A new perspective

My first few thoughts on learning about Chicana feminism, archives and oral history were that I didn’t know very much at all. I keep thinking to myself, what exactly does it mean to be a Chicana feminist? And how is a Chicana feminist different from other feminists?  I have learned about Chicana feminism before, though that was not always the focus in most of my classes. Works like The Bridge Called My Back (I’ve only read parts of that book) and Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands: La Frontera helped introduce me to Chicana feminist thought. Much like other historical narratives, the history of Chicanos and their struggles for civil rights has been told largely from a masculine perspective.

The relationship between Chicana feminism, archives and oral history, however, really lost me. I had no idea that archives privileged certain narratives over others, though it did not surprise me. I had, like so many others, assumed that archives represented the Truth, that they were indiscriminate in what they decided to keep. In reality, archives can only hold a small piece of the truth. The different perspectives on countless subjects are still missing, as archives still mostly contain records or manuscripts on the dominant narrative. I find it bothersome that certain histories are still missing, and even more bothersome that there is a sort of feedback loop that perpetuates this. Historians can only write histories on the evidence provided to them, if there is not sufficient evidence then they cannot do their work. Historians are therefore bound to what is available, and the obvious problem is that the available evidence does not always give a complete story and so certain histories go missing. These missing histories have a difficult time getting archived because no one is researching them because they are studying what has already been archived. No archive, no research. No research, no archive.

What makes what I am learning so fascinating is that we are contributing to making a part of history more visible through oral history. Before this course I had heard about oral history, but not really given it much thought until very recently. I have a book on African folk tales and origin myths. All of the stories within it had been recorded by a historian or ethnographer during a retelling of them. Until now, though, I did not understand just how precious what the researchers/oral historians were doing was. That book opened up a whole new world to me when I first read parts of it (twas for a class), but it also led me to desire more. Oral historians help to capture history that may not be written or documented in a physical, tangible form. By placing these histories in archives, we now open doors for further research and more knowledge.

My greatest hope for this experience is that I learn exactly what Chicana feminism is (well, I’ll have to learn exactly what plain old feminism is first, it is surprisingly still murky) and that I will also be able to participate, in some degree, to the continued learning of others. The more I learn about this course, the more interested I become. I love getting new perspectives on history, that’s what made me major in history in the first place. I want every narrative to be treated with the same respect and interest that others are. That’s a rather large aspiration, but no one ever got anywhere without at least an idea of where he or she wanted to go.