From Remezcla: “In 2013, University of Arizona Libraries made 150 years of regionally published newspapers chronicling Mexican and Mexican-American history available online for the first time. Librarians and archivists curated, researched, and digitized the database, which includes 20 different publications. “Throughout history, Spanish-language reporting has preserved the Mexican cultural narrative in written form,” said Assistant Professor Roberto Cintli Rodriguez. And the collection is useful to “anyone interested in the Mexican cultural narrative and the Mexican voice – the fight for their land, language, and rights.””
The Historic Mexican and Mexican American Press collection documents and showcases historic Mexican and Mexican American publications published in Tucson, El Paso, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sonora, Mexico from the mid-1800s to the 1970s. The collection covers important periods in Mexican-American history, from the Mexican Revolution to the Bracero Program to the Chicano Movement. There are about 1,900,000 Latino and Hispanic population in Arizona and more than 50 million in the United States. Having this collection available to the public through digitization of these materials, will raise awareness to issues that advance the image and identity of Latinos in American politics and media and their contributions to the United States.
The idea for this collection originated with an exhibit created by students of the History of Red-Brown Journalism and Communication course, taught by Dr. Roberto Cintli Rodriguez of the Mexican American Studies and Research Center at the University of Arizona. The course examined early civil and human rights struggles from the 19th and 20th century and Mexican-American journalism in the United States. The exhibit shared the students’ research with the community on the history of journalism and communication of Latino and indigenous populations.