The Washington State Chicano History Project

This presentation will discuss what happens when a research cluster of undergraduate Latino/a students in the UW chapter of MEChA used Civil Rights Project resources to interview Chicano/a movement activists from the 1960s and 1970s not just about their history, but about the founding of their own student group. MEChA students now use those interviews, and research they did about Chicano/a movement history, to recruit Latino/as to attend the UW, as well as to do political education among students in order to sustain their current organization. Finally, the opportunity to publish oral history excerpts online has created a knowledge bank that has both dramatized the everyday struggles at the local level that make social change a reality, as well as served to highlight how the civil rights movement was national rather than regional in scope. Online oral history interviews have served as one of the most popular features of our web site among K-12 and college educators, and many of the people we interviewed have since been contacted for dozens of speaking and follow-up interview opportunities as a result of the publicity that we brought to their work.