BORDER ARTS CULTURAL
HERITAGE PROJECT

Scholars doing U.S./Mexico border-related Chicano cultural arts will receive a boost from a new project made possible with a grant from the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC MEXUS). The $15,000 grant was awarded to the University Libraries at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for "Border Arts Cultural Heritage", a one-year project that will organize, describe, and catalog three San Diego-based U.S./Mexico border-related Chicano/Latino cultural arts archives in the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA). According to CEMA Director Salvador Güereña, "these records elucidate the past and present history of Chicano cultural arts production in California and will provide an unprecedented visual record of Chicano/Latino art and cultural history."

This new grant will help to process personal collections of two visual artists, Salvador Roberto Torres and Victor Ochoa, and the organizational records of an internationally renowned Chicano/Latino cultural arts center, the Centro Cultural de la Raza, that these two artists helped found. These three collections are presently in a variety of print and media formats. Border Arts Cultural Heritage Project will help recover these materials from an unusable and inaccessible condition and transform these toone that is readily accessible to the research community, and, ultimately, the broader public. The project will create guides to each of the collections to be added to the UCSB Libraries website and the Online Archive of California of the California Digital Library

Centro Cultural de la Raza building

The Centro Cultural de la Raza is a Chicano Cultural Center founded in 1970 as an alternative program to encourage and facilitate artistic growth and cultural interchange in the San Diego communities. Centro Cultural has given birth to many artistic groups, such as MALAF, the Mexican American Liberation Art Front, and Teatro Mestizo. It also provides art classes

and drama, music, dance and arts and crafts presentations, many of which have origins in Mexico and Aztlán, the latter a term used by Chicanos to indicate the American Southwest. The Centro Cultural's circular building has offices and workrooms, studios, a theater, and much wall pace for mural projects. It is one of the largest Chicano cultural arts buildings in the Southwest.

 

Victor Ochoa

Border Bingo/Loteria Fronteriza by Victor Ochoa, 1987

 

Salvador and Gloria Torres

 

Salvador Roberto Torres is a Chicano artist and arts educator in California, best known as the "architect of the dream" for his vital role in the creation of San Diego's Chicano Park, the largest collection of Chicano murals in the world. He is an important and influential figure in the Chicano art movement, owing both to his art and to his civic work as a cultural activist. Torres' primary media are painting and mural painting.

 

Güereña states that these materials are unique and invaluable that will attract seminal research and lead to new publications, especially in the field of Chicano art history. Upon its completion, the project will increase the University's research resources in an area where such primary materials are either very limited or not accessible at all. The potential for advancing scholarship is great--these materials can provide the foundation for scholarly research in the humanities and social sciences. The collections contain un-interpreted raw data which, when effectively arranged and cataloged, will generate a wealth of primary source material on the history of a key, historic Chicano cultural arts organization and on the contributions of individual Chicano artists.