Toward a Critical Race Feminista Archival Praxis

• In Event: Critical Race Feminista Methodologies in Educational Research

Abstract

Purpose and Theoretical Framework

Delgado Bernal and Villalpando (2010) argue that the University as an institution is a key arena where “legitimate” knowledge is created, housed, and established. For non-dominant populations, the university creates an “apartheid of knowledge” in distorting and erasing the experiences, histories, and systems of knowledge that these communities possess. Archivists participate in this process through “archival silence” while bearing a great deal of responsibility in contributing to preserving the canons of “objective” truth. The archival profession is nearly 86 percent white (Society of American Archivists, 2012). This lack of professional diversity is instrumental in understanding how histories are interpreted and preserved in building collections. In this paper, the authors employ a Critical race feminista methodology (CRFM) to invoke a praxis in library and information science that challenges the often-regarded apolitical role of archivists (Delgado Bernal et al., 2018).

Methods and Findings

A CRFM archival praxis calls for the building and maintenance of collections that recognizes that “the unearthing of silences requires not only extra labor at the archives but is also a project linked to interpretation” (Trouillot, 1995). To do that work, we propose a CRFM by utilizing tools that disrupt the “objective and neutral” ways archivists have been trained in (Beilin, 2018). Traditional library collections function as “master narratives” that often present distorted and deficient narratives of nondominant people. We discuss how employing a counternarrative methodology proposed by CRT scholars, can help in interrogating the method of cataloging and classifying information. Utilizing platicas as a counter-storytelling strategy, the authors (a university library archivist and an education sociohistorian) present a dialogue reflecting on our own multiple positionalities as first-generation women of color scholars and practitioners in our attempt to race-queer the archive. In our attempts to include the various experiences of women of color, we reflect on our own respective work. Our platica takes readers on a journey to trouble how collections are built, what information becomes silenced and distorted, and the building of archives that challenge racism, classism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism. We discuss strategies including the crafting of public-face policy statements, anti-oppressive descriptions, and creating notes contextualizing offensive terminology and implementing reviews of findings aids for problematic language. In our attempt to shift the lexicon of rectifying the creation of collections, we propose CRFM tenets to guide archivists.

Scholarly Significance and Implications

A CRFM archival praxis offers tenets that acknowledge and disrupt the colonial and white supremacist heteropatriarchal practices that have created a complex history in relationship between the archives and nondominant peoples. Recognizing the importance that libraries and archives hold in perpetuating the “apartheid of knowledge,” a CRFM archival praxis acknowledges a complex history of colonial, white supremacist, heteropatriarchal practices that omits and distorts the many manifestations of the knowledge that non-dominant people possess. Calling attention these practices in cataloging, description, and metadata is critical to educational researchers to understand and challenge the continual violence on knowledge access for nondominant populations.

Authors

• Maria C. Malagon, California State University - Fullerton

• Lizeth Zepeda, Loyola Marymount University