CSRC Newsletter - May 2011

Volume 9, Number 9

Director's Message

Congratulations to Lupe Anguiano for receiving a Climate Change Action Award, presented by the Ventura County Board of Supervisors at a ceremony on April 19. Lupe is a longtime civil rights activist and a champion of the environment. She began her work in 1949, when she joined Our Lady of Victory Missionary Sisters, where she worked for fifteen years to improve the social, educational, and economic conditions of poor people throughout the United States. Now in her seventh decade of activism, Lupe is an exemplary role model for a life dedicated to public service. The last time we met, I could not help but notice her brand new running shoes. She is not slowing down! Lupe’s papers are archived in the CSRC Library. Last month the CSRC screened a film by mother-daughter filmmakers Elaine and Virginia Madsen that featured Lupe, among other exemplary women over sixty-five. I am proud to say that, per the title of the film, I know a woman like that ...
 
Chon A. Noriega
Director and Professor
 

News

Book Launch
The release of The Center Theatre Group/Latino Theatre Initiative Papers, 1980–2005the latest book from CSRC Press—was celebrated on April 18 at MALDEF’s national headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. A panel discussion featured Chantal Rodríguez, who drew on the CSRC’s extensive collection of Latino Theatre Initiative (LTI) papers to author the book’s essay, and Chon A. Noriega, CSRC director. Dr. Rodriguez and Dr. Noriega spoke about the LTI’s lasting impact on theater in Los Angeles and throughout the United States. Among those attending were three leaders of the initiative: Diane Rodriguez, director and author; Luis Alfaro, USC professor; and Jose Luis Valenzuela, UCLA professor and CSRC affiliated faculty. Interviews with Dr. Rodriguez and guests can be found on the CSRC’s YouTube Channel. The book is the fourth volume in the CSRC Press’s The Chicano Archives series.
 
Traveling Exhibition
Arte ≠ Vida, a traveling exhibition that originated at New York’s El Museo del Barrio, ended on March 18 at the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República in Bogota, Colombia. Items from CSRC collections were part of the exhibition, which was curated by Deborah Cullen, El Museo del Barrio’s director of curatorial programs. Arte ≠ Vida was the first survey of performance art created over the last four decades by Latino artists working in the United States, as well as artists working in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico, and Central and South America.
 
Vallejo Exhibition
Linda Vallejo’s solo exhibition, Make ’Em All Mexican, will open at Ave 50 Studio on May 14. The show is curated by Karen Mary Davalos, CSRC visiting scholar and associate professor of Chicana/o studies at Loyola Marymount University. Dr. Davalos is also collaborating with the CSRC on L.A. Xicano, a set of four interrelated exhibitions developed by CSRC for the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945–1980. The exhibitions will open at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the Autry National Center, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art beginning in September.
 
West and Dix in Discussion
On April 29 the CSRC co-sponsored “In the Age of Obama, Police Terror, Incarceration, No Jobs, Mis-education: What Future for Our Youth?,” a discussion between Cornel West and Carl Dix. Cornel West has been a champion for racial justice since childhood; Carl Dix is a founding member for the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. Other sponsors of the event, which was held at DeNeve Plaza Auditorium, were the UCLA Academic Advancement Program, Bunche Center, Graduate Division, Department of History, and Black Alumni Association.
 

CSRC in the News

The CSRC’s digitization of the Arhoolie Foundation's Strachwitz Frontera Collection is mentioned in an article about Chris Strachwitz in Boing Boing. The online archive—The Frontera Collection—contains about 30,000 recordings of commercially produced Mexican and Mexican American vernacular music. The CSRC’s Los Tigres del Norte Foundation provided funding for the project; the online archive is hosted by the UCLA Library.
 
Chon A. Noriega’s “Director’s Message” for April 2011 has been posted on Los Angeles Public Media’s new multimedia website LA>FWD (L.A. Forward). The message, which appears under the title “The Last Word on Alexandra Wallace,” reflects on the controversy triggered by “Asians in the Library,” a YouTube video posted by a UCLA student.
 
An article by Alvaro Huerta, CSRC visiting scholar, “It Takes More Than a Village…” appeared on April 25 in the San Francisco Chronicle. The article discusses what is needed to send inner-city youth to elite universities. Mr. Huerta is PhD candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning and a visiting lecturer in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning. Another article by Mr. Huerta, “Teachers Make Positive Contributions,” was published in the Los Angeles Daily News on April 10.
 
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez’s article about the release of The Center Theatre Group/Latino Theatre Initiative Papers, 1980–2005, appeared in Movie Miento, KCET’s online series, on April 19. The book was published by CSRC Press earlier this year.
 
The reopening of the CSRC Library was mentioned in the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM) newsletter.
 
PDFs of all articles are available on the CSRC website.
 

Events

Festival of Books
Visit the CSRC Press at the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which will be held Saturday, April 30, and Sunday, May 1. This year the event will be at the University of Southern California. The CSRC Press booth, #132, will be in area T3. We’ll have new books—including of The Center Theatre Group/Latino Theatre Initiative Papers, 1980–2005, and the second edition of The Chicano Studies Reader —DVDs, and our ever-popular T-shirts for sale. For more information and a link to a map of USC, go to the festival’s website.
 
Book Presentation
On Wednesday, May 4, 3:00–5:00 p.m., the CSRC will host a book discussion and signing to celebrate two recent publications co-edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alba: Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera, edited with Georgina Guzmán (University of Texas Press, 2010), and Our Lady of Controversy: Alma López’s “Irreverent Apparition,” edited with Alma López (University of Texas Press, 2011). Dr. Gaspar de Alba is a professor of Chicana/o studies and CSRC affiliated faculty. The event will be held in the CSRC Library (144 Haines Hall).
 
Latino Education Summit 2011
Registration for the CSRC’s sixth annual Latina/o Education Summit, “Building on Our Assets: Language, Culture, and Education,” is near capacity. Online registration will close as soon as all seats are reserved. The conference will take place on Friday, May 6, 8:30 a.m.–5:00 p.m., at the UCLA Faculty Center. This year’s summit is a collaborative effort between the CSRC and UCLA’s Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles. Presentations will focus on a significantly different approach to the education of Latina/o students: viewing their language and culture as assets that schools can use to build success. Joining UCLA researchers will be scholars representing the University of Arizona, Stanford University, the University of Southern California, and San Jose State University.
 
L.A. Xicano Faculty Preview
The CSRC will host a faculty preview of L.A. Xicano, a set four interrelated exhibitions developed by the CSRC, on Thursday, May 12, 4:30–6:00 p.m., in the CSRC Library (144 Haines Hall). Curators Chon A. Noriega, Terezita Romo, and Pilar Tompkins Rivas will provide an overview of each exhibition and share printed materials. The curators will then answer questions related to incorporating the exhibitions into classroom instruction and student research projects. A reception will follow. L.A. Xicano is part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945–1980, an initiative organized by the Getty Foundation. Pacific Standard Time is a collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California, which are coming together for six months beginning in September to tell the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene and how it became a major new force in the art world. L.A. Xicano is unique within this effort as a collaboration between a research center and three museums. The four exhibitions are Art Along the Hyphen: The Mexican-American Generation (Autry National Center), Icons of the Invisible: Oscar Castillo (Fowler Museum at UCLA), Mapping Another L.A.: The Chicano Art Movement (Fowler Museum at UCLA), and Mural Remix: Sandra de la Loza (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). To RSVP for the preview, contact Crystal Perez at csrcinfo@chicano.ucla.edu.
 
ALMS Conference
The third annual ALMS conference, “Archives, Libraries, Museums, and Special Collections: An LGBT International Conference,” will take place from Thursday, May 12, through Sunday, May 15, at Plummer Park in West Hollywood. The conference will focus on the public, private, academic, and grassroots archives that collect and preserve materials from LGBT communities. The LGBT and Mujeres Initiatives, a CSRC project established to increase LGBT and women’s archival collections, will be highlighted during a site visit to the CSRC Library on Friday, May 13. Sponsors include the CSRC, the UCLA Library, the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, ONE Archives, and the City of West Hollywood. For more information, visit the conference website.
 
UCLA Alumni Day
This year’s UCLA Alumni Day—also known as UCLA Day—will be held on Saturday, May 21. This all-day campus-wide event offers alumni the opportunity to reconnect with the campus, faculty, staff, and friends. The CSRC will participate in the information fair at Wilson Plaza from 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Other events include a lunch, panels, campus tours, a Kids’ Zone, and an address by Chancellor Gene Block. For an updated agenda, visit the event website.
 
Book Talk and Signing
Sal Castro and Mario T. García will discuss their book, Blowout! Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice, on Tuesday, May 24, 4:00–6:00 p.m., in the Young Research Library Presentation Room. The authors will talk about the 1968 protest by thousands of Chicano students, who walked out their East Los Angeles middle and high schools to protest decades of inferior and discriminatory education. Dr. García is a professor of Chicana/o studies and an adjunct professor in history and religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Mr. Castro is an educator and activist. A book signing will follow the presentation.
 

Opportunities

Call for Articles
Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies is currently considering submissions for 2012. Each issue of Aztlán presents three types of articles: peer-reviewed essays, thematic dossiers, and book reviews. All submissions are considered on a rolling basis and should be sent to our submission inbox at submissions@chicano.ucla.edu. For complete information about Aztlán and the submission guidelines, please visit the CSRC Press website. To ask questions or discuss ideas with the journal’s staff, please contact Assistant Editor David O’Grady at dogrady@chicano.ucla.edu.
 

CSRC Library and Archive

Library Welcomes New Students
The CSRC Library participated in UCLA’s Raza Day on Friday, April 8. The annual event, which is hosted by MEChA de UCLA, offers information to Latino students and their families about student organizations, tutoring services, academic majors and minors, and campus libraries. The CSRC also participated in Bruin Day, an annual event for newly admitted freshman and their families, on April 9. The CSRC Library was one of 1,200 campus clubs, organizations, departments, and libraries that took part in a resource fair.
 
First Stop on Campus Tour
On Thursday, April 28, thirty students from the Puente Program at Cypress College visited the CSRC as part of the program’s UC campus tour. Library staff welcomed the students with breakfast and a tour of CSRC offices and then of the entire campus. The Puente Program is designed to encourage students to transfer to four-year universities by providing them with workshops, tutoring services, and campus tours. After visiting the CSRC, the students traveled to UC Santa Barbara.
 
CSRC Collection at Plaza de Cultura y Artes
Items from the Pedro J. Gonzalez Papers as well as the Comision Femenil de Los Angeles Papers are currently on display at the newly opened Plaza de Cultura y Artes, which is located across from the historic Placita Olvera in the heart of Los Angeles. The exhibition, L.A. Starts Here!, examines Mexican and Mexican American history and identity in Los Angeles. It runs through October 16. For more information visit the Plaza’s website.
 
The Homeboy Industries Papers
The CSRC recently acquired an additional 1.5 linear feet of material from Father Gregory Boyle and Homeboy Industries, which will be added to the existing collection. Researchers who wish to consult the collection may contact the librarian, Lizette Guerra, at lguerra@chicano.ucla.edu.
 
New Additions to the Archive
The Artes de Mexico Festival was a grassroots event designed to highlight the influence of art from Mexico on U.S. culture and art. The four-month festival, which began September 1, 1991, offered events incorporating the visual arts, music, dance, theater, film, family activities, and readings and lectures, which were held at a number of locations throughout Los Angeles. The CSRC Library would like to thank Armando Duron, president of the festival committee, for donating documents related to the festival to the CSRC’s special collections. The Artes de Mexico Festival Committee Archive comprises 10 linear feet.
 
New Scanning Projects
Library staff are currently scanning three collections. The Anthony Beltramo Collection of Cancioneros includes Spanish-language lyric sheets from the 1930s. The Laura Aguilar Papers contains, in addition to photographs currently on deposit in the archive, papers, clippings, photographs, and proof sheets. The Tomas Benitez Papers includes a rich collection of artist and gallery show cards for Chicana/o and Latina/o artists’ shows and exhibitions from the 1970s through 2007.
 
Video Update
Visitors to the CSRC website can now view longer videos not only through iTunesU but also on the CSRC YouTube site. Look for the new video of Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores’s presentation of their recently released edited volume, The Afro-Latin@ Reader. The event took place in the CSRC Library on April 21.
 

CSRC Press

New Policy Brief
In An Assets View of Language and Culture for Latino Students, CSRC Latino Policy and Issues Brief No. 25, authors Patricia Gándara, Megan Hopkins, and Danny C. Martínez show how incorporating Latino language and culture into classroom instruction can improve the academic success of Latino students. The brief is being produced in conjunction with the CSRC’s sixth annual Latino Education Summit. The policy brief will be available on May 6 on the CSRC Press website.
 
Scholars Currently Visiting the CSRC:
Alvaro Huerta, PhD candidate, UC Berkeley. Area of research: Social networks of gardeners in Southern California (2010–11).
Ramon Garcia, professor, Department of Chicana/o studies, CSU Northridge. Area of research: Chicano photographer Ricardo Valverde (Spring 2011).
Jennifer Rose Najera, assistant professor, Department of Ethnic Studies, UC Riverside. Area of research: Race, gender, education, and immigration (2010–11).
Madlene Knoll, graduate student, University of Vienna. Area of research: Hybrid culture and identity of Chicanos in California (Spring 2011).
Karen Mary Davalos, professor and chair, Department of Chicana/o Studies, Loyola Marymount University. Area of research: Mexican and Chicano presence in the L.A. art scene (2010–11).
Alvaro Ochoa Serrano, professor, El Colegio de Michoacan, Mexico. Area of research: Presence of Mexican music in the United States (2010–11).
 

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