Thomas O'Donnell, Ph.D., Principal Analyst, Office of Academic Diversity
twodonnell@ucdavis.edu
This article provides a brief account of some of the available sources to help write this history. We are fortunate to have a significant cache of primary sources including the school’s newspaper, The California Aggie, which has its entire run back to 1915 digitized.
Additionally, and this is both helpful and revealing about the importance of liberation movements at UC Davis, there was a newspaper printed somewhat regularly called the Third World News, or Noticias del Tercer Mundo, in the case of special editions that focused on Chicana/o issues. It was published from about 1970 to 1975 and Shields Library has all of the editions known to be in existence and has recently digitized them for online access. In an Aggie article announcing the first issue, the editors stated their intention that it reflect the concerns of “Third World people,” which it defined as “Chicano, Asian, Black, Native American and foreign students.”
The Third World News was replaced in 1976 by the Third World Forum which ran until at least 1993 as a regular part of the Aggie newspaper. These student-run newspapers contain a wealth of information about this history of Chi/Lat activism and will form the basis of many future articles.
Other important repositories of this history include holdings in the Shields Library Special Collections such as the records from the Department of Chicana/o Studies, faculty member Riddell (Adaljiza Sosa) Papers, Galvan (Joaquin) Collection on Racial Conflict at UC Davis, a Retention Coordinator at the UC Davis Learning Skills Center from 1981-2011, Oral interview transcripts from Professor Deeb-Sossa’s Community-Based Participatory Research course (CHI 141), UC Davis Emeriti Association, Video Records Project, The Sacramento Movimiento Chicano and Mexican American Education Oral History Project, and the UC Davis Spectator, the predecessor to the current UC Davis Magazine, 1996-2015 and 2015 - present.
There are of course a plethora of secondary sources for which we have started to create a bibliography and will continually update with the sources used in the writing of future articles or are written by UC Davis affiliated individuals.
Read the next article in this series:
