Unpacking Our Mothers' Libraries

This chapter aims to focus Chicana collecting as a praxis of memory that offers a model to critically reframe the relationship between the past and the present. It argues that the critical reframing of the past in the present offers new objects of inquiry and new methods of analysis. Scholars of Chicana history have long observed how relative invisibility of Chicanas in institutional archives has structured absences in the collective historical knowledge about the central role they have played in shaping various movement ideologies and practices. The modularity and automation of data in digital media offer new “opportunities for combining old media objects into new configurations in fast and efficient ways that are user focused.” The recombinant memory practices enabled by new media can reveal affinities and networked connectivities in previously isolated collections. The Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Project seeks to recuperate few technologies of memory even as it replicates them in its own digital praxis.

Linguistics · Sociology · Unpacking · Computer Science · Library Science and Administration · Philosophy