CSRC Newsletter June - July 2010

Volume 8, Number 10

Message from the Directors of the UCLA Ethnic Studies Research Centers

The four ethnic studies research centers at the University of California, Los Angeles, stand united against Arizona House Bill 2281, which forbids school districts from offering ethnic studies classes. This law undermines the state's obligation to protect an individual's right to learn about and meaningfully engage with his or her own linguistic and cultural heritage in conjunction with others. Ethnic studies contributes to a more inclusive social vision for American society. Since their founding in 1969, the UCLA ethnic studies research centers have diversified the curriculum across the campus and fostered research, scholarly publications, library and archival holdings, and public programs that have enriched higher education in the humanities, social sciences, and professional fields. Efforts to mischaracterize and demonize ethnic studies constitute an assault on American society's most deeply held principles: equal rights, educational opportunity, free speech, and academic freedom. If we deny these rights to some, we deny them to all.

Darnell M. Hunt, Director and Professor, Ralph J. Bunche Center of African American Studies
Chon A. Noriega, Director and Professor, Chicano Studies Research Center
Angela R. Riley, Director and Professor, American Indian Studies Center
David K. Yoo, Director and Professor, Asian American Studies Center

News

40th Anniversary Reflections
A new video commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the CSRC is now available online. It features Deborah Marrow, director of the Getty Foundation; Lupe Anguiano, housing advocate and environmentalist; and Armando Duron, lawyer, art collector, and UCLA alumnus. These CSRC supporters reflect on the history and accomplishments of the CSRC.
 
Hammer Program Online
A video of “Art and Public Space in Los Angeles,” a panel presentation that took place at the Hammer Museum last February, is now available on the Hammer Museum’s website. Chon A. Noriega, CSRC director, was the moderator for this discussion of public art, community identity, art and activism, and new models for socially engaged art practice. The program was presented as part of the UCLA ethnic studies centers’ fortieth anniversary celebration.
 
Middle School Dedication
The Sal Castro Middle School will be dedicated on Saturday, June 5. Mr. Castro, a Chicano activist and educator, is best known for his role in the 1968 East Los Angeles high school walkouts and his life-long commitment to youth leadership in Los Angeles. The LAUSD Board of Education voted to name the school after Mr. Castro in 2009. The dedication ceremony will be Saturday, June 5, at 9:00 a.m. The school is located on the campus of Belmont High School, 1575 West 2nd St., Los Angeles. In 2006 the CSRC organized the Sal Castro and the Chicano Youth Leadership Conference: The Development of Chicano Leadership since 1963.
 
Faculty Promotions
The CSRC congratulates Chon A. Noriega, CSRC director, for his promotion to professor step VI in the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media. We also extend our congratulations to Kelley Lytle-Hernandez, CSRC associate director, for her promotion to associate professor with tenure in the Department of History.
 
Fostering Scholarship
Research conducted in the CSRC Library archives contributed to Jésus Salvador Treviños’s Visions of Aztlán, a documentary that was broadcast on KCET on May 6. The film surveys work produced by Mexican American artists from the 1960s to the present. Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and Culture, a book by former CSRC Visiting Scholar Ellie D. Hernandez, was recently published by the University of Texas Press. Dr. Hernandez worked on the book while she was in residence at the CSRC during the 2007–08 academic year.


CSRC in the News

Chon A. Noriega, CSRC director, is quoted in “Critics: ‘Airbender’ and ‘Prince” Were Whitewashed,’” which appeared in the online edition of the San Francisco Chronicle on Tuesday, May 25. The Associated Press article reports on the use of white actors for roles created for people of color. The article is available on the CSRC website.
 
Chon A. Noriega, CSRC director, and Carlos M. Haro, CSRC postdoctoral scholar in residence, are quoted in La Opinión’s coverage of “Framing the New Policy Agenda: Latino Baby Boomers in an Aging America,” a symposium presented last month by the UCLA School of Public Affairs. The article, which was published on May 12, is available on the CSRC website. Latino Baby Boomers: A Demographic and Economic Profile (Latinos and Economic Security Policy Brief No. 5), by Zachary D. Gassoumis, Kathleen H. Wilber, Lindsey A. Baker, and Fernando Torres-Gil, was issued by CSRC Press in conjunction with the symposium. The brief, which examines stark differences in education, living arrangements, and income among Latino boomers, is available on the CSRC Press website.

Events

Presentation on Son Jarocho
Son jarocho artist Laura Marina Rebolloso-Cuellar will present “Son Jarocho: A Living Being of Music, Dance, and Poetry,” a discussion and performance, on Thursday, June 3, 2:00–4:00 p.m., in the CSRC Library (144 Haines Hall). Ms. Rebolloso-Cuellar is a dancer, poet, and virtuoso performer of the leona, the largest and lowest-pitched instrument in the jarana guitar family. In 1992 she cofounded Son de Madera, an ensemble that is regarded as one of the most important exponents of son jarocho. The event, which is free and open to the public, is cosponsored by the CSRC, the Latin American Institute, and the Center for Mexican Studies.
 
Chicana/o Alumni Reunion
Join us for the CSRC’s 40th Anniversary Reunion and Reception on Saturday, June 5, 1:00–3:00 p.m., at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. Reconnect with friends and colleagues who were at UCLA at the time of the CSRC’s founding. See Art, Activism, Access, the Fowler Museum’s exhibition about the history of ethnic studies at UCLA. Meet current Chicana/o students and MEChA members. Join us as we reminisce and look ahead to the next ten years! Refreshments from Casablanca Restaurant will be served. Please send your RSVP to cperez@chicano.ucla.edu by Thursday, June 3.
 

CSRC Library and Archive

New Getty Intern
As in previous years, the CSRC is participating in the Getty Multicultural Undergraduate Internship program. Internships are structured around current and ongoing CSRC archival projects in the arts. This year the CSRC welcomes Christopher Velasco. Mr. Velasco is from Lincoln Heights and is currently in his senior year at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, where he studies photography and media. He will be assisting staff with metadata entry for our digital art collections, including the Patssi Valdez Digital Image Collection, the Gronk Digital Image Collection, and the Nancy Tovar Murals of East L.A. Collection. We look forward to working with him on these important projects, which are aimed at creating greater access to our digital holdings.
 
The Mexican American Study Project
The CSRC recently acquired materials from the Mexican American Study Project through the efforts of Vilma Ortiz, professor in the Department of Sociology and CSRC affiliated faculty member, and Charlotte Brown, university archivist. Dr. Ortiz and Edward Telles (also a professor in the Department of Sociology) were the principal investigators in the follow-up study of the original survey carried out in 1960–1968 in Los Angeles and San Antonio. The follow-up study surveyed the original respondents and their children, focusing on intra- and inter-generational change and persistence in ethnic identity and behavior and socio-economic mobility. The collection includes the questionnaires, data files, and codebook for the follow-up study. Access is available by appointment only; to review the materials, contact Lizette Guerra, CSRC librarian, at (310) 206-6052 or via email at lguerra@chicano.ucla.edu. Drs. Ortiz and Telles published their findings in Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2008). These findings are summarized in five CSRC Latino Policy and Issues Briefs (Nos. 17–21), which can be downloaded from the CSRC Press’s website. The data files and codebook for the original study are available online at the UCLA Social Science Data Archives.
 

CSRC Press

A Ver Preview
Visit the CSRC Press’s webpage for a preview of the next volume in the A Ver: Revisioning Art History series, Carmen Lomas Garza, by Constance Cortez. Read the foreword by Chon A. Noriega, which focuses on Garza’s Una Tarde/One Summer Afternoon, and the table of contents, and see a few of the seventy-seven illustrations. The book will be available in September from the distributor of the A Ver series, University of Minnesota Press.
 
Coming in July
Watch for the Teacher’s Guide for Celia Alvarez Muñoz (volume 3 of the A Ver series), which will be available online next month. The A Ver teacher’s guides are written by arts educators Veronica Alvarez and Theresa Sotto, with input from classroom teachers. Each guide features a short introduction about the artist, three lesson plans that explore the artist’s work and artistic practice, and illustrations.
 
Aztlán Honored
In honor of the fortieth anniversary of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, the South Texas College Library has created a display that features Aztlán and the books that have been discussed and celebrated in the journal over the past forty years. Photographs of the display are available on the library’s website.
 
Last Chance!
Just a few copies of the first edition the Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlán remain. We need to make room for the forthcoming second edition, so you can snag a copy of this best-selling book for $10.00—a 50 percent discount! Call the CSRC Press for this special price (310 825 3428), or send an email to support@chicano.ucla.edu.
 
CSRC Visiting Scholars for 2010–11
 
The CSRC supports a visiting scholars program that attracts scholars from institutions throughout the country and from abroad. Grant recipients conduct research on a wide variety of subjects during their residency at the CSRC. We are pleased to announce the scholars for the upcoming academic year.
 
Jennifer Rose Najera, Institute of American Cultures (IAC) Post-Doctoral Fellowship recipient. Dr. Najera is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside. She is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the contradiction between immigration acculturation and racial marginalization among Mexican Americans in South Texas. Her postdoctoral project is to complete revisions on her book manuscript, “The Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town,” which analyzes how segregation processes affected people of Mexican origin in a South Texas community during the first half of the twentieth century.
 
Deborah Vargas, Los Tigres del Norte Fund/IAC Visiting Scholar. Dr. Vargas is an assistant professor in the Department of Chicano/Latino Studies at UC Irvine. Her research project, “Geography, Gender, and Genre: Gloria Rios, Reina del Rocanrol,” focuses on Spanish-language rock music in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, particularly the work of underexplored Chicana musician Gloria Rios.
 
Karen Mary Davalos, associate professor, Chicana/o Studies Department, Loyola Marymount University. Dr. Davalos will be a member of the CSRC’s research team for Los Angeles: The Mexican Presence in L.A. Art, 1945­–1980, a multipart exhibition sponsored by the Getty. She will also work on the manuscript for her fourth book, “Chicana/o Art: Improbable Subjects and Political Gestures.”
 
Ramon Garcia, associate professor, Chicana/o Studies Department, California State University, Northridge. Dr. Garcia’s research interests include literary studies, visual culture, and cultural studies.
 
Alvaro Huerta, PhD candidate in city and regional planning, University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Huerta will focus on Mexican workers and their social networks.
 
Sandra de la Loza, MFA recipient, California State University, Long Beach. Ms. de la Loza is a member of the CSRC’s research team for Los Angeles: The Mexican Presence in L.A. Art, 1945–1980. She will be studying Chicano murals in Los Angeles.
 
Jessica M. Vasquez, professor, Department of Sociology, University of Kansas. Dr. Vasquez’s research interests include Mexican American families, racial/ethnic identity, and assimilation.
 

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