VOCES Oral History Project

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Photo, Albert Jose Angel, VOCES Oral History Project
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VOCES (Spanish for "voices") began as the project of a University of Texas professor of journalism. Rivas-Rodriguez sought to record the stories of Latinas and Latinos who served during World War II. However, since 2010 the archives have expanded in scope, with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, to also include experiences from the Korean War and Vietnam War.

The majority of the interviews found on the site focus on veterans. However, civilian experiences are included as well. The "Stories" section can be browsed by name, war, city of birth, state of birth, and branch of service. A rather easy to overlook bar at the bottom of the page also permits you to find stories based on thematic content such as "citizenship" and "racism/discrimination." Each individual name is connected to a short narrative based on the individual's interview. These include direct quotations from the man or woman in question, but there is no transcript of the entire interview itself. You may also find photographs accompanying each story.

Maybe you would like your students to conduct similar interviews, particularly if no names are available from your home town. If so, be sure to visit "Learn to Interview." Here you can find a series of short videos describing the process of preparing for, conducting, and processing oral interviews. If you would like to provide an interview for the site, a downloadable PDF kit is available describing guidelines and containing the questionnaires used by the project.

Additional sections include "Resources" and "Publications." The former includes external links and an 85-page downloadable educator's guide, while the latter offers links to past VOCES newsletters and newspapers.

Chicano/a Movement in Washington State History Project

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Photo, Carving at El Centro, November 4, 2008, litinemo, Flickr
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This website traces the history of the Chicano/a movement in Washington State, which had its roots in the early 1960s when campaigns surrounding farm workers' rights in eastern Washington and community and educational rights in western Washington united and student activism grew at the University of Washington, continued through the 1970s, fractured in the 1980s, and recently reemerged as a younger generation of activists have mobilized around affirmative action, globalization, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and immigrant rights.

This website presents a wealth of primary sources documenting this rich history, including 17 oral history interviews with prominent members of activist groups; 73 images of demonstrations, prominent leaders in the movement, and Seattle-area murals; 42 documents, including copies of the "Boycott Bulletins" that keep students informed of the proceedings of the 1969 grape boycott at the University of Washington and documents surrounding the University of Washington's Chicano/a activist group; as well as more than 300 newspaper articles from the University of Washington Daily, the Seattle Times, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer dating from between 1968 and 1979 and covering topics such as farmworkers and the grape boycott, arts and culture, and the community activist group El Centro de La Raza.

A slideshow providing historical background and highlighting some of these materials is a good place to begin for those unfamiliar with the Chicano/a movement history, as is an extensive timeline and several historical background essays.

This website is part of the larger Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, which provides materials that can serve as larger historical context, such as a guide to civil rights groups from the 1910s to the 1970s, and 14 2,000-word essays on the ethnic press in Seattle.

Bracero History Archive

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Bracero History Archive

The Bracero History Archive—a collaborative project of George Mason University, the Smithsonian, Brown University, and the University of Texas, El Paso—is an online collection of resources that documents the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative where millions of Mexicans came to work in American agriculture during the mid-20th century.

Little Cowpuncher: Rural School Newspaper of Southern Arizona

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Drawing, Ciara, From Little Cowpuncher, Redington School, November 20, 1932
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A work in progress, this site presents the southern Arizona school newspaper, Little Cowpuncher. Created by Anglo and Mexican American ranch children, from kindergarten through 8th grade, between 1932 and 1943 at five neighboring Arizona schools (Redington, Baboquivari, Sasco, San Fernando, and Sopori), the newspapers present the original and unedited stories, poems, and illustrations of students about their community and school life. The site includes a map that identifies the location of the five schools and users may select which newspaper they wish to examine by school and by year.

The newspapers include many stories about holiday celebrations, especially Halloween and Christmas. Also frequently featured are tales of rodeo activities and issues dedicated to graduating classmates. Other local events, such as an outbreak of chicken pox and droughts offer a unique perspective on the students' isolated rural lives.

Although the site is simply designed, middle and high school students and teachers will find that the newspapers present an opportunity to study pioneer Mexican and American ranch families and understand the bilingual and bicultural communities they created in Southern Arizona.

Hispano Music and Culture from the Northern Rio Grande

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Logo, Hipano Music and Culture of the Northern Rio Grande
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This online presentation of an ethnographic field collection from the Library of Congress American Memory Project documents the religious and secular music of Spanish-speaking people from rural Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado. It features the audio recordings and transcriptions of over 100 songs that Juan Bautista Rael of Stanford University recorded during a 1940 research trip to the region. Recordings include alabados (hymns), folk dramas, wedding songs, and dance tunes. Descriptive information about the title, performers, genre, instrumentation, location and date of recording, and any other brief (10-25 words) notes about the music accompanies each tune. The collection also includes over 35 pieces of correspondence from Rael about his trip. The site offers a keyword search and is browsable by performers and titles. For persons interested in Spanish American culture, music, and folklife, this site is a good source.

Frontera Collection of Mexican American Music

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Image for Frontera Collection of Mexican American Music
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This collection of commercially produced Mexican American vernacular music is the largest of its kind, with more than 100,000 recordings. The music, originally published between 1905 and the 1990s, is primarily in Spanish. This website presents digitized versions of roughly 30,000 recordings. The music ranges widely in style and includes lyric songs, canciones, boleros, rancheras, sones, instrumental music, and the first recordings of norte and conjunto music, as well as politically motivated speeches and comedy skits.

A browseable list of subjects shows that love (unrequited love, adultery, regrets), war (Korean War, Mexican Revolution, World War I and II), and praise (of country, guitar, mother) are common themes in the collection. Unfortunately, the songs are available to the general public only in 50-second sound clips. Users interested in gaining full access to a select group of songs for research are encouraged to contact the website's administrators.

Living Voices, Voces Vivas

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Introductory graphic, Living Voices
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Provides audio files of 40 Native Americans and Native Hawaiians talking about their diverse lives, experiences, histories, and traditions, with an emphasis on illuminating their present-day concerns and projects. Those interviewed come from Canada, Mexico, and Panama, in addition to various parts of the U.S., and include leaders of organizations dedicated to the preservation of indigenous traditions and languages, artists, writers, musicians, teachers, scientists, activists, tribal leaders, students, and scholars. Includes religious leaders, the head of a successful gaming establishment, an illusionist, and a former Miss Indian World. The site is divided into English- and Spanish-language sections. Each talk lasts from three to five minutes; some talks are translated into English or Spanish for the appropriate section.

Access to the interviews is provided in two ways: through a "flash site" to accommodate high-speed connections, and via an HTML site for those with slower modems. The latter site includes interview transcripts. Valuable for those studying the history of Native peoples and ways that past traditions are consciously preserved in present-day cultures.

RaceSci: History of Race in Science

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Logo, History of Race in Science
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RaceSci is a site dedicated to supporting and expanding the discussion of race and science. The site provides five bibliographies of books and articles about race and science. The section on current scholarship has 1,000 entries, organized into 38 subjects. A bibliography of primary source material includes 91 books published between the 1850s and the 1990s. Visitors can currently view 14 syllabi for high school and college courses in social studies, history of science, rhetoric, and medicine. The site links to 13 recently published articles about race and science and to 49 sites about race, gender, health, science, and ethnicity. This site will be useful for teachers designing curricula about race and for researchers looking for secondary source material.

On a Mission: Junípero Serra in New Spain

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photomechanical print, Junipero Serra, published 1913, Francisco Palóu, LOC
Question

What was Junípero Serra’s relationship to the San Gabriel Mission and the Native American people in the area?

Answer

Father Junípero Serra was born Miguel Joseph Serra in Spain in 1713. Educated as a friar in the Order of St. Francis, he immigrated to New Spain in 1749, where he worked as both a missionary and a university administrator. In 1769, Serra led a group of Franciscan monks into Alta California, and there oversaw the founding and maintenance of a chain of missions along the Californian coast. Mission San Gabriel was the fourth mission to be built in this chain. While Serra selected the site for the mission (a site that was eventually changed) he did not personally visit the mission station until September 1772, a year after its founding.

Serra oversaw a mission system that rapidly transformed the environment and living situation of California's indigenous communities.

Serra oversaw a mission system that rapidly transformed the environment and living situation of California's indigenous communities. The friars, and the soldiers sent to accompany them, brought European domestic animals—cows, pigs, and sheep—into the region where they quickly reproduced past the point of containment. Non-native species of grasses and weeds were transported via supplies from New Spain and overran the local flora upon which Native communities depended for food. Thousands of indigenous people were pushed by these events to move to the missions in order to secure the means of their subsistence.

The friars forced Native people to work for the missions, often growing the crops upon which the mission community depended. The Franciscans strove to convert Native people to Catholicism, requiring that individuals attend mass, memorize catechisms, confess their sins, and accept harsh physical punishment for behaviors the friars considered sinful. Kinship structures were deeply disrupted by the friars' attempts to remake Native families according to a Christian, Spanish model. This situation was further compounded by mortality rates at the missions, which vastly outpaced those in other areas of the Spanish empire or Europe itself. Infants and children were especially vulnerable. The rampant spread of diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea among the Native population made it hard for communities to replace the members they lost.

Native people were not passive in the face of such change.

Native people were not passive in the face of such change. Many individuals sought to preserve their traditional spiritual belief systems—some of which, like that of the Luiseño, mapped easily onto the central ideas of Catholicism, and some of which did not—as well as offering political resistance to the authorities of New Spain. The environmental and epidemiological changes brought about by the missions, however, made it difficult for families or communities to survive without some connection to the missions, be it wholesale removal or trade.

Serra died in California in 1784. In 1987 he was beatified by Pope John Paul II, a prerequisite for the attainment of sainthood. Controversy persists as to whether Serra should be sainted, given his administration of a mission system that was so destructive to the lives of California's Native people.

For more information

Hackel, Steven W. Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Sandos, James A. Coverting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

Inside an American Factory: Films of the Westinghouse Works, 1904

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Photo, Westinghouse Works factory
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This exhibit includes 21 "actuality" films from the Library's Westinghouse Works Collection. Actuality films were motion pictures that were produced on flip cards, also known as mutoscopes. These films, made by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in 1904, were intended to showcase the company's operations and feature the Westinghouse Air Brake Company, the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, and the Westinghouse Machine Company. They were shown daily in the Westinghouse Auditorium at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. Brief (roughly 500-word) descriptive narratives accompany each film, along with three to five photographs of factory exteriors and interiors and male and female workers performing their duties. A timeline traces the history of the Westinghouse companies from the birth of founder George Westinghouse in 1846 to Westinghouse's last patent, awarded four years after his death in 1918. Another link offers a Wilmerding News article, dated September 2, 1904, about life in Wilmerding, Pennsylvania, "the ideal home town," where the Westinghouse Air Brake factory was located. A bibliography of 18 scholarly works on Westinghouse and manufacturing in America is also included. The easily-navigable site is keyword searchable and can be browsed by subject. It is a good resource for information on labor and manufacturing in early 20th-century America, as well as on early film.