Building Latino digital collections means building a collective of practitioners, scholars, students and community members in a democratized relationship to the cultural production of a collection. Through the work of these two organizations, this talk will present the processes and policies crafted to center community-based knowledge and experience through the transformative act of intergenerational witness as applied to the materials collected and articulated.
Linda García Merchant is the US Latino Digital Humanities (USLDH) Postdoctoral Fellow, for the University of Houston’s Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage program—a Latino Digital Humanities program that is one of the first of its kind in the nation. García Merchant holds a PhD in Chicana/Latina Literary and Cultural Studies and Digital Humanities from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. An award-winning documentary filmmaker García Merchant has directed and produced eleven films including Las Mujeres de la Caucus Chicana, Palabras Dulces, Palabras Amargas, and most recently, the autobiographical short, No Es Facil. García Merchant is also the co-founder of the Chicana Por Mi Raza Digital Memory Collection (CPMR), an online repository of Chicana/Latina Second Wave Feminist materials and interviews. Her interview with the editors of Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era, “Making Chicana Movidas” is featured in the Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Spring 2020 special issue on Chicana Feminism. García Merchant’s research site, Chicana Diasporic: A Nomadic Journey of the Activist Exiled, highlights the political/ideological journey of the women of the Chicana Caucus of the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) from 1973 to 1979 alongside the autobiographical experience of living as Mexican and Black during that same period. Acutely aware of the complexities that continue to present themselves through this identity, García Merchant identifies as bicultural and Chicana. Presently Garcia Merchant is working on a chapter exploring the life of her second wave feminist mother, Ruth “Rhea” Mojica Hammer for the manuscript-in-progress, Chicago Latina Trailblazers.
Hosted by the Latin American studies program & the department of writing.