CSRC Newsletter - November 2019

VOLUME 18,  NUMBER 2

DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE

This month we give thanks to our many partners, collaborators, supporters, alumni, and volunteers. It may take a village to raise a child, but an interdisciplinary research center needs a world of friends and communities! Big shout outs to diehard Bruins Dan and Juleann Gandara and Stephen Yslas for making it possible to train the next generation of students. Thanks to our colleagues Héctor Calderón and Steven Loza for their recent award-winning books in our Aztlán Anthology Series. The CSRC is enriched by generous donations to its archival holdings, most recently by Susan Alva, Gregg Barrios, Myriam Gurba, and Dianne Rodriguez, as well as CHIRLA (Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights) and IUPLR (Inter-University Program for Latino Research). Some of our collection donors have also been among the archive’s most dedicated users and champions. Just ask Lupe Anguiano, Rosalio Muñoz, and Laura Serna, among many others. Our community partners help keep us connected to where our research is needed most. Thanks to Charlotte Lerchenmuller, president of the Sal Castro Foundation, for involving us in the annual Chicano Youth Leadership Conference (established in 1963). Last week, the CSRC was pleased to present its Community Partner Award to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MADEF). MALDEF and CSRC, created within a year of each other, are committed to knowledge production as a key tool in achieving social equity and civil rights. In presenting the award, I noted, “Today, Tom Saenz, the current president and general counsel, keeps MALDEF on the front lines for defending civil rights for Latinos, and, by extension, for all people in the United States. Once you justify caging children and separating them from their parents because they are ‘illegal,’ you help create an unjust and cruel society. MALDEF reminds us that a ‘nation of laws’ is not a passive truth. It must be fought for at every single step.”

Thank you to everyone who has helped raise a center over the last fifty years and who, each in your own way, has inspired us to pursue research that makes a difference. With the New Year we start the next fifty years, with you at our side.

Director and Professor

NEWS

In October, UCLA Chancellor Gene Block appointed several faculty to serve on a committee to help UCLA receive federal designation as a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). CSRC director Chon A. Noriega, CSRC associate director Charlene Villaseñor Black, and CSRC assistant director emeritus Carlos M. Haro are among the committee members who will help develop a strategic plan to meet this goal, which requires a sustained enrollment of full-time undergraduate Latinx students that is at least 25 percent of total enrollment. UC Davis, UC Riverside, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Merced have all been awarded HSI status and, as a result, they are eligible for additional federal financial aid and student support. The HSI committee will assess and make recommendations on how UCLA can improve enrollment among current and future Latinx students. Vilma Ortiz, professor of sociology and CSRC Faculty Advisory Committee chair, will serve as co-chair of the HSI committee along with Sylvia Hurtado, professor of education, and Alfred Herrera, assistant vice provost for the UCLA Center for Community College Partnerships.

In October, Carlos M. Haro, CSRC assistant director emeritus, presented three lectures about historical developments in educational access for Chicana/os. On October 10, Haro and Nadine Bermudez, professor of Chicana/o studies at East Los Angeles College (ELAC), co-presented the talk “Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District: Ending School Segregation in California” for students in the ELAC honors program, which Bermudez directs. On October 26, Haro gave the lecture “The Significance of Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District” to high school juniors attending the Chicano Youth Leadership Conference, which is organized by the Sal Castro Foundation. Finally, on October 29, Haro presented the lecture “The Establishment of the Chicano Studies Research Center in 1969 and the Role of Chicana/o Students in the Formation of the Center” for students in “Class on Race and Racism at UCLA: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” a Fiat Lux freshman seminar taught by Jessica Harris, assistant professor of education in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.

The Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), a multiyear research project co-led by Lorrie Frasure-Yokley, associate professor of political science and African American studies, and Matt Barreto, professor of political science and Chicana/o studies and CSRC Faculty Advisory Committee member, has received a grant of nearly $1 million from the National Science Foundation. The funding will go toward the fourth iteration of the survey, which will occur after the 2020 elections. This time conducted in six languages, the online, self-administered survey will collect opinions on political and social issues as well as demographic data. An estimated twenty thousand residents, both voters and nonvoters, will be canvassed nationwide. The grant will also support the creation of a CMPS Scholars Network, which will offer professional development through working groups, workshops, and an online research support space for CMPS data users. Edward Vargas from Arizona State University and Janelle Wong from the University of Maryland, College Park are the other co-principal investigators on the project. Read the UCLA Newsroom story here. For more information on CMPS, visit https://cmpsurvey.org/.

Robb Hernández, associate professor of English at UC Riverside, has published the book Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde (NYU Press, 2019). Hernández was the Institute of American Cultures visiting research scholar at the CSRC in 2015-16, and he spent his year in residency researching CSRC collections and completing his manuscript. Hernández is also the author of The Fire of Life: The Robert Legorreta–Cyclona Collection and VIVA Records, 1970–2000: Lesbian and Gay Latino Artists of Los Angeles in the Chicano Archives Series from CSRC Press.

The CSRC mourns the passing of Deborah Marrow, former director of the Getty Foundation. Marrow passed away on October 1. In a tribute on the CSRC website, CSRC director Chon Noriega writes, “She was a friend of the CSRC in the best possible way: she saw what we were doing, knew how it made a difference, and made it personal.” Read the entire tribute here.

CSRC IN THE NEWS

UCLA Newsroom, October 23, 2019 (URL) (PDF)

KCET website, October 18, 2019 (URL) (PDF)

UCLA College of the Humanities website, October 14, 2019 (URL) (PDF)

KCET website, October 11, 2019 (URL) (PDF)

UCLA Newsroom, October 3, 2019 (URL) (PDF) 

All “In the News” articles are available in PDF format on the CSRC website.

EVENTS

CSRC librarian and archivist Xaviera Flores, CSRC community engagement coordinator Michael Aguilar, and Chicana and Chicano studies PhD student Erika Hirugami have co-curated a community altar for the Day of the Dead (Día de Muertos) in the CSRC Library. Students, staff, faculty, and other community members are encouraged to contribute to the altar by bringing flowers, decorations, photographs, and other nonperishable materials to remember friends and loved ones. Contributions can be made during regular library hours: 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m., Monday–Friday. The altar will remain in the CSRC Library through Friday, November 8.

This two-day conference will explore the history of California’s missions with the goal of promoting new research that incorporates the voices of Native, Mexican, and Mexican American people into the history of California and the United States. Featured as keynote speakers will be Yve Chavez, UCSC, and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, UT Austin. Chavez (Tongva/Gabrielino, Akimel O’odham, and Tohono O’odham) specializes in Indigenous and Colonial Latin American visual culture. Cañizares-Esguerra studies the formative role of Latin America in the colonial history of the United States and the history of "Western" modernity. This event is made possible by The Terra Foundation for American Art. Presented by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, this conference is co-sponsored by Critical Mission Studies, UC-Mexico Initiative, and the UCLA Department of Art History. The conference program is available on Eventbrite. This event is free; RSVP requested through Eventbrite.

Join us for a book presentation and conversation for the award-winning The Aztlán Mexican Studies Reader, 1974–2016. The presentation will include author and UCLA Medal recipient John Rechy, musicians Aldo Acuña and Rolando "Roco" Ortega, CSRC associate director Charlene Villaseñor Black, and contributors Audrey Harris, Juanita Heredia, Sandra Ruiz, and Ariel Tumbaga. The presentation will be moderated by editor Héctor Calderón, professor of Spanish and Portuguese. The Aztlán Mexican Studies Reader explores the ongoing cultural and political connections between Chicana/o and Mexican history. Edited and introduced by Calderón, this collection of essays makes a rigorous case for the contributions of Chicana/o studies to the transnational study of Mexico. Books will be available for sale, and a reception and book signing will follow the presentation. This event is co-sponsored by the CSRC and the UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Marta Caminero-Santangelo, professor of English at the University of Kansas, is an academic scholar and activist who works with immigrant rights organizations and gives community presentations on U.S. Latino/a/x literature and culture and immigrant rights. She is the author of the book Documenting the Undocumented: Latino/a Narratives and Social Justice in the Era of Operation Gatekeeper (University of Florida Press, 2016) and numerous articles on literature and social justice for undocumented youth. This event is co-sponsored by the UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the UCLA Center for Mexican Studies, the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health Community Health Sciences, the UCLA Spanish and Portuguese Graduate Student Association, the Central American Studies Working Group at UCLA, and the CSRC.

All CSRC events are free and do not require an RSVP unless otherwise noted. Programs are subject to change. For the most current information, visit the Events page on the CSRC website.

CSRC LIBRARY

Currently on view at the CSRC Library are three mini exhibitions and an installation. They celebrate fifty years of Chicanx and Latinx activism through art, literature, and scholarship and mark the CSRC’s fiftieth anniversary. Profiles of Activism gathers together prints, photographs, and books from the collections of the CSRC Library. In Give Us Our Flowers: Latinx Artivist Portraits, artist and UCLA doctoral candidate Angélica Becerra presents watercolor portraits of four emerging or established artivists—artist-activists who are responsible for visual culture in contemporary social movements. Salomón Huerta’s Portrait Series of Chicana/o-Latina/o and Mexican–Latin American Icons honors the leaders—both women and men—who have played a key role in making positive differences in the United States and Mexico. The exhibitions will remain on view through the fall quarter in the library and vitrine and are viewable during regular library hours: Monday through Friday, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

The CSRC announces the acquisition of new collections and additions to existing collections. These materials enrich our understanding of the Chicanx and Latinx experience in the United States.

• The CSRC received a new set of documents from donor Gregg Barrios, Chicano playwright and journalist. These newspaper articles, interviews, and general press coverage are related to his career, and they date from the 1980s to the early 2000s.

• The CSRC recently acquired the papers of Diane Rodriguez, associate artistic director of the Center Theatre Group (CTG) from 2005 to 2019 and a CTG staff member from 1995 to 2019. The collection includes scripts, director’s notes, correspondence, and other personal documents related to her years in the arts, including some materials from her time in Teatro Campesino.

• The CSRC received an addition to the Ralph Arriola Papers. It includes materials related to the Latin American Civic Association, the United Automobile Workers, and the creation of the head start program in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s.

• The CSRC received fifty additional linear feet to the CHIRLA Organization Records. CHIRLA (Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights) has partnered with the CSRC to create greater access to their records. CHIRLA is an immigrant-centered and immigrant-powered organization working to achieve a just society fully inclusive of immigrants. The collection includes subject files, ephemera, publications, educational and programming materials, and more.

The Mimi Lozano Holtzman Papers have been processed. Holztman is a genealogy enthusiast, educator, and puppeteer. Most of the collection reflects her interest in genealogy and her role as a co-founder of the Society of Hispanic Historical and Ancestral Research (SHHAR) and editor of its journal, Somos Primos. Included in the collection are administrative records, correspondence, and publications from the organization. There are a large number of copies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century baptismal, marriage, and funeral records from churches in San Antonio, Texas, and surrounding Bexar County, as well as records from the states of Coahuila and Nuevo León, Mexico. There is some documentation of Holztman’s puppetry career and her work as a teacher specializing in bilingual education in Orange County secondary schools. Particularly well documented are the educational materials she helped develop for Vietnamese refugees, which concentrated on language acquisition and cultural assimilation. There is also material documenting her participation in the civic life of Orange County, particularly with groups such as the Committee for Positive Hispanic Visibility and the Lincoln-Juárez Opportunity Center. The finding aid for the Mimi Lozano Holtzman Papers is available on the Online Archive of California.

The following off-campus exhibitions opening this month or currently on view include images and artworks from CSRC collections and publications:

• Queer Forms, Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, through December 7, 2019
• Pop América, 1965–1975, Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, through December 8, 2019*
• Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, through December 9, 2019*
• Art After Stonewall, 1969-1989, The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami, Florida, through January 5, 2020
• The 1968 Walkouts: Selections from UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Collections, Theodore Roosevelt High School Library, Los Angeles, California, through April 1, 2029
• LA Starts Here! Plaza de Cultura y Artes, Los Angeles, California, on-going, permanent exhibition

*Exhibition catalog available in the CSRC Library

To schedule a tour of the CSRC Library, contact CSRC librarian Xaviera Flores at floresx@ucla.edu or fill out the form on the CSRC Library Services page.

CSRC PRESS

Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies was ranked 30th—out of more than 11,000 titles—for the number of articles downloaded in September from Ingentaconnect, the journal’s online hosting site. Aztlán was also in the top 100 in August, when it was 57th in the number of downloads. The CSRC is proud to publish research that is making a difference! Aztlán subscriptions may be ordered online through IngentaConnect: ingentaconnect.com/content/csrc/aztlan

opportunities

The UCLA Center for the Study of Women (CSW) invites submissions of paper, poster, and roundtable proposals for its 30th Annual Thinking Gender Student Research Conference. This year’s conference theme, “Sexual Violence as Structural Violence: Feminist Visions of Transformative Justice,” will focus on sexual violence as a function of state and capitalist violence, emphasizing feminist, queer, trans, abolitionist, and intersectional interventions. CSW is specifically interested in presentations that center anti-imperialist, anti-racist, Indigenous, intersectional, anti-carceral/abolitionist frameworks for understanding sexual violence. CSW invites proposals for papers, roundtable presentations, and posters related to studies of sexual violence in the context of empire, settler colonialism, incarceration, immigration detention and deportation, and labor exploitation, among other forms of state and capitalist violence. Also welcome is research on the criminalization of gender and sexual non-conformity, social institutions and carceral control, and intersectional abolitionist responses—historical and contemporary—to punishment. Proposal submissions for panel presentations, posters, and roundtable sessions are encouraged.

Eligibility and requirements: Registered graduate students from any institution are eligible to submit presentation proposals for all Thinking Gender sessions. Registered undergraduate students from any institution are eligible to submit proposals for poster presentations only. To participate in Thinking Gender, successful applicants will be required to pay a registration fee of $50, the entirety of which will go towards covering conference costs. Accepted paper presenters will be required to submit a draft of their paper by February 10, 2020, for pre-circulation among their co-panelists and faculty moderator.

Deadline for all proposal submissions: Monday, November 4, 2019 at 11:59 p.m. For additional details, and to submit a proposal, visit http://www.csw.ucla.edu/tg20_cfp. All queries should be directed to 2020 Thinking Gender Coordinator Bri-Ann Hernandez at thinkinggender@women.ucla.edu.

The UCLA César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies invites applications from outstanding candidates for an open position at the rank of Assistant Professor to begin July 1, 2020. Over the past decade, the department has grown in undergraduate and graduate course offerings, including opening one of the first PhD programs in Chicana/o studies and offering introductory courses that draw over 800 students. Due to the high demand for classes among a diverse and growing Latina/o student body at UCLA from Central America, the department welcomes applicants who have expertise in Central American communities, but are open to any substantive area within Chicana/o or Latina/o studies. The department is particularly eager to consider applicants who take a social scientific approach that complements departmental strengths in evidence-based research methods (e.g., interviews, ethnographies, quantitative, archival research, etc.). Applicants are encouraged to show how their research and teaching will both complement current department strengths as well as contribute new topics and themes. The department seeks applicants with a PhD in Chicana/o studies, ethnic studies, sociology, anthropology, history, criminology, public affairs, political science, geography, gender and sexuality studies and other related fields in hand by June 30, 2020. Pending administrative approval, we may consider outstanding candidates at the rank of Associate Professor. To apply, visit https://recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF05047.

Deadline to apply: December 15, 2019

• The Center for Mexican American Studies and the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas-Austin
• The Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Houston
• The Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA
• The Dominican Studies Institute at CUNY
• The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at CUNY
• The Latin American and Latino Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago

The fellowship includes a $25,000 stipend, participation in an intensive summer institute, a structured writing program, faculty mentorship, and ongoing professionalization support. For more information and to view the online application, visit https://mfp.lals.uic.edu/.

The Institute of American Cultures (IAC) invites applications for support of research on African Americans, American Indians, Asian Americans, and Chicanas/os for 2020-2021. The Institute also invites proposals on interethnic relations that will increase collaboration between the UCLA ethnic studies research centers and/or between the centers and other campus units.

Eligibility Requirements:
UCLA faculty, staff, graduate students, and IAC visiting research scholars

Funding: The Research Grant Program is on a reimbursement-basis only. Funds for the purchase of permanent equipment will be provided only under exceptional circumstances. Conference travel, whether the applicant is presenting or attending, is not eligible.

Grant Period: July 1, 2020 through May 31, 2021.

Deadline to apply: March 1, 2019. Incomplete applications will not be reviewed. Applicants will be notified in May. Prior to submission of the application, applicants should briefly discuss their proposal with the coordinator of the appropriate center, or in the case of interethnic proposals, with each applicable center. All grant recipients, where appropriate, must comply with UCLA’s Protection of Human Subjects in Research before receiving funding. All grant recipients, where appropriate, must comply with UCLA’s Protection of Human Subjects in Research before receiving funding. If you have been awarded this grant for the last two academic year (2018-19 and 2019-20), you are not eligible to apply for a 2020-21 grant.

The application is available online at https://sa.ucla.edu/IAC/ResearchGrant.

For further information, please contact the coordinator of the appropriate UCLA Ethnic Studies Research Center.