as a radical information scientist, organizer of women and a writer on women’s issues. The kind of the high point of her career was in the 1970s and early 80’s. Oh! And I failed to mention one thing, which is very important in 1974, she and Evey Chapa and even our own Emilio Zamora was an advisor on this project, but they founded the Chicana Research and Learning Center, which was a research hub for information on Chicanas and Women of Color, actually more broadly.

And it was meant to really diversify the women’s studies and Chicano studies and ethnic studies curricula that were beginning to rise up in the universities. So she really envisioned CRLC as a place of research and information sharing where she could help inform the earliest curricula in ethnic studies and women’s studies.

I love hearing those histories. And of course that you’ve come by this work, honestly. It was in the air you breathed growing up. So I did want to ask you, so some listeners may know, or may themselves agree with kind of a recent move away from the term Chicana, at least in part because of embeddedness in mestizaje, or the idea of Mexicans as a mixed people between European and Indigenous.

That’s sort of erases blackness potentially. And so why do you continue to use the term Chicana both in this project and more broadly?.

Oh, it’s such a good question. The history of the project from 2009 to the present day encompasses the shift in our thinking. Even in the beginning we were very careful to articulate that for us, what we were documenting was Chicana feminist praxis.

Not Chicana bodies or embodiment, because in fact, there are women who are not Chicana in our collection. There are women who are Puerto Rican, who are Cuban, who are Brazilian, there are white women. And I really think it’s one of the reasons why we were very careful to say this document Chicana feminist praxis, not Chicana history.

Right. And when I think about Chicano feminist praxis, I think it’s very important to, I guess specific in my articulation of that as a historical phenomenon that arose in between multiple social movement spaces in the 1970s in the early 1970s.

And I think of the work of Jennifer Nash here, where she looks at black feminist practice. She doesn’t just focus on black women. Right. When she talks about black feminist theory, people like Grace Hong, right? Rachel Lee and others, because she understands black feminist theory to be an intellectual formation that arises in a particular, a specific historical moment.

And that’s very much how we see Chicana Por Mi Raza. Which is not to say that it’s documenting a specific kind of political intellectual formation that is pulling from and drawing from critiques that are emerging from the women’s movement, emerging from the Chicano movement and emerging from third world and internationalist movements as well.

So I guess the other question you might ask is why not Chicanx, right? Because there are some women who were active in that period who no longer identify as women, right? So it’s important to know that what we’re documenting is really a kind of intellectual movement.

Right. So in some ways I see the archive, even though it’s so embodied, even though there’s so many personal stories as an intellectual history project, more than anything. We may change the name to Chicanx, but there are complications with that as well. Because some women strongly identify as women and we don’t want the specificity of that identification, that experience to be erased by later iterations of concepts around identity that at the time were not operational.

Well, I think what you’re speaking to speaks to many of the broader questions in our broadly construed, if it is such a thing about language, and this has always been an issue for our communities. You think of Spanish, Hispanic. Do we do nationalistic identities? And then the question of the X or the E more contemporary, like how do they function?

And so I think, your project is engaging with those same kinds of questions, for sure. So I wonder if you would talk a little bit about the role that students often play. You said usually it’s you and Linda who are collecting these materials, but I about your students doing work with you too.

So, so talk about how students have participated in the creation of this project.

Yeah. You know, students have been critical to the project since the very beginning. I mean, there’s been a lot of critiques and criticisms within digital humanities, more generally about the exploitation of student labor and about how we should, be careful not to treat students as, yeah. It was basically exploitable labor to do the kind of busy work of DH.

And there’s a lot of. And so from the beginning, we were very cognizant that we wanted to involve students, not simply because we needed their labor, but also because we felt that the project could bring something to their academic experiences, particularly with undergrad students. That might introduce them to new ways of thinking about scholarship and much more embodied relationships to scholarly production.

The project was started because I have felt that there was a lack of resources for me to suitably complicate the narratives around the Chicano movement, the Latino social movement, the women’s movement, there just weren’t primary resources. So it started also with students as it started with our mothers, but it started with, because I wanted to change the narrative for students.

And so one of the things that I noticed in my classes is I started bringing in archival materials from my mother’s collection. And when students started reading about the women’s movement through these archival materials, like newspapers and letters and photographs and posters, they really got excited.

And so, right then I knew that there was something about the way history was being taught to students that was making it seem abstract and not very interesting to them and then consequently write off history as unimportant. It’s incredibly important, right.

And to know this history. And so I thought if. Uh, took on the role of historians and began seeing how history is made, then they would have a different relationship to it. And so my classes, I started introducing archives. And then I got the bright idea when we started the project where we should be working with students from the get-go.

We usually work with students at Michigan who did have work study appointments. And so we could hire them as work study or through research partnerships so that they were compensated. But when they weren’t they earn credit for doing the work in our classes that they do. And I have written a lot about how students react to being up close in the archival space, in the space of memory, listening to stories, digitizing archives, interpreting them, trying to figure out how all these archives connect to the story they’re listening to.

And it’s a really powerful experience, right. So students that we’ve worked with have gone on to get information science degrees have gone on to PhDs have gone on to pursue careers that are really embedded in community.

And I think that part of the experience of Chicana Por Mi Raza, what’s so powerful about it is a kind of a recursive phenomenon where students in whatever political time they may be, because we remember we started after the Obama administration came into power and we lasted through the Trump administration. And so the political times have been changing throughout the life of the project.

But one thing that remains really clear is that when students recover radical history, they see themselves reflected many times in the stories. And especially since the materials they’re recovering in, the stories are recovering so much of them take place when these women were 18, 19, 20, 21, you know, in their twenties.

So they’re hearing these stories of a different time, but of women who were politically active. And really doing all kinds of things that seem beyond the pale in 2009, when we started the project. But students see their radical imaginaries reflected in the archive.

And I think it’s really impactful because often they’ll say like why she was just 20, I’m 20!. She went off and started a college, or she went up and went to Cuba or, you know, all of these things. And I think it brings up for them a kind of radical potential that they hadn’t necessarily imagined for themselves.

So I think, and it’s not really idolizing or turning these subjects into heroes. I think there’s something really different and it comes in with listening to the stories of women. And they’re are embodied experiences, which brings it home to students in a different way than just a kind of heroic narrative told by someone.

And just building off that a little bit. Do you have any favorite memories in collecting materials? Whether it’s the oral history interviews or students looking through materials to digitize. Are there any memories that really stick out?

Well, yes. I’m embarrassed to mention this one because I actually write about it in an article for South Atlantic Quarterly, but our first trip was here to Texas from Michigan and I brought these two young women. One was a non-traditional student actually, who was continuing her education.

And the other was a self-described farm girl from Tecumseh, Michigan who was white, the other student identified as Chicanx. And so they had never been out of the state. And in both cases, their mothers came to my home to drop off their daughters. Right. And basically said, read me. The riot act was like, they better be safe.

They’ve never been out of state. And I was like, everything will be fine. We’re staying with my mother in Austin, it’s cool. We won’t be getting into any trouble. Well, so that was here in Austin and we interviewed women from the Raza Unida Party. And we started going through my mother’s collection was the first time we’d really kind of tackled it.

And every night I remember going out because it’s my hometown and visiting with friends and trying to get these young women to come with me. And they were sitting up in my mother’s library. Just looking at stuff and I could never get them to leave. And I begged them, you know, it’s five o’clock.

You have to stop working, like take a break. And they were just not interested in going out in Austin, TX.. And so finally on the last night I shoved them out the door and I was like, no, you have to stop working every night. I would come home and they would share their finds with me, like, oh, I found this radical women’s zine that was written in Ann Arbor by 16 year olds, you know, or, oh, I found this lesbian tide magazine or, oh, I thought, you know, they were doing.

They were just blown over by the materials. Um, and so the last night I pushed them out of the door and it was like, y’all are going out, take the rental car. I don’t care. Do whatever you want, but you can not stay in this house on your last night. And so they came back at around two and they both had tattoos.

Um, Yeah, materials that they found in the collection, like they had taken, they had xeroxed, like iconagraphy and had gone to a tattoo parlor in Austin, Texas and said basically put this on my body permanently. And so I did return the daughters to Michigan relatively unscathed, but I did, I asked both of them, like, have you shown your tattoo to your mother yet?

You know? Cause I was really. Worried that I, I brought them back, you know, not completely unscathed, but in any way. So that is like one of my favorite stories to tell about the archive..

I love that story. we’re winding our time down here, but I did want to ask if someone wants to use the materials in the collection or participate in the project in some way, what do they need to do to become a part of this?.

Oh, that’s a great question. Well, if you’re a student at UT, just reach out to me, either grad or undergrad students. We are constantly taking on work study and research interns and we can use all the help we can get with. With scholars, so we have a repository that is log-in protected, and that’s where we have about somewhere around 10,000 items.

So it’s a very large repository of oral histories and archival objects. And then we have a public website, so people can go to the public website and see student curation. So most of the website is written by students. Students spend a lot of time Basically accessioning our archival collections that means cataloging them and applying metadata.

So they write either historical essays or bios for our public website. That website is www. chicanapormiraza.org. So if you just want to look at some of this stuff, you can go there. Scholars have asked to look at our repository. We operate on the principle, not of an archival collection that is sort of extractive where you go in, get your stuff, right.

Your thing, get your evidence and write your article. We operate on a collective model. So If scholars are interested in using the archive, they can reach out to me or one of the other project leaders and tell us what their research is on and then propose us some kind of project that they can do for CPMR that can help sustain the project, because we don’t have major funding.

We have great support from UT, but we don’t have like a Mellon grant. Scholars have offered to apply metadata to uncatalogued collections, to write scholarly pieces for our website and that kind of thing. So we’re pretty open about the thing you want to do, but if you’re a scholar or a graduate student and you want to do research in our archive, just let me know and we’ll figure something.

I think what’s so great about that is the way that the archive exists is a model of the Chicana feminist practices that it tells you that it tells a history for. So it’s very unique model, very feminist model. And to say, I am just delighted I’ve had this conversation and even more delighted that I get to be your colleague now at UT.

So thanks so much for being on Latinxperts today,Dr. Cotera.

Thank you. It’s been a wonderful experience being here with you, Karma and all my other incredible colleagues. It’s a very nurturing and exciting space right now. It’s the place to be if you’re interested in Latinx studies. So I’m really happy I’m here.

Yeah, I think it is the place to be. And hopefully others feel that way too. So again, our guest today Dr. Maria Cotera, Associate Professor in the department of Mexican American and Latina/o here at UT Austin. Talking about the Chicana Por Mi Raza digital archive. your host Karma Chavez.

And this is LatinXperts.