Marie Dillivan Reflection #1

         I made the decision to sign up for this class last year when I met with my advisor for my majors, Spanish and Latina/o Studies, because it would count for a requirement for my Latina/o Studies major and because my advisor highly recommended Professor Cotera. I think at first, on paper, this class can look kind of intimidating because it is not what we are normally used to seeing in a class description. I’m excited to take this class for many reasons and I think there is a lot that I can learn through this experience. Initially, I have a decent amount of experience learning and reading about the Chicano movement. I’m not an expert on the movement, but I have discussed it in a few classes here and have more exposure to it than the average student. However, I have zero experience learning about the feminist movement, so what I’m really excited to get from this class is a new perspective on the Chicano movement through the lens of its overlap with the feminist movement. I also hope to gain more understanding of these movements as they were present in the Midwest since this is where I have lived my whole life, and it’s an area that is not often referenced in discussions of Latina/o Studies since the Southwest is usually the focus.

            My first thoughts on all of these topics are that it’s very interesting that we are going to be creating a history for someone who otherwise wouldn’t be present in archives or history itself. It’s incredible that with modern technology we can do this fairly easily and make the stories of these women accessible to people all over the world in a way that couldn’t have been done at the time that these women were politically active in the 1960s and 1970s. I also think that it’s really great that we aren’t just getting oral histories but that we are also preserving their documents in an archive because as we know people are not as likely to believe in oral histories alone. Even though this isn’t a safe assumption to make about oral histories, I think that the documents and photos add an important dimension to the oral histories.

            I don’t have any background knowledge in Chicana feminism, so I’m excited to read and hear about these stories, but I think I might be a little nervous about making sure that everything is done right throughout this process and that we represent the woman who we interview in a way that she will be proud of as well. Although it is a great responsibility archiving the history of one of these women, I think it’s important to remember that without this project, their history would not be documented as well at all, or it wouldn’t be as accessible to everyone. Because of how unique this archive is, our final result will be important and a success even if we experience a few bumps in the road.

One thing that I have learned so far in this class, is that we really do grow up to acquire a trust in the idea of archives and that surely they’re unbiased and hold all of the information that we could ever need to know about history. This is clearly not the case, but it’s not something that we normally don’t have to think about. Archives are not normally in our consciousness at all. I think that in the future, more projects like this will be created to store the parts of history that mainstream archives are not interested in. These kinds of archives help to preserve a more diverse part of history, not just the stories of politicians and the rich and famous. I hope that at the end of this course, I will have a really awesome part of the Chicana Por Mi Raza website that I can show my friends and family and be really proud that I made a contribution to this project!