Archival research. Something that is rarely taught in high school and rarely spoken of.
As explained in my last post, for my college English class, we entered the archival collection to conduct research about my university’s past. My university archival room was not as large as I expected but it was a very regal-looking room with a lot of natural sunlight. It’s a beautiful room and despite the small size, the atmosphere made me feel as if I was in the Hogwarts library.
On the first day, the archival librarian introduced the different types of artifacts laid out and just as I had predicted, there was very limited information about Native Americans and Native American life during the creation of the university. Initially, I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to research about Native American life, but was excited to have found interesting information about the arrival of women to the university.
I was mainly focusing on the information about women involved in sports. I found this photo of the first women basketball team in 1984.
As I kept flipping through the entire album of women in sports, I noticed that there weren’t any photos of women of color. I wanted to know when women of color started playing sports, let alone started attending my university. The album was extremely large and so I gave up my search in finding a photo of the first woman of color to play a sport.
I became interested in finding more information about people of color at my historically predominate white university.
On the second day of archival research in the archive room, I found some documents regarding my college’s Multicultural Center (MCC) and Unity movement. The current MCC includes 9 cultural clubs and serves as a safe space for minority groups at my university. Unity (currently Unity 4) is a group of students (mainly from the MCC) who work in bringing diversity and solidarity to our campus. Although information was also limited on these two groups, there were some interesting documents that contained the mission statements for both the MCC and Unity.
This photo above shows the mission statement of the MCC which is to:
“Provide the minority student organizations of Santa Clara University an environment conductive to promoting an appreciation of the different cultures…”
This relates to my understanding of the university because it is still the same mission statement as it was in 1984. The fact that this mission statement is the same goes to show that the same problem that existed years ago, still exists.
There are many unanswered questions about the MCC and Unity movement and it’s impossible for one individual to understand what it was like during the time of the establishment of these two clubs. However, this doesn’t mean my curiosity has ended.