CSRC Newsletter - January 2013

Happy New Year! We survived the Mayan apocalypse and the fiscal cliff. Well, the first part of the fiscal cliff.... And now, a record number of Latinos have been sworn in as members of the U.S. Congress. So bring it!

 

 

In December the CSRC was delighted to host renowned actor and Chicano art collector Cheech Marin. Chon A. Noriega, CSRC director, and Pilar Tompkins Rivas, co-curator of last year’s L.A. Xicano exhibitions, gave Marin a tour of the library and its current exhibition, Alex Donis: Floating World, and introduced him to the CSRC’s extensive collections and varied initiatives concerning Chicano art and culture. The staff was thrilled to meet the legendary Cheech!

 

The CSRC hosted a reception on December 13 to encourage support of the CSRC’s LGBT Latina/o Initiative, which is devoted to preserving LGBT collections and making them accessible to the general public. David Damian Figueroa, Roland Palencia, and professors Chon A. Noriega and Maylei Blackwell were the featured speakers, and artist Monica Palacios gave a short performance. If you would like to make a donation to support the leading Latina/o LGBT archival collection in the United States, please visit the CSRC’s UCLA support page or the Giving page on the CSRC website.

 

The CSRC is very sad to report the passing of Lucille Beserra Roybal on December 23, two weeks before her ninety-sixth birthday. Roybal was a pioneering political activist for the Latino community and the wife of the late Congressman Edward R. Roybal, whose extensive papers are a cornerstone of the CSRC archives. We extend our heartfelt condolences to the Roybal family and have posted on our website a comprehensive tribute written by the family.

 

A team of UCLA professors—Maylei Blackwell, Chicana/o studies; Keith Camacho, Asian American studies; Mishuana Goeman, gender studies and American Indian studies; and Wendy Teeter, Fowler Museum and American Indian studies—has been awarded the first IAC–Dream Fund Faculty Work Group and Visiting Scholar Initiative Award. The group’s project, “Indigenous Los Angeles at the Intersections,” will focus on comparative indigeniety and racialization in an urban center—specifically, modern-day Los Angeles. The grant is part of a new program developed by the Institute of American Cultures (IAC) with support from the Dream Fund at UCLA. The program is designed to encourage interdisciplinary faculty work groups at UCLA that explore critical aspects of the “emerging America.” The grant supports research for a single academic quarter. For more information about all IAC grant and fellowship programs, visit the IAC website.

 

Maria Elena Ruiz, who served as CSRC associate director for 2010-12, has been awarded an Institute of American Cultures (IAC) research grant for the 2012-13 academic year. Ruiz will be developing a literature review of the Cuban health system to determine the system’s implications for the U.S. Affordable Care Act. In her proposal Ruiz provided a brief overview of the components of the Cuban model of universal community-based health care that have worked as designed. She noted that these successes "suggest that the proposed Affordable Care Act in the U.S. may present us with some creative approaches for improving health care to Latino communities in Los Angeles and the nation."

 

Marissa López, CSRC associate director and assistant professor of English and Chicana/o studies, wrote an appreciation of Jenni Rivera following the performer’s tragic death last month. The tribute is posted on the CSRC website and can be downloaded as a PDF.

 

Last year’s Pacific Standard Time exhibition ASCO: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987, opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) before traveling to Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The show, which includes numerous photographs as well as videos borrowed from CSRC collections, is now traveling to Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. It will be on view there from March 21 through August 1. Meanwhile, Glam! The Performance of Style opens at Tate Liverpool on February 8. It includes CSRC DVDs of video works by ASCO member Harry Gamboa Jr. Glam! will be on view until May 12.

 

Recently, curators at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art asked to review the CSRC DVD Frontierland/Fronterilandia: The Border in the Popular Imagination of the U.S. and Mexico (1995) for exhibition research. We accommodated their request by donating a copy to the LACMA Research Library. This and all DVDs from the CSRC Chicano Cinema & Media Arts Series are available for purchase from the CSRC. Please visit our website to review the collection.

 

“Jenni Rivera’s Fame Built on Gut-Level Connection with Her Fans”

Agustín Gurza, music journalist and author of the CSRC publication The Arhoolie Foundation's Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings, remarks on the late singer’s success as cultural symbol.

The Miami Herald, December 11, 2012 (PDF)

 

“Cartografiar otro L.A.: El Arte Chicano en el Este de Los Ángeles”

The L.A. Xicano catalog essay by co-curator Pilar Tompkins Rivas was excerpted in Spanish in the latest issue of Carta, the magazine of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain.

Carta, Spring-Summer 2012 (PDF)

The UCLA Environmental Justice Initiative (EJI) Lecture Series will kick off with a talk by Joseph K. Lyou on Thursday, January 10, 4:00–5:30 p.m., at the UCLA Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, Room 1200. Lyou, president and CEO of the Coalition for Clean Air, will recount his twenty-two years as an environmental justice advocate in California. The lecture series is organized by UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, Institute of American Cultures, and Luskin School of Public Affairs, with each of UCLA’s ethnic studies centers and the UCLA Library serving as co-sponsors and co-hosts.

 

Graduate students, post-doctoral students, and faculty interested in the fundamentals of preparing a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant proposal are invited to attend a workshop in the CSRC Library (144 Haines Hall) on Thursday, January 17, 3:00–5:00 p.m., taught by Alex Ortega, CSRC associate director. Ortega, who also serves as director of the UCLA Center for Population Health and Health Disparities and is a professor of public health and psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences, will address topics such as developing specific aims, frameworks, analysis, innovation and originality, and team science approaches.

 

Join us at the CSRC Library (144 Haines Hall) on Thursday, January 31, 4:00–5:30 p.m., when author Maria Nieto will read from and sign her first novel, Pig Behind the Bear (Floricanto Press/Berkeley Press, 2012). The book tells the story of a young female reporter for the Los Angeles Times who is asked to write a commemorative piece on Ruben Salazar on the one-year anniversary of Salazar’s death. While doing work for the piece, she finds herself embroiled in a murder mystery. Books will be available for purchase at the event and light refreshments will be served.

 

 

Patricia Valdovinos, a work-study student assisting at the library, has been accepted into the McNair Scholars Program at UCLA. This rigorous two-year research-based program is for undergraduates who are interested in pursuing a PhD in the humanities or social sciences with a focus on social justice. Valdovinos’s project will look at the relationship between art and art literacy among at-risk youth in Latino and Native American communities. Congratulations, Patricia!

 

The CSRC Library would like to thank Norman Gold, for his recent donation of over 500 titles to our monograph and serials collections. Gold, who lives in Berkeley, is a UCLA alumnus specializing in the field of English-learner schooling. During a career spanning more than thirty-five years, he accumulated a substantial collection of works concerning civil rights, advocacy, sociolinguistic and linguistic studies, materials in school and district management, school improvement, educational evaluations and assessments, and language acquisition. Included are volumes from the 1960s through the current decade. From 1979 through 2000 Gold worked with the California Department of Education, and for the last twelve years his consulting firm, Norm Gold Associates, has provided assistance to schools and school districts as well as several state departments of education. He spent 1988-89 researching bilingual education in Catalonia, Spain, and has worked with the state education agency in Oaxaca, Mexico. Some of the materials in the collection are from government agencies and had limited print runs, making them very rare. We appreciate this exceptionally generous donation.

 

Work continues in the processing and preservation of the archives of former L.A. deputy mayor Grace Montañez Davis, judge and attorney Ricardo Muñoz, and artist and educator Raphael Montañez Ortiz. If you are interested in consulting these or any other CSRC collections, please contact Lizette Guerra, CSRC librarian.

 

Now available for viewing on CSRC YouTube are several videos of Fall 2012 CSRC events. "Inside Out: Social Justice, Activism, and the 2012 Vote" was a pre-election panel discussion moderated by Mark Q. Sawyer, professor and director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics at UCLA. It included panelists Lalo Alcaraz, political cartoonist, satirist, and faculty member, Otis College of Art + Design; Dennis Loo, professor of sociology, Cal Poly Pomona; Joely Proudfit, director of the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center, CSU San Marcos; and David E. Ryu, director of development and government and public affairs, Kedren Mental Health.

 

Also available are videos from the seventh annual CSRC Latina/o Education Summit. This eight-part series includes each of the summit’s panels; a presentation by Gilbert Cedillo, California assemblymember for District 45; and the keynote address by Michael A. Olivas, William B. Bates Distinguished Chair of Law and Director, Institute of Higher Education Law and Governance, University of Houston. The theme of the summit was “Law and Policy: Conversations across the Disciplines.” For more information about the annual summit series, please visit our website.

 

Oral History and Communities of Color, edited by Teresa Barnett and Chon A. Noriega, explores how oral history, through video recordings and storytelling as well as interviews, can be used for a number of purposes in communities of color. The authors discuss oral histories that not only record the culture and history of understudied communities but also address other goals, such as increasing student interaction with diverse communities and developing effective health interventions.

 

Each essay considers a different racial/ethnic community: Asian American, American Indian, Latino, African American, and Muslim. Interviews with two scholars who integrate oral history into their research touch on oral history's theoretical foundation in cultural anthropology, particular considerations for collecting oral histories in specific communities, and the importance of including the narrator's personal story. Oral History and Communities of Color is available from the distributor, University of Washington Press.

 

Applications are now being accepted for the CSRC’s 2013–14 visiting scholar/researcher program, which is offered in cooperation with the UCLA Institute of American Cultures (IAC). CSRC visiting scholars/researchers contribute to the research activities of the center, including teaching a ten-week undergraduate or graduate seminar based on their research project. The visiting scholar/researcher will receive an academic stipend of $32,000 to $35,000 (contingent upon rank, experience, and date of completion of doctoral studies), plus health benefits. While all applications related to Chicano-Latino studies are welcome, the CSRC also encourages proposals that contribute to the IAC's emphasis on the emerging America. Applications are due by February 1. Recipients will be notified by mid-April. Submit applications electronically to CSRC assistant director Javier Iribarren. Those interested in applying can read about the application process and access the electronic application on the IAC website. Questions about the program can be sent to Dr. Iribarren.