Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies

About the Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies collection

Stanford’s research on Hispano language and folklore of the American Southwest dates to the first half of the twentieth century. That philological approach expanded in 1981 with the founding of the Center for Chicano Research with its focus on issues of bilingual education, immigration, and civil rights. The scholarly shift is reflected in the Libraries’ extensive archival holdings documenting the Mexican American experience in the United States with archives like those of activist Ernesto Galarza or the civil rights group MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense Fund), two of the most highly used Stanford Libraries primary source collections, used by both local and external scholars. Currently, the Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies program at Stanford is part the Center for Comparative Race and Ethnicity and has added a more interdisciplinary approach to cover the broader Latin American diaspora North of the Rio Grande.

The cognizant curator provides reference support and instruction to courses introducing undergraduates to archival research and those engaged in more advanced projects. There is also a growing group of external users consulting Stanford’s archival holdings ranging from doctoral students to museum curators. For instance, the archives of Chicana filmmaker Lourdes Portillo and Chicana artist Amalia Mesa-Baines housed at the Libraries have been showcased in exhibits such as Significant Movies And Moviemakers: Lourdes Portillo (Academy Museum) and Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, also San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).