Historic Mexican and Mexican American Press Collection: Expanding Access to a Different Point of View

The University of Arizona Libraries’ Historic Mexican and Mexican American Press online collection provides access to Mexican and Mexican American magazines and newspapers published in Tucson, El Paso, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sonora, Mexico, from the late 1800s to the 2000s. These newspapers are useful not only for researchers and students, but the Mexican American community has also found these newspapers to be very important and critical to showing their views of historical events. The newspapers demonstrate the voice that Mexican American newspapers have provided during critical time periods in U.S. history as Mexican Americans fought for justice, equality, and human rights and what daily life was like for Mexican Americans. This paper will discuss the origin of the project, describe how the project team approached the development of the collection, and the benefits of collaborating with campus and other institutional partners. We include the results of interviews with University of Arizona faculty both before and after the completion of the project, the impact on classes and researchers of making these newspapers openly available, comparisons to similar collections, and examples of the types of information available through the collection. We also discuss what it has meant to the local Mexican American community to have these magazines and newspapers openly available.