Grant to Fund Digitizing of Herman Baca Archives at UCSD

UC San Diego is starting a two-year effort to computerize some 40,000 pages of archival material on Chicano activist Herman Baca, a university spokesman said Wednesday.

Correspondence, photographs, posters, slides and audio interviews chronicle the Chicano movement in San Diego between 1964 and 2006. The effort is being funded by a $56,000 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

"Herman Baca has made an amazing contribution by documenting the Chicano Movement in San Diego and Southern California," said Marye Anne Fox, UCSD chancellor.

Baca was a prominent Chicano activist, political organizer, printer and the founder of the Committee on Chicano Rights during the 1960s.

"Digitizing this collection will greatly increase the impact of his archive by making it available to all segments of the community, which will help us to strengthen our ties to the Chicano community while providing an important new resource for teachers, students, and scholars and citizens beyond the campus," Fox said.

Baca's archives are in the Mandeville Special Collections Library, along with the American Friends Service Committee United States-Mexico Border Program Records of 1974-2004 and papers from that group's director, Roberto Martinez.

—City News Service