CSRC Newsletter September - October 2005

Welcome back! We have a lot on our agenda this academic year, including conferences on education and leadership. We are also expanding our community partnerships this year by working with Casa Libre, a homeless shelter for undocumented minors, in order to continue meeting our mission of supporting research that makes a difference. We look forward to seeing you at our open house on October 20 and at our other events throughout the year.

 

 

Dr. Chon A. Noriega will be one of four honorees for LA Artcore at their annual award benefit at the Omni Hotel-Downtown on October 22, 2005. For more information on attending call (213) 617-3274 or go to the LA Artcore website.

 

UCLA graduate student Maria C. Ledesma has been appointed to serve as the student representative to the University of California Board of Regents for 2006-2007. Ledesma, who was selected July 20, 2005, will serve as the student regent-designate for the current year. Although she will be able to participate in all deliberations, she will not be able to vote until the beginning of her term July 1, 2006. Ledesma, a first-generation college student, earned her bachelor's degree in English from UC Berkeley; a master's degree in education from Harvard; and is currently a doctoral candidate at the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. She will become the thirty-second student regent since the position was established in 1975 and the UC system's first Chicana student regent. She will succeed Adam Rosenthal, a UC Davis law student.

 

The appointment of UCLA faculty member Fernando Torres-Gil to the Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners has been confirmed. Torres-Gil, who is currently acting dean of the UCLA School of Public Affairs, is also a professor of social welfare and public policy and a CSRC faculty associate. He is one of six new commission members appointed by the new mayor of Los Angeles and confirmed September 6, 2005, by the Los Angeles City Council.

 

CSRC has received a $100,000 grant from the JP Morgan Chase Foundation in support of A Ver: Revisioning Art History, the first book series on the contributions of Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and other U.S. Latino artists.

 

The CSRC would like to thank Tamar Wilson for her generous continuing support and contribution to the center. Tamar's annual contribution helps fund many valuable programs and research throughout the year.

 

All are invited to the CSRC Open House on Thursday, October 20, 2005 from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm. The event will be held in 144 and 179 Haines Hall. Books, t-shirts, and DVDs will be on sale. Casablanca Restaurant will provide food and refreshments on the CSRC balcony. For more information, email the front office or call (310) 825-2363.

 

Yolanda Retter Vargas, the librarian of the UCLA CSRC Library, and Lillian Castillo Speed, head of the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library, received a grant from the UCLA Librarians Association Research and Professional Development Committee to collaborate on a project to update the Chicano Thesaurus. The thesaurus provides subject heading guidance for the Chicano Studies Database, which is the primary online research resource for Chicano studies. The project will add new headings in two areas: non-Chicano Latinos in the United States and LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex) people.

 

It has been a very busy summer for the CSRC Archive. Below are four achievements of the past few months. Finding aids for CSRC collections can be found on the CSRC Library website and the Online Archive of California website.

 

In May, 2005 we received 130 storage boxes (approx. 300 linear feet) of the Mexican Museum of San Francisco's curatorial records, educational and community papers, financial records, tour and exhibition papers, catalogues, and financial papers. Normally a collection of this size and scope would require at least one to two years preparing, preserving, and itemizing it with a web-based finding aid. Thanks to the coordinated efforts of the CSRC library and archive and an enormous team effort by library student assistants, we are pleased to announce that this collection has been preserved and organized. A finding aid for the collection should be available online by December 2005. Currently, noted scholar and educator Karen Mary Davalos is studying these papers to prepare a book in the Chicano Archive series about the Mexican Museum of San Francisco.

 

A very exciting collection of great interest to drama students, professional dramaturges, and scholars of Latino theater in Los Angeles, this collection of approximately 100 linear feet consists mainly of play manuscripts by Latino and other dramatists from across the nation and papers related to their production. Additionally, this collection has almost 100 video recordings of many of the plays. The finding aid to this collection will be available online for researchers by January 2006.

 

The archive assisted in organizing and building a database for the print collection of the artist Malaquias Montoya. Tere Romo, CSRC Arts Project coordinator, will use this collection to prepare an A Ver monograph about the artist.

 

The Mexican Folk Narrative Audio Tape Collection, with bound volumes of transcripts, is another exciting collection now in our possession. Recorded between 1966 and 1973, it consists of the stories, myths, and fables that immigrants from Mexico brought with them to their new homes here in the United States. The finding aid will be available to researchers by December 2005.

 

This summer the press worked to forward a number of projects. After a year of focusing on our periodicals (releasing two issues each of our Latino Policy & Issues Brief, CSRC Research Report, and Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies), we turned to our two new book series: A Ver: Revisioning Art History and The Chicano Archive. The first series, under the leadership of Director Chon A. Noriega and with major funding from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, is devoted to forwarding and preserving the work of Latino/a artists. The first book in the series, to be in full color, is on the artist Gronk. The second series, with collaboration from Latino institutions around the country, is devoted to preserving Latino archives. The first book in the series is on Self Help Graphics & Art and due back from the printers by the Open House this October.

 

For more than three decades, Self Help Graphics & Art has been a national model for community-based art making and art-based community making. Through its innovative printmaking and other programs, Self Help has empowered local artists and reached out to the world beyond East Los Angeles with the vibrancy of Chicano/Latino art. In the new CSRC book Self Help Graphics & Art: Art in the Heart of East Los Angeles, historian Kristen Guzmán draws on archival sources and on interviews with artists to compose a historical essay that tells the story of this remarkable organization. The guide to the archives was created and contributed by the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which houses the Self Help Graphics archives. The book's editor is Colin Gunckel. Part of the “UCLA in LA” initiative, this book comes out of a partnership between the CSRC and CEMA. In addition to the historical essay, the book includes a finding aid to the CEMA archives and a note on strategic partnerships between the public university and community-based arts. Five hundred copies of the book will be donated to Self Help.

 

Interest remains high in the three DVDs that the CSRC released on Chicano art of the 1970s and 1980s. The DVDs document two pivotal art exhibitions in Los Angeles (Los Four and Murals of Aztlán) and the early “conceptual dramas” directed by Harry Gamboa Jr., a co-founder of ASCO. These works - with the originals archived in the CSRC Special Collections - have been restored and are being made available for the first time. The fourth DVD is about to be released, Frontierland / Fronterilandia, by Jesse Lerner and Rubén Ortiz Torres (1995). For information on how to purchase these historic DVDs, see our media website or contact the CSRC press.

 

The fall issue of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies has arrived. If you are not an Aztlán subscriber and want to be one, e-mail your postal address to the CSRC Press in order to receive a subscription package!

In this thirty-fifth anniversary issue, Suzanne Bost considers Gloria Anzaldúa's writing on physical pain; Robert McKee Irwin contrasts Lola Casanova and Ramona on interracial romance; Anthony Macías reconstructs the sophisticated post-World War II Latin music and dance scene in southern California; Scott Michaelsen's article examines contemporary dialogue about the U.S. Patriot Act in relation to 1970s Supreme Court decisions regarding the U.S.-Mexico border patrol and Japanese American internment, and Erin G. Carlston writes on the undercut romanticism of Alfredo Véa Jr.'s 1993 novel La Maravilla. In the dossier section, “La Frontera,” Guillermo E. Hernández searches for the author of the corrido “El contrabando de El Paso” and Dennis Bixler-Márque details “the journey of emancipation” endured by a Chicano immigrant student body who confronted “the U.S. border patrol in a federal court of law in El Paso, Texas.” Finally, in our artist communiqué, Ken Gonzales-Day provides valuable insight into his photograph series “Bone-Grass Boy: The Secret of the Conejos River,” a conceptually driven project that explores historical absence.

 

If you are interested in buying our books, click here.

If you are interested in buying our DVDs, click here.

If you are interested in subscribing to our journal, email your postal address to press@chicano.ucla.edu.

Information about all our publications is available at the CSRC Press website.

 

The CSRC congratulates Karen Recinos, this year"s recipient of the UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese Service Award. The $300 co-sponsored award is given each year to the graduating senior with the best record of service to the Latino community. Karen Recinos, a double major in Spanish literature and sociology has made many contributions to the Latino community, including tutoring elementary school children in East Los Angeles, collaborating with a Tijuana orphanage, and working as a teaching assistant for various English as a Second Language classes at Grant High School. Karen is also a member of the cast for La Casa de Bernarda Alba, a production by undergraduate and graduate students in Spanish and Portuguese.

 

The CSRC welcomes four postdoctoral scholars and one scholar-in-residence for 2005-2006. George Sanchez, USC History Department and Program in American Studies and Ethnicity (hosted at UCLA by the Asian American Studies Center), has been awarded the Institute of American Cultures (IAC) Postdoctoral Fellowship for his project "Remaking Community: A Multiracial History of the Boyle Heights Neighborhood of East Los Angeles." Tara Yosso, UC Santa Barbara Department of Chicana/o Studies and Education, will be a visiting postdoctoral scholar at the CSRC and will conduct research for her project "Analyzing Racialized and Gendered Roads to the Ph.D." Mary C. Beltra¡n, University of Wisconsin-Madison Communication Arts and Chicana/o & Latina/o Studies, also a visiting postdoctoral scholar, will implement research on her project "Lessons in Hollywood Latinidad: Latin@ Stars and the Evolution of U.S. Racial Borders." Karen Mary Davalos, Loyola Marymount University, will be a scholar-in-residence at the CSRC and research the Mexican Museum of San Francisco Collection now held at the CSRC. Finally, David Hernandez, a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow for 2005-06, will be hosted by the CSRC.

 

The CSRC welcomes IAC Predoctoral Fellow Roberto Emilio Montenegro, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology, who will be completing his dissertation, "Parent Expectations, Spanish-Speaking Doctor-Parent Communication, and Inappropriate Antibiotic Prescribing for Pediatric Upper Respiratory Infections." There are three Graduate Associates at the CSRC for 2005-06: Nadine Bermudez, doctoral candidate in education, will be completing her dissertation "Mendez v Westminster School District: The Story of a Mexican American Community's Struggle to End Race Discrimination in Their Neighborhood Schools"; Maria Rebeca Burciaga, doctoral candidate in education, will be working on "Having It All: Chicana Education Doctoral Students" Familial and Professorial Aspirations"; and Kelly D. Main, doctoral candidate in urban planning, will be implementing a research project titled "MacArthur Park: Rethinking Attachments to Place in a Culturally Diverse and Transitional Environment."

 

The CSRC awarded the following research grants for this academic year: Guillermo E. Hernandez, professor in Spanish and Portuguese, "Documenting the Frontera Collection at UCLA"; Alicia Gaspar de Alba, associate professor in Chicana/o Studies, "Making a Killing: Femicides, Free Trade, and La Frontera"; Caesar j. Ayala, associate professor in sociology, "Why Not Martha"s Vineyard? Land Tenure, Military Expropriations, and Civilian Displacement in Vieques, Puerto Rico, 1942-2002: A Sociological Study"; Citlali Lucia Sosa-Riddell, doctoral student in history, "The Politics of a Spanish Heritage: Californios, Americans, and the National Body: 1880-1915" ; Bert Maria Cueva, doctoral candidate in women"s studies," Economic Globalization: New Threads of Imperialism"; Natalie Operstein, doctoral candidate, "Indo-European Studies, Dialectal Survey of Zaniz (Papabuco) Zapotec."

 

The CSRC administers the Latino Research Program, which provides research grants to faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students for the promotion of policy relevant research on Chicano and Latino issues in California. This year's faculty recipients include Kelly Lytle Hernandez, assistant professor in history, "Constructing the Criminal Alien: A Historical Framework for Analyzing Border Vigilantes at the Turn of the 21st Century"; Paolo Prolo, M.D. in dentistry, "Internet Health Care Access in the Latino Community"; Maria Rebeca Burciaga and Kelly D. Main (see above).

 

The CSRC website publishes a list of UCLA graduate students currently doing Chicana/o-related research. To be added to the CSRC Affiliated Students list, email the center with your information.

 

The CSRC welcomes undergraduate and graduate students with an interest in Chicano Studies to work as interns and volunteers in various areas of the Center. If interested, send an inquiry to Carlos M. Haro.

 

To learn more about us, visit our website or email us. To subscribe to this newsletter, e-mail CSRC Newsletter and include in the body of your message the line (and nothing but the line) SUBSCRIBE CHICANO [first name, last name] (don't enter the brackets, just your name). This automatically subscribes you to the electronic versions of the Latino Policy & Issues Brief and the CSRC Research Report.