Resistance and Belonging
in an Academic Library:
Finding Home in the Praxis
By Margie Montañez
Peer reviewed by Xaviera Flores
& Isabel Espinal
Teresa Márquez in boxing gloves at the Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections.
Positionality Statement
As a Chicana cultural studies scholar with a tenure-track faculty librarianship position, I recognize the privilege of my academic appointment. Still, I struggle with constructing my place (my home) in an academic library and archive. The literal and theoretical act of making and claiming space for one’s positionality is already an act of resistance, and it rests on minoritized groups to do it every time we enter a new academic space as our histories, cultures, and lived experiences are not part of the narratives that shape higher education(1). We do not build our home alone, but rather make home in the praxis of resistance and belonging in likeness to those who paved the way before us. Briefly foregrounding three area studies Latinx librarian precursors—Carlos Castañeda, Martha Cotera, and María Teresa Márquez–I cement their legacy in the profession and reveal a clearing for continued trajectories.
In exploration of home, belonging, and resistance, I start with the self—both personally and professionally. Personally, I am a Chicana from Southern New Mexico. Professionally, I am a cultural studies scholar housed in an academic library as the Curator of Latin American and U.S Latinx Collections at the Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections (CSWR) at the University of New Mexico (UNM). I entered the academy with the cultural and informal knowledge of growing up on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. I was always drawn to folklore and family stories shaped by movement through space, time, and geography. I contemplated what this taught me about history, culture, and belonging, and how this type of knowledge is not only passed down, preserved, and disseminated, but how these histories are often ignored, re-written or otherwise erased by dominant historians. By way of formal training, I earned a doctorate in American Studies while continuing to explore themes of belonging and resistance. Home is for me personal, professional, and political.
As a Chicana curator whose identity is the subject of the collections I curate, I am both object and subject. This creates an interstitial space(2) where the autoethnographic tenets of my librarianship are revealed. As Angie Chabram claims, the “politics of ethnographic interpretation identified in Chicano discourse, and anthropological discourse embraced race, class, gender, under-representation, and economic oppression” and recuperated an “historical subject through history, politics, literature, sociology, folklore, law, and art”(3). As the curator of Latin American and U.S Latinx collections I grapple to recuperate historical erasures in archives and libraries. I am intimately aware of the connection between culture and texts. My philosophy and praxis consider not only the historical implications of collections, but also account for the ways collections and cultures are shaped by the contemporary moment and by the human experience. The relationship between time, space, collections, and culture shapes our future as well.
It is with those who came before me with whom I now share a similar space that I find my footing. Dr. Carlos Castañeda was a “hallmark of Southwestern historiography”(4) and in 1927 was the Latin American Collection Librarian at the University of Texas at Austin (UT)(5). Leveraging his positionality as a Mexican National and an academic, Castañeda’s “dual reputation as librarian and historian allowed him to move with ease back and forth from the academic community to the public sector,”(6) and he made frequent trips to Mexico copying archival records from Mexican archives for US institutions, even establishing the Mexican Photo Print Company(7). Although his impact on Latin American collections is recognized now—UT named a library after him, the Perry-Castañeda Library—Castañeda’s activities were viewed by his contemporary library colleagues as “‘wholly unrelated to duties in the library’” and “library gossip maligned Castañeda for being a Mexican and a Catholic”(8). Even to this day, the librarianship profession remains largely white, with only 9.8% listed as Hispanic/Latino(9).
Conference Proceeding for the Institute of Latin-American Studies Conference on “Changes in the Economic and Political Situation in the Western Hemisphere and Problems Arising Therefrom, As a Result of the War in Europe. 2-3 July 1940.
Institute of Latin American Studies conference brochure listing Castañeda as a member and as both an Associate Professor of History and Latin-American Librarian.
Martha Cotera, a librarian, author, and activist, was the “Director of Documents at the Texas State Library in Austin” and later became director of “Southwest Education Development and was put in charge of 28 libraries across the state of Texas”(10) She also headed the Crystal City Memorial Library, “responsible for democratizing the library system,”(11) and worked for “three decades as a community liaison for the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas”(12). A storied career in libraries, Cotera also worked at the Chicano Research and Learning Center (13)and worked on the Bio-Bibliographic Encyclopedia of Hispanic Women that proposed to collect “information on historically significant Hispanic women across the Americas and to organize that information in a searchable format utilizing the newest database technology” before the project was lost due to funding(14).
[Letter from Martha Cotera accepting a position to work with the Juarez-Lincoln Center citing her expertise in libraries and contributing to the information needs of migrant programs.] [Full Text]
The important work of organizing and curating information was led by another one of my precursors, this time closer to home. In 1979, María Teresa Márquez was the Humanities and later Southwest Librarian in the CSWR at UNM. In an interview in the Blue Mesa Review, Márquez speaks on the work she did to amplify Chicano culture and literature. Márquez worked with the late Rudolfo Anaya to create a speaker series that attracted not only an academic community, but the local community alike(15). Márquez worked tirelessly to recognize Chicano/a authors and critics, and to bring their books to the library(16). Like Cotera and Castañeda, Márquez had the “goal of building a relationship with Mexico and Mexican scholars”(17) and in 1991 she developed an extensive mailing list, CHICLE, the Chicano/Chicana Literature Exchange. Unfortunately, like Castañeda and no doubt countless others, the library did not view Márquez’s work as library work and administration cut off funding for a work-study student. In Márquez’s own words: “I didn’t know my place as a Chicana faculty member” and she had to stop working on her “internet work” with CHICLE and Chicano/a programming(18).
[Article in Campus News highlighting Teresa Márquez’s “brainchild,” CHICLE] [Full Text]
[Published spotlight featuring Teresa Márquez’s promotion of Chicana/o literature] [Full Text]
Even when people who look like us occupy libraries and archival spaces, the power to fill in historical erasures, diversify knowledge, and enact change is complicated. María Cotera calls attention to this predicament: “there can be little doubt that one’s access to power determines one’s presence in the archive, and one’s presence in the archive actively shapes the kinds of histories that can be written, which, in turn, informs the system of valuation that structures the priorities that govern collecting and preservation in institutions”(19). The profession is at a critical juncture—a time of recognizing and addressing the role archives play in shaping, keeping, and resisting history. My work is to center and bring forth the ways minoritized voices in libraries and archives contribute to the field, not only in ways that have already been examined to disrupt whiteness, but in ways that continue the work that implores us to reexamine and claim the different ways of knowing we bring to the profession. It is in the temporal praxis of resistance and belonging and collections and culture that the stories of our academic Latinx librarian ancestors not only make home for us in the present, but also for those who will come after. It is also in this praxis that I claim our presence, our power, in this profession and in the historical archival record.
End Notes
(1)See for example, Eric Castillo’s “Justice in Action in the Ivory Towers: Decolonial and Anti-Racist work Inside/Outside the Master’s House” for a brief social history of higher education in Dismantling Whiteness: Narratives of Resistance from the Academy. Edited by Teresa Neely and Margie Montañez. Routledge 2023.
(2) In Emma Perez’ Decolonial Imaginary she argues that an interstitial space is where differential politics and social dilemmas are negotiated. Pérez, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas Into History. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999.
(3) Chabram, Angie. “Chicana/o Studies as Oppositional Ethnography.” Cultural Studies 4.3
(1990): 228-247.
(4) Almaréz, Felix Almarez. Knight Without Armor: Carlos Eduardo Castaneda, 1896-1958, Texas A&M University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unm/detail.action?docID=3037697. xiii
(5) Almaréz, 38
(6) Almaréz, 186
(7) Almaréz
(8) Almaréz, 70
(9) Rhodes. Tamara; Naomi Bishop, and Alanna Aiko Moore. “The Work of Women of Color Academic Librarians in Higher Education: Perspectives on Emotional and Invisible Labor.” up//root: a we here publication. February 13, 2023. https://www.uproot.space/features/the-work-of-women-of-color
(10) Dreeze, Katelynn. Biography of Martha Cotera. Chicana Por Mi Raza (CPMR). https://chicanapormiraza.org/chicanas/martha-cotera
(11) Dreeze, CPMR
(12) Dreeze, CPMR
(13) According to the Texas State Historical Association, The Chicana Research and Learning Center was the first “research and service project in the nation founded and run by and for Mexican-American women” TSHA | Chicana Research and Learning Center (tshaonline.org)
(14) Cotera, María. ”Unpacking Our Mother’s Libraries: Practices of Chicana Memory Before and After the Digital Turn,” in Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era., ed Dionne Espinosa et al. University of Texas Press, 2018, 300.
(15) Vizcaíno-Alemán, Melina. “Resisting the Darkness of Boxes: A Conversation with María Teresa Márquez.” Blue Mesa Review, no43, Spring 2021: 10
(16) Teresa established with Rodolfo Anaya two prizes, the Premio Aztlan and Critica Nueva, an award for best book published in a current year and the other award for critics of Chicano and Chicana literature. See Blue Mesa Review
(17) Marquez, Quoted in Blue Mesa Review, 12
(18) Tersa, quoted in Blue Mesa Review, 14.
(19) Cotera, 300
Margie Montañez (she/her/ella), Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor and Curator of Latin American Collections at the Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections at the University of New Mexico. She is a former CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Latin American, Caribbean, and Chicano/a Studies. Her scholarship focuses on Chicano/a Cultural Production, U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, and Digital Humanities. As a cultural studies scholar housed in the library, she works with post-custodial archival collections that bridge the north-south information divide, oversees the Latin American collections, and helps implement transnational digital humanities projects. She is co-editor of Dismantling Constructs of Whiteness in Higher Education: Narratives of Resistance from the Academy (2023) published by Routledge as part of their Research in Higher Education series.