Chicana por Mi Raza is a digital humanities project that involves the collection, digitization, and display of archival materials and oral histories related to the development of Chicana Feminist thought and praxis over the long civil rights era.
We are currently at the planning stage for a feminist digital archive. The archival material derives from the Ella Strong Denison library, which includes significant collections of suffragette ephemera, 19th century women’s work, book arts from antiquity to the present, and an extensive interdisciplinary teaching collection. We hope to develop a program that utilizes the archive as an opportunity to explore a range of questions within digital humanities. In particular, we are interested in developing a specifically feminist encoding paradigm that will allow us to integrate feminist theoretical insights on archival formation, digital technology, and user interfaces. We also plan to develop a digital archive that maximizes the pedagogical impact of digitizing the Denison materials.
Still very much in its development stages, the project explores how Spanish women understood and represented their charitable work from the late-Enlightenment period through the end of the Spanish Civil War and the early part of the Franco dictatorship.