Chicana is a digital archive focused on preserving the Chicana and Latina voices during the civil rights movement as well as the feminist movement. This is crucial because the general history of the movements omits the roles that women of color played. The Civil Rights era is predominantly male and the feminist movement is predominantly white. By those standards, women of color were not participating until the ends of the era. However, that is untrue and this project focuses on correcting that issue.
The project utilizes oral histories of various women, which means that we interview these women and they share their life stories with us. Many of these women also have original documents that we scan and create a collection for. The more Oral Histories conducted, the greater the connection between these women become. The narrative of the feminist movement then changes to include these voices and the connections between these women weave an accurate history of what happened during the Civil rights and Feminist movements. These archives can be referenced for researchers to share in their books and papers so that all the correct information may be shared one day.
I have worked on this project for almost a year now and it has been super interesting to hear about these women’s lives and to simply explore a past era through their eyes. The ethics behind this project is mainly respecting the women. They allow us to use their documents freely and if they do not agree with how we present it, we have to change it. We are more like partners with these women rather than using them as historical sources. Overall, I believe it is an amazing project and that as the years go on it will grow immensely and succeed in rewriting history.