I am very fortunate to have been given the opportunity to take this class, the ROHP has given me a new insight to the city that I currently live and study in. By taking this class I was able to work with UCSD’s Raza Resource Centro and go through/help build an archive for MEChA. In doing this we were able to comb through different documents that MEChA had collected throughout the school’s history going all the way back to the early 1970’s. I personally found this very interesting as many of us had come across different documents that were in conversation with what we had been discussing in class. For example, I found the list of demands the Black Student Union had sent via email during “Black Winter,” an event that took place in 2010 which led to the establishment of D.E.I. course requirements and the Raza Resource Centro. This class has allowed us (students) to be in control over the work that we produce for the institution; because of this, my group has been given the opportunity to highlight events and groups that have been previously sidelined in our institution’s history. I hope that by helping the Raza Resource Centro establish this archive it will give students in the future the opportunity to access the history of our institution that is commonly only discussed in certain classes.
Overall this class has helped me begin to develop the skills that I will need as I begin to conduct not only oral history interviews but archival research this summer for my master’s thesis.
