CARIDAD II
Sal Güereña
April 9, 2004

California Cultures draws on the extraordinarily rich resources of the University of California to create a digital collection at the California Digital Library's (CDL) Online Archive of California (OAC). This virtual collection will document ethnic groups in California and the West with specific aims to build an online research collection of primary resources comprised of digital images and electronic texts available to students, teachers, scholars and the general public to serve as the basis for historical studies, analysis, interpretation and application to current events.

The CARIDAD II project is a one-year digital initiative (2003-2004) that will build on CARIDAD I, a project that secured, described and cataloged over 14,000 Chicano art slides from four of California’s top Chicano cultural art centers.

The comprehensive collection created by the project is an invaluable resource of an important art movement that began in the mid-1960s. This historic archive of slides and art prints records the past and present history of the centers of Chicano art production and exhibition in California, provides anunprecedented visual record of that important art and cultural historyfor the broader public of California. The centers represented in the project include the Centro Cultural de la Raza (San Diego), Galeria de la Raza (San Francisco), the Royal Chicano Air Force (Sacramento), and Self-Help Graphics & Art (Los Angeles). CEMA is the official archival repository for all four centers. The electronic database to be created will also include digitized prints and slides from the CEMA collections of artists Linda Vallejo, Jose Montoya, Esteban Villa, Salvador Torres, Yolanda Lopez, Victor Ochoa, and Rini Templeton.

CEMA‘s CARIDAD II project (Chicano Art Resources Information Development and Dissemination), is a new initiative that will for the first time make it possible for many thousands of rare Chicano art images to be enjoyed and appreciated through the World Wide Web.

In an accord between the California Digital Library (CDL) and the University Libraries, a CDL grant of $100,000 is enabling CEMA to significantly expand its participation in the California Digital Library. CEMA is digitizing and adding 7000 images of Chicano visual and cultural arts, as well as culturally relevant descriptions, to the California Cultures Project of the Online Archive of California.