Archives & Special Collections invites you to learn about and celebrate the rich history of cultural student organizations and activism from Santa Clara University’s students by interacting with our newest digital collection, The Multicultural Center and Cultural Student Organizations at SCU. This collection collates and displays documents relating to the Multicultural Center and cultural student organizations such as Igwebuike, MEChA-El Frente, and the UNITY movements, among others. The collection currently features 47 objects, and more are being added each week.

Formation  

SCU Archives & Special Collections digitization work is fueled by research requests. Many of the documents we have digitized for this collection reflect interest and requests from researchers, including SCU faculty and students. Most especially, materials from this collection were requested for and utilized by Jesica Fernández’ ETHN 165 Community-Based Research Methods class. It’s been a pleasure being able to share these materials with her students, and as a result, being able to prioritize their digitization and inclusion in digital collections. The more research requests we have, the more we are able to prioritize this work. 

Goals

Our goals with this collection are to directly connect researchers to materials; provide the bedrock for online instruction opportunities that encourage critical thinking about power, identity, and representation; and connect current students with struggles and successes of past students. By having all these materials available (and downloadable) online, we’re streamlining access to these highly-requested resources. For instance, many of these materials were used to support reference requests for the recent article titled ‘Not a Moment, But a Movement’ featured in Santa Clara Magazine.

Materials from this collection have also been used for ETHN 165 in-class activities. By critically analyzing these materials, Ethnic Studies students not only learn how to undertake archival research, but also learn more about the rich history of cultural student organizations and activism here at SCU. Current students can connect with these stories of past students to contextual events that happen at SCU today.

We plan to continue using these materials in our upcoming archival instruction sessions, and faculty members interested in scheduling an archival instruction session can contact us as specialcollections@scu.edu.

Structure and Searching

In general, most of the collections in SCU Digital Collections reflect the physical order of locations held within Archives & Special Collections. For this digital collection, materials have been pulled from a variety of different places. All of the materials in this collection come from University Records, including but not limited to the Office of the President (Papers of Paul Locatelli, S.J., 1968-1998), Records of the Vice Provost for Student Life, and Office Records of the Student Resource Center. If you’re interested in viewing all documents included in the digital collection from a certain record group, you can click the record group name on the collection landing page.

When searching this collection, it is important to remember that the language we use for student groups and cultural issues today may not be the language used at the time a document was created. For example, SCU’s Latinx Student Union was formerly called Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlan – El Frente (MEChA-El Frente), and before that, El Frente Estudiantil Chicano, and before that, MACS. While we have documents that reference MEChA-El Frente, we don’t have documents about the Latinx Student Union, because that name was not used in the documents we have in the archives. A list of terms used in the collection can be found on the collection landing page.

Harmful Materials

Santa Clara University’s Archives & Special Collections department makes publicly available historical materials which reflect a variety of viewpoints on social, political, and intellectual issues of the past and recent past. The collections (including this collection) include materials which contain negative and/or discriminatory stereotypes, language, or symbols aimed at marginalized groups based on race, ethnicity, gender, social class, or religion, to name a few. Archives & Special Collections does not condone these viewpoints. We affirm that these viewpoints are not only discriminatory and offensive, but also disrespectful, inhumane, and unjust. Please read our full Statement on Harmful Materials for more information.

Some materials in this collection contain offensive racial slurs and have not been made public. We have not included these materials within the digital collection because we did not want to unintentionally harm any of our students or researchers who may look through these materials. Because objects are displayed before metadata, users may look through the object itself before reading all of the metadata, and as such may unintentionally expose themselves to extremely harmful language before being able to read a content warning. We want our users to be able to choose whether or not they want to view these harmful materials. These materials are available to any researcher upon request, and a note regarding excluded pages has been included in the metadata for any objects which are missing pages. 

For More Information

The full digital collection can be found within SCU Digital Collections at https://cdm17268.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/Cultural. If you have questions, would like to receive more information about this collection, or are a student group looking to include your materials in SCU’s Archives & Special Collections, please feel free to contact Archives & Special Collections at specialcollections@scu.edu.

Header image: Excerpt from UNITY Memo to Erekson March 7 1996. Image courtesy of SCU Archives & Special Collections Digital Collections.