Good morning, it’s Wednesday July 28, you can expect another hot and humid day.
1. A new digital archive preserves the story of Chavez Ravine families for generations to come.
By now, the story of how the city of Los Angeles bulldozed the neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine and displaced thousands of Mexican American residents in the 1950s to make way for Dodger Stadium has become one of the city’s ingrained political and cultural narratives.
There have been documentaries, radio programs, books, art exhibitions and, of course, endless newspaper articles detailing how city officials painted the tight-knit community as a slum, then swept it away. And there have been countless projects of remembrance and restoration, including a proposal for reparations.
Earlier this month, LMU launched a unique contribution to this ongoing project of civic remembrance and atonement. Chavez Ravine: An Unfinished History is an online, community-curated archive of photos, oral histories and other documents. But in this archive, the former Chavez Ravine residents and their family members who contribute memorabilia retain the copyright. This break from the conventional paradigm of archive building, the project founders noted on the website, hands “narrative authority to the communities themselves.”
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