Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective

Dr. María Cotera and Linda Garcia Merchant, founders of Chicana por mi Raza (CPMR) Digital Memory Collective, will present a webinar on their work preserving oral histories, material culture, and other records of Chicanx and Latinx contributions to the Civil Rights Era.

Chicana por mi Raza (CPMR) Digital Memory Collective is a group of historians, educators, researchers, archivists, and technologists dedicated to preserving imperiled Chicanx and Latinx histories of the long Civil Rights Era. Started by Professor Maria Cotera and filmmaker Linda Garcia Merchant in 2009, CPMR has traveled to over one dozen states, interviewed more than 70 people, and collected hundreds of hours of oral histories and scanned archives for preservation and access. Using largely volunteer and student labor, CPMR pioneers a model for grass roots history creation that encourages further research into both Latinx studies and a model for grassroots digitization projects. The overarching objective of the project is to provide broad‐based public access to oral histories, material culture, correspondence, and rare out‐of‐print publications for use in both scholarly research and the classroom.
 
Dr. María Cotera is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s Studies and the American Culture Department at the University of Michigan. Cotera began her career as a researcher and writer at the Chicana Research and Learning Center, a non‐profit dedicated to supporting research by and about women of color. In 1989 she helped produce "Crystal City: A Twenty Year Reflection," a documentary about the role of young women in the 1969 Chicano student walkouts in Crystal City, Texas. Cotera's 2008 book, Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poetics of Culture, (University of Texas Press) received the Gloria Anzaldúa book prize from the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA). The prize is awarded for "groundbreaking scholarship in women's studies that makes significant contributions to women of color/transnational scholarship." Cotera has been building the Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory project along with project co-director Linda Garcia Merchant since 2009.
 
Linda Garcia Merchant is a doctoral student concentrating in U.S. Latina and Chicana Literatures, and Digital Humanities. Linda focuses on the restoration and reconstruction of the counter narrative as an aid in rehabilitating the discourse of resistance and social movement. As the co-founder of the Chicana Por Mi Raza Digital Memory Collective, Linda and Dr. Maria Cotera of the University of Michigan have produced over 125 filmed oral history interviews and collected more than 7,000 documents and ephemera from iconic figures of the Chicana and Feminist movements. In April 2012 Linda, coordinating an effort with Dr. Andrea “Tess” Arenas of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Wisconsin State Historical Society began the Somos Latinas Oral History Project to collect and archive the historical narrative of Wisconsin Latina activism. In January 2014, Linda partnered with Dr. Elena Gutierrez of the University of Illinois Chicago to launch the Chicana Chicago/MABPW Collection project, collecting the histories of Latina leadership in Chicago.