The Chicana por mi Raza Digital Humanities Project

Chicana por Mi Raza is a digital humanities project that involves the collection, digitization, and display of archival materials and oral histories related to the development of Chicana Feminist thought and praxis over the long civil rights era.  The project proposes both the collection of documents related to this history--photographs, posters, correspondence, written material (both published and unpublished), ephemera--and the development of a flexible user interface that can allow users to access these materials through interactive timeline and mapping utilities.

While there are some archival holdings (mostly in California and the Southwest) documenting this period, the vast majority of archives related to the history of Chicana feminism are located in the basements, attics, and garages of women who were active during the civil rights era. This project seeks to address this problem by identifying key figures, conducting oral histories with them, and digitizing their archives in situ. The idea, then, is to create a single digital access point that re-unifies an archive that is currently dispersed; one that recreates the complex network that once existed among activists who were, like their archives are now, dispersed across a wide geographic field stretching from Chicago to Texas to California, and beyond.