A collection of more than 40,000 pieces that tell the story of the Chicano movement in San Diego from 1964 to 2006 will be digitally preserved at the UC San Diego.
The items were collected by Herman Baca, who grew up in National City in the 1960s and is a prominent activist and political organizer. He was founder and director of the Committee for Chicano Rights and founder of the San Diego chapter of the La Raza Unida Party, which promoted political participation among community members in the 1970s.
He collaborated with historic Chicano leaders who promoted civil and political rights and educational opportunities for community members. They included César Chávez, Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, Humberto Noé "Bert" Corona, Francisco "Kiki" Martínez and José Angel Gutiérrez.
The collection was acquired by UCSD in 2004 and it's considered one of the most important ones in the region. It includes the minutes of key meetings, fundraising pamphlets and Chicano art that give a sense of the daily life of the movement.
It's going to be preserved as digital files by the university's library thanks to a $56,000 grant from the National Historical Publication and Records Commission.
It will take two years to preserve the letters, photographs, posters, slides and audio interviews in the collection.
"Herman Baca has made an amazing contribution by documenting the Chicano Movement in San Diego and Southern California," Marye Anne Fox, chancellor of UCSD said in a statement. "Digitizing this collection will greatly increase the impact of his archive by making it available to all segments of the community, which will help us to strengthen our ties to the Chicano community while providing an important new resource for teachers, students, and scholars and citizens beyond the campus."
The university noted that when it received Baca's collection in 2004, it was the first one related to
Chicano activism. But since then, Mandeville's Special Collection Library has grown to include the records of the border program the American Friends Service Committee, which cover the period of 1974 to 2004, and the papers the late Roberto Martinez collected from 1969 to 2009.
UCSD's librarian Brian E. C. Schottlaender said the grant funding the digital preservation "will make it possible for this collection to be available for free to be explored through the Internet. In a world increasingly digital, one of our goals is to make our collections as accessible as possible to our users and the public."
Lynda Claassen, the director of special collections at Mandeville, said students from various disciplines, such as history, anthropology and ethnic studies, use the collection.
"Digitalizing the items will make them accessible, as well, to the Chicano communities in the region that have expressed an interest in incorporating materials from the Baca collection into their lessons," Claassen said.
editorial@mienlace.com
This story was published by The Union-Tribune's Latino newspaper Enlace.
