This preformed panel consists of a team of three Chicana scholars and our moderator, Lorena Gauthereau from the U.S. Latino Digital Humanities Center at the Recovering the Hispanic Literary Heritage Project. As a three-person team of digital humanists, we will present different components and perspectives on the ethics of digital storytelling, the production of our collaborative project, Señora Power, and the rasquache strategies necessary to conduct this work. Rasquache, or rasquachismo, is a Chicane attitude that values working/lower class experiences, and it is an aesthetic that brings together scraps, leftovers, and recycled material to create new art, material, home décor, and everyday goods. Our project uses rasquache attitudes as a methodology for creating accessible, responsible and sustainable digital materials that (re)narrate the evolution of Chicana political consciousness throughout the 20th century.
In this panel we present Señora Power as a case-study for describing the specific Chicanx strategies required when representing racialized and marginalized communities throughout the US-Mexico Borderlands. By highlighting the challenges, strategies, and community reactions to the project, we explore how the intersection between Latinx Studies and Digital Humanities allows for the crucial representation of community histories that have long been left out of the official history taught in schools and universities. This expression of community history, specifically of Latinx history, is thanks to digital humanities methodologies and techniques such as digital storytelling. The traditional definition of digital storytelling is based on the origins of this genre in the 1990s—“2 - 5 minute videos that rely on still and moving images, a soundtrack, narration, and other components to tell a story.” Digital storytelling is a process through which minoritized communities can tell their own stories. The Señora Power project uses a Chicana feminist lens to create a praxis that allows for digital representation of Chicana history in Los Angeles and Houston in a way that considers community partners as collaborators and co-creators of the project, thus establishing a horizontal relationship between academic resources and community histories.
Our panel will consist of 3 papers or sections:
The first two papers will be presented by individual team members, focusing on a cohesive narrative of our fields, theory, and methodologies. The third paper will be much more interactive, asking audience members to take part in “rasquache strategizing.” We will lead the audience through a series of questions about their own work to consider what Chicana ethics and frameworks have to offer a digital humanist project.
Chicana Digital Humanities Praxis Background, Gaby Barrios
Understanding digital humanities as a discipline and methodology, we use DH to approach the question of self-representation within the Chicanx community. This presentation explores the ethical and theoretical backing of the Señora Power project. The 2018 work titled Chicana movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era, edited by Dionne Espinoza, María Eugenia Cotera, and Maylei Blackwell along with the project Chicana Por Mi Raza give us a foundation for the Señora Power project. These two works highlight Mexican American and Chicana women’s stories and contributions, acknowledging that the most important foundations of the Chicano Movement took place in small, mostly unrecognized feminized spaces.
The digital storytelling techniques that we use go hand in hand with the ethical frameworks we have adopted in order to properly partner with community organizations and groups. Drawing from Diana Taylor’s The Repertoire and the Archive, we are sensitive to the privacy and autonomy of our community respondents. While we hope to bring crucial parts of oral tradition and history into the recorded archive, we are also guided by the wisdom and knowledge of the Chicane community in Los Angeles and Houston. When we enter the institutional archive, such as university special collections, we consider the stories that appear in them as part of the same living history that Chicane community members share with us.
Señora Power : A Case Study, Sonia Del Hierro
This section will present an overview of our collaborative project, focusing on the ways we have used digital storytelling for social justice-oriented goals. Señora Power is a historical analysis of the growth and development of Chicana feminist politics in both Los Angeles and Houston. The historical narrative centralizes the different strategies of survival and resource-gathering, which appear, at times, very differently in each city despite facing similar issues of racism, forced assimilation, and violent policing. Our primary goal is to create openness and awareness of Chicana contributions to U.S. history and culture.
Digital tools, like podcasts, offer a method of intervening into gaps in both historical and cultural conversations in both community and education spaces. Señora Power uses podcasts to highlight histories boxed behind institutional archives, to include community voices from oral interviews conducted by the team, and to connect seemingly disparate stories of individual women in a longer arc of Chicana political consciousness. Our episodes focus on specific individuals—women of Mexican descent who are or were respected in their local communities. Some of this biographical information comes from physical and digital archives while other pieces are told by local community members who knew or are related to the individual señoras. Our work is to stitch together and make digitally accessible this larger narrative of struggle and racial justice. As such, this paper will present Señora Power as a case study in Chicana digital storytelling.
Sharing Rasquache DH Strategies, Sophia Martinez-Abbud
The last section of the panel takes a detailed look at the tools, software, and institutional resources we have made use of for the Señora Power project, such as Airtable, Audacity, and Wordpress. We also share information about the funds and expenditures that have supported this project, as well as decisions we have taken regarding the sustainability of the project beyond the first season.
Putting our rasquache strategies into practice, we make use of this section of the panel to record this conversation between the three panelists for use in our podcast. We then stop the recording and open the floor for audience members to share their own rasquache strategies and resources; in this way, the Q&A section is extended into a more personalized exercise in collaboration toward sustainability. The purpose of this section is to explore the challenges and limitations of DH storytelling, while also finding–and sometimes inventing–new narrative, archival, and research strategies that more closely resemble the methods used by the communities under representation as well. Through built-in moments of interactivity where panelists ask the audience questions about their own projects, this section stages a generative conversation about the ethics, resources, and methodologies of using DH tools to represent marginalized histories.