Class Blog

The Virginia Espino and Renee Tajima-Pena Collection of Sterilization records is a collection of legal records and court documents from the 1975 class action lawsuit Madrigal v. Quilligan. This lawsuit was brought to court by 10 Latina women against E.J. Quilligan M.D. and other hospital employees in regards to coerced sterilization of Latina women at Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center. While the ultimately judge ruled against the women, the lawsuit still increased public awareness about sterilization of minority women. Also included in this collection are Oral History Audio Recordings done by Virginia Espino documenting the interviews with prominent Latinas at the time of the court case and their involvement. Also included are interviews with a lawyer who supported the plaintiffs in the lawsuit and a doctor at the hospital who reported that minority women were being sterilized.

The court documents provide a very factual account of the court proceedings. The collection includes all the interrogatories as well as answers from the defendants and plaintiffs and other documents detailing the proceedings of the lawsuit. From these documents, one gets a comprehensive and non-biased narrative of the case proceedings given that they are all just reports and not subjective stories. The oral recordings give a very different historical narrative. These are personal accounts of people who were involved in the case. As a result, you’ll get a narrative that includes people’s feelings and different experiences that all show slightly different perspectives about the events of the case.

That being said, this collection is missing a large section of information. While there are 10 different tapes from individuals sympathetic to the plaintiffs, there are no interviews with those sympathetic to the defendants. This means that an entire perspective of the case is completely missing. Anyone trying to understand this lawsuit by looking at the information stored in this collection would have a significant bias towards the plaintiffs because the collection only includes interviews with people sympathetic to them. In order to remedy this, oral recordings should be made of Dr. E. J. Quilligan and other hospital employees who were involved in the case so that their perspectives can be included and considered. This collection also lacks interviews with the actual plaintiffs. While interviews with others involved in the case such as the lawyer and the doctor gives a more personal view of the lawsuit, having interviews with the actual women who were sterilized would provide more valuable information about the case.

For this assignment, I chose to explore the finding aid for Walt Disney Productions Publicity Ephemera, which is an archival collection provided by the UCLA Library of Performing Arts Special Collections and stored off-site at the Southern Regional Library Faculty (SRLF). The collection consists of a total of 280 pieces–photographs, press books, press kits, film stills, and other print resources of the Walt Disney productions and films from 1938 to the 1980s. Many of the pieces come from over 150 Walt Disney films, which were mostly produced from 1950 to the 1980s.

The finding aid for this collection was processed by N. Vega and includes a descriptive summary of the collection, as well as information about the Walt Disney company and a container list of the projects that are organized in an alphabetical order. The container list specifies the boxes and folders in which the collection pieces are stored at SRLF. The finding aid also provides contact information for inquiries about the collection and requests for access to the collection, which allow viewers to learn more about the earlier productions of Walt Disney and gain deeper insights on how the company came to be one of the global leaders in animation production and family entertainment.

While the scope of the collection covers a large number of the early works of Walt Disney Productions, I found that the finding aid is quite limiting and may not be very helpful for viewers to further look into the collection. Although the finding aid comprises of a biography section that briefly mentions the development of the animation films, it does not provide any images of the pieces from the collection nor any detailed descriptions, making it difficult for viewers to fully understand the narrative that the collection is trying to portray. In addition, the projects are indexed alphabetically, which viewers may find confusing, as it would make more sense to view the collection chronologically. This would enable viewers to follow the progress that Walt Disney Productions has made in the film and entertainment industry, and examine the incorporation of technologies, such as color and sound, into these productions.

The finding aid for the Walt Disney Productions Publicity Ephemera catalogues many of Disney’s feature-length and short subject films through a collection of press kits, press books, publicity stills, and other ephemera for their films. This collection contains objects from 1938 to the 1980s.

These items can reveal a lot about the narrative and history of Disney. Many of the objects in this collection are related to the advertising of these motion pictures, so a lot about how Disney markets themselves can be seen through these items. Disney has always been a family entertainment company, and these records show this through cataloguing the kind of films Disney produced and the way they were marketed, specifically to children and families. We might also be able to recognize the scope of these films as a whole, and the overall themes that Disney was trying to portray through them. Also, the biography mentions the decline of Disney’s reputation from 1966 to 1980. Because the collection has items from this time period, we might be able to see the effects of Disney’s decline on the publicity of the films produced during this time.

Although this collection is about Disney’s impactful films, the collection does not contain the films themselves, so it would be difficult to construct ideas of why their films are so impactful and significant based on ephemera alone. Another important part of the history of these films are how they were made and who worked on them. Also, although the decline of Disney’s popularity may be able to be noticed through the records, the reason for what caused the decline and the general history of Disney would be difficult to decipher from the records alone. The included biography of Disney helps remedy this by giving a general history of the company. To understand these records fully however, I believe it would be important to also have copies or at least summaries of the films themselves.

Risha Sanikommu

I thought the finding aid, Walt Disney Productions Publicity Ephemera, 1938-198x, would be interesting to delve into. The finding aid initially lists background information such as the creator, dates, location, and extent of the collection. It also talks about how to access it. In this case, advance notice is required. The collection includes printed publicity materials for Walt Disney Productions films. Among these printed items are press kits, press books, publicity stills, and more. The collection hosts more than 150 titles and includes films such as The Jungle Book, Mary Poppins, Davy Crockett, and more. The aid also has a biography on the Walt Disney Company. The biography describes the beginnings of the company with Steamboat Willie all the way through the leadership changes, and what Disney has become today.

The contents of the boxes are listed in alphabetical order. While this is a good way of keeping information organized, I do not think narratives can be constructed when organized in this manner. I feel that sorting the works chronologically would provide a greater framework. Once the works are organized by date, they can be sorted through more filters. Some examples are when new technologies are implemented such as the use of color, sound, or computers. Some other questions could be posed. When did Disney transition from hand drawn animation? Were there stylistic and tone changes in content when Walt Disney died? Did the executive power struggle affect Disney’s creative process? Were Disney films affected by other factors such as trends in the movie industry? These questions may not necessarily all be able to be answered from the materials, but they will be a good starting point. Placing them into chronological order will let us see changes over time, and we can search deeper through other library and online resources.

I select the Collection of Material about Japanese American Internment, 1929-1956 bulk 1942-1946 for its significance in reflecting the history of Japan–United States relations. This collection includes primary source in the forms of publications, press releases, yearbooks, pamphlets, speeches, clippings of published articles, masters’ theses, artistic sketches, etc.  With an emphasis on the Manzanar and Minidoka internment camps, those materials, mainly documented the history of Japanese Americans, relocation, and internment during 1942-1946. And they were originally created by U.S. Department of the Interior War Relocation Authority (WRA) and by Japanese American internees and advocacy groups.

The materials have been organized and categorized into five boxes of different themes: two boxes for War Relocation Authority from 1942-1946, one box for internment camps from 1942-1945 and one box for miscellaneous from 1929-1956. The fifth box contains a poster recruiting to build a new Tokyo. If the first two boxes tell a narrative on the policies, social opinions and propaganda from the perspective of the government, the third box from the internment narrates the life of the internment from the internees’ perspective and the last miscellaneous box supplements the former two narratives.

This collection first tells us how the government planned, controlled, and inspected the internment camps with their quarterly and semi-annual reports.  It took the government some time to choose the locations for the internment and gather the statistics of the employees’ and internees’ life within internment camps.  Besides segregating the Japanese Americans, the camps attempted to mobilize, educate, convert and entertain the internees. Special attention had been paid to riots and violence in the camps. Those reports ended in 1946 with the closure of the Tule Lake relocation center.

The collection also demonstrates how the high officials updated their political opinions and explained the policies of relocating and resettling the Japanese Americans during the course of war. On the one hand, the government realized there had been riots within the camps and anti-Japanese American sentiments over the States. On the other hand, from the speeches, they also took pains to regulate Japanese Americans and ease their discontent. Positive examples such as Ben Kuroki had been set to show many Japanese-Americans’ loyalty to the U.S.

How the young Japanese-Americans grew up during and after the relocation formed anther narrative. Yearbooks from high schools in the relocating areas and all kinds of reports on “Nisei,” namely the second generation Japanese-Americans, portrayed a growing group announcing a disconnection from the older generations, their fusion into the American society and loyalty to the U.S. Meanwhile, the materials mentioned the racist prejudice that Japanese-Americans experienced during this period.

After reading the finding aid, I think the “Issei,” namely the first generation Japanese immigrants, were largely ignored. Perhaps because the awkward political and social position they were situating in during this period their stories and opinions were not included in the documents by the government or local institutions. To remedy this lacking, we need personal memoirs, pictures and oral history from individual first generation Japanese-Americans.  Materials from Japan on the issues of relocating and resettling Japanese-Americans may also deserve a position in the collection.

There are many other mysteries that had not been solved by this archive. What was the background of the donors Ralph P. Merritt and Bradford Smith? Were they employees of the government so they had access to the governmental documents? Or did they have a strong interest in the internment so they keep collecting all the relevant materials over the years? Why did they donate this collection to UCLA? To answer those questions, a clearer “Provenance/Source of Acquisition” could be written which could include a brief introduction to the donors and to the historical period where they gathered the sources.

For this assignment, I chose to look at the finding aid for the collection of material about Japanese American Internment, 1929-1956. There is a diverse range of material in this collection. From semi-annual reports about internment camps sponsored by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to camp newsletters and high school yearbooks to newspaper articles about Japanese American resettlement, these documents come from both sides: arguing for and against Japanese American internment, from a variety of viewpoints over about a 30-year period. The sheer amount of information and opinions from different sources lends itself well to creating many narratives that these documents would support.

One interesting narrative would be creating a timeline about the internment camps, particularly Manzanar and Tule Lake, based on the information presented in the WRA’s annual and semi-annual reports about these internment camps. Particularly, it would be interesting to use these reports to count the amount of incidents or “disturbances” over time. The scope notes do not detail what is meant by “disturbance” but I assume it refers to protests and riots. This information in the form of a timeline would allow historians insight into ways that the people forced into these camps were trying to fight back and the emotional toll that the ordeal caused them. It could answer questions like, “Were there more incidents in the beginning when people first arrived at these camps?” “ Were there more towards the end as they had been in the camps for a long period of time?” “Or were incidents a common occurrence throughout the time people were interned?” If only the information in this specific collection were to be used in the narrative, it would really be missing personal accounts. All the reports came from the WRA, obviously a source that could contain a certain degree of bias (as the WRA was supported these camps), so it would balance out if the narrative could access personal accounts of these incidents as well. This could be remedied by finding more collections of documents or perhaps conducting interviews.

Another narrative to tell from these documents would be comparing perspectives on the internment camp conditions and day-to-day life. Again, there are the annual and semi-annual reports by the WRA, which would be one perspective, and there are newsletters and essays written by members of the interned community, the obvious other perspective. Comparing what was written about the camps would be interesting because historians would be able to see if there were any discrepancies between the reports, something that could lead into new research questions. The audience of the newsletters and essays was the community of the internment camp, however, it is not clear exactly who the audience of the WRA’s reports was. This would need to be further researched in order to give an accurate comparison between the content of the documents. If only documents from this collection were used for this narrative, it would be missing a real objective perspective. This could be remedied by finding another collection that contains photos of the barracks and other areas to look at the conditions of the camp; a more objective source.

In Room A1713 of the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA, researchers can find the Service Employees International Union, United Service Workers West records, ca. 1935-2008. Before unpacking the collection of boxes and folders, one could use its finding aid (prepared by Julia Tomassetti and Caroline Luce) to browse and target specific materials. This physical, archival collection is a “paradigmatic example of ‘social movement unionism’”, a hybrid of grassroots mobilization, in-depth research, and deliberate planning to transform laws, workforce demographics, and industrial frameworks.

The Los Angeles Justice for Janitors campaign (c.1986-2000), also known as LA JfJ, was comprised of mostly low-wage Latino immigrants workers from the de-unionized janitors industry. Through the Service Employees International Unions (SEIU) Local 399/Local 1877, they organized themselves and gained more rights in society. Their efforts enabled them to win three area-wide contracts for up to 9,500 janitors from 1987 to 2000, improving their lives with increased wages and full health coverage for 5,000 workers.

The collection is organized in series and sub-series according to the type of material. There are ten series (in numerical order) titled as follows: “Legal, older,” “Internal training and planning,” “Ephemera,” “Internal publications,” “Studies,” “Press,” “Video/computer records,” “Photos,” “Agreements, bylaws, and constitutions,” and “Staff records.” These series titles were copied by collection processors from the titles on the collection’s original folder titles. Each titled series is comprised of its own collection of boxes full of folders with specific subtitles (Box #, Folder #). Most folders include a time window for its respective content.

The series “Staff records” contains 16 subsidies with 15 names. Here, individuals affiliated with the campaign become known. It is unclear, however, why they aren’t ordered alphabetically. Perhaps, this arrangement suggests a hierarchy of campaign involvement. “Other research” and “Miscellaneous” folders follow the names, which records about staff that have fewer documents attributed to their names.

The media types in the collection include “photos, audiovisual records, ephemera, internal publications, internal training and planning records for the organization, staff records, research studies, collective bargaining agreements, and records pertaining to grievances, legal disputes, union recognition, and contract negotiations.” Most of the collection includes photos, audiovisual records, and documents from the three rounds of organizing and completing contract negotiations during the Justice for Janitors, Los Angeles campaign (1986 – 2000).

The heart of the collection is embodied by “extensive photos, ephemera, and organizing materials documenting the janitors’ dramatic and colorful demonstrations, civil disobedience, savvy use of media, and community alliances.” Here, the collection reaches its greatest depths. The activists put a lot of effort in documenting “the campaign’s strategic corporate and worksite research, organizing efforts, alliance building, and political strategies.”

The second part of the collection contains materials from LA JfJ Local 399 predecessor campaigns. These materials provide further historical context, enabling researchers to notice trends in the process of researching, campaigning, and documenting strategies for a worker’s movement. Remnants of JfJ campaigns in Northern California (Hewlett-Packard, Sacramento) and Southern California (security guards, Los Angeles) provide us with campaigning case studies. Documental evidence of legal disputes, recognition, collective bargaining relationships, and internal complaints reveal hardships that the campaigns experienced, and suggest coping mechanisms for enduring similar struggles.

By relying solely on the records in this collection, the LA JfJ’s narrative would be incomplete. The collection exhibits micro and macro gaps in the narrative. For example, the finding aid does not indicate any sign of maps, that would provide researchers with a macro-perspective of information. The campaign congregated its activity in six areas of the city: downtown, Century City, USC, LAX, Hughes Aircraft, and Toyota. A spatial visualization could show which parts of the city were more dense with working and/or demonstrating janitors. Researchers could visit specific addresses if they wanted to seek more information onsite.

The narrative also lacks sequential ordering of events. A JfJ LA timeline would enable researchers to see the progression of the campaign from its origins in the 1930s, or more recently in Downtown Los Angeles. Researchers could analyze how events played off of each other and begin a dialogue regarding the following questions: What were the highs and lows of the campaign? What events triggered fluctuations? Why did the campaign unfold the way it did in history?

I looked at the “Finding Aid for the Collection of Material about Japanese American Internment, 1929-1956 bulk 1942-1946”. This collection is made up of publications, press releases by the War Relocation Authority, phonographic recordings, yearbooks and pamphlets regarding and created by Japanese American internees and advocacy groups. Additional primary resources include speeches, article clippings, reproduced sketches and masters’ theses. Subjects covered include segregation within camps, loyalty of Japanese Americans, resettlement discussions and the internment process. The internment camps in particular that are mentioned include the Manzanar and Minidoka internment camps.

I really enjoyed scrolling through the contents and seeing the collection of resources compiled within this finding aid. Something that surprised me was the lack of personal perspectives from Japanese Americans in the internment camps. Most of the resources were official pamphlets and press releases instead of things like journal entries or interviews.

A historical narrative you might be able to tell from this collection is a narrative regarding how a democratic system was installed within the camps and how it dealt with segregation issues amongst internees. This collection would be useful in creating this narrative due to a variety of resources. In particular, we might be able to use the thesis by Richard B. Rice titled “The Manzanar Relocation Center” tracing the forces creating a democratic way of life in Manzanar. This thesis covers early history of the camp, problems with community government and employment problems. It would be useful because it directly touches on the democratic system within the internment camps, but this narrative would be missing a few resources. Notably, we would be missing a primary resource, such as a journal from an internee, on daily life within the internment camps. I would remedy this by conducting primary research and interviewing leaders in the internment camps to find an insider perspective.

Another historical narrative you could tell from this collection is a narrative regarding internee attitudes and experiences with prejudice after their internment and how they assimilated to life after release. A useful resource in this narrative could be the “United States Dept. of the Interior. Division of budget and Administrative Management. People in Motion: The Postwar Adjustment of the Evacuated Japanese Americans. 1947”. This resource covers public attitudes toward resettlement, economic adjust of internees, evacuation loss and remedial legislation and social adjustment. Another useful resource could be the article by Robert O’Brien, “Selective Dispersion as a Factor in the Solution of the Nisei Problem”. This article talks about the dispersion of second generation Japanese Americans through college education as a solution to the assimilation process. These 2 resources would be useful because it covers an outside perspective on the assimilation process and policies that were undertaken to more comprehensively integrate Japanese Americans back into society. However, if this narrative were based entirely on this collection, a few resources would be missing. Primarily, we would be missing firsthand accounts from Japanese Americans regarding their experiences post-internment. I would remedy this by conducting ethnographical field work, interviewing Japanese Americans who came out of the internment camps about their experiences with post WWII prejudices and their assimilation experiences.

I chose to explore the finding aid concerning Bonnie Cashin and her collection of fashion, theater, and film costume design during the time period of 1913-2000. The collection is held at the UCLA Library Special Collections and consists of over 400 articles. The compilation consists of Cashin’s fashion illustrations, press materials, paperwork and photographs of her successful design career. Personal items of Cashin are also included such as letters and photographs.

Right off the bat, we are able to learn about the historical biography of Ms. Cashin due to the arrangement of the finding aid. The biography includes an extensive list of the different productions and designers that she worked for. Furthermore, it also includes the series of awards and achievements she received up until her death in 2000.

When looking at the collection at a broad view, we can simply see the arise of Cashin’s career over the years. The container first involves contents of the designers high school illustrations which shows that she has always had an early interest in fashion. Later we see there is an arise in the amount of content during the years after 1943, so one could hypothesize that this was the around the time when Cashin’s career flourished. We are also able to see the transition of her type of media through this archive. It seems that she worked on more films and costume wear during the 40s due to the more theatrical components in the collection. While during the 1950s and forward we see the content more situated amongst ready to wear and evening collections.

An interesting component of this collection is that it highlights the work that Cashin put in to her designs. One can see the hundreds of illustrations that were thought of before putting the clothing into production. We are also able to see the basis of her art by comparing the illustration to the actual clothing as many of them are photographed in editorials or advertisements. This finding aid links to

By looking at the essay component of the archive, we also see the heavy influence of Ms. Cashin on the American woman as she has written numerous articles on her opinions on how to dress. There is a separate section for Ms. Cashins fur designs which suggests that her customer is of a certain class.

It is notable to see that Cashin recorded a trip to India where she researched different textile and manufacturing industries. This is important as it shows the amount of detail and experience the designer thought about when making her work.

Missing from this narrative is specific details about the sales of her clothing. We can see that she is successful due to the amount of work she reached over her career but we do not know who is her customer. We could contact the Bonne Cashin estate and ask for documents regarding sales and customer identifications. By receiving this information, we could look at the trends in sales in order to further support the hypothesis of when her career arose as well as seeing the class and income of her customers.

In his examination of the intersection between “event” and “history” in his essay “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Hayden White argues that the moral presence concerning the way in which the world operates ultimately forms the narrative to write history. To formulate such notion, White states, “historical self-consciousness, the kind of consciousness capable of imagining the need to represent reality as a history, is conceivable only in terms of its interest in law, legality, legitimacy, and so on” (17). In essence, our idea of history is constructed by a slew of events. We relate these events through a cause-and-effect relationship that we base on our idea of how the world works.

Taking this notion into account, we can use this idea of narrative forming history in the context of archives. Specifically, I chose to examine the Collection of Material about Japanese American Internment, 1929-1956 because as someone with Japanese ancestry, I felt that this archive is the one that resonates most with me. I also thought the narrative that I would construct from the material would possibly be different from someone who does not have a similar background, thus showcasing the implications of White’s original argument.

The collection consists of materials from the War Relocation Authority (WRA) under the U.S. Department of the Interior. Materials include pamphlets, press releases, yearbooks, speeches, theses, and more writings regarding the conditions in the camps, detailing of the internment process, Japanese relocation after war, and more. The first two boxes containing the WRA material are organized chronologically and thus eases the process in formulating a narrative because it can follow a trajectory based on a timeline. I would begin in the Spring of 1942, detailing the initial conditions of internment and Japanese relocation, signifying World War II as the cause of such occurrences. Initially, conditions seem are relatively unknown but progressively show to only grow worse, denoted by the “Tule Lake incident” and “demonstration at Tule Lake Hospital” of the Semi-Annual report of 1943. It only continues to worsen as Tule Lake is shut down entirely in 1946. Moreover, addresses from army officials calling for the “humane treatment of Japanese Americans” demonstrate how the conditions of inhabitants of the camps had grown to inhumane in their execution. Pamphlets detailing anti-Japanese sentiment show the ways in which this treatment was able to persist because of how citizens were taught to view such people.

Other narratives are able to be constructed from the materials in this collection as well, such as ones construed from the yearbooks of the Manzanar camps. Historical narratives regarding the people who inhabited such camps and their daily routines could be constructed from the names and subsequent accounts.

Moreover, I think the larger narratives that can be constructed from the materials could be surrounding the story of Japanese-American life post-WWII. Much of the material is focused on life within the camps and the lives of those who inhabited them. Ironically, this narrative is generally muted in typical conversations of today. This material has the ability to explain part of the silenced story. I do not think this collection has the ability to explain everything from my constructed narrative, however, because much of the material is from WRA (a government agency) and thus most likely does not showcase the true horrendous conditions that Japanese-Americans had to go through. I might remedy this by looking to the first-person accounts as well as other signifiers such as the call for “humane treatment” by Sergeant Ben Kuroki that demonstrate the horrible events that were occurring during this time period. I would potentially fill the gaps within the narrative by stories passed down from my ancestors; however, it should be noted that even most of these stories have failed to continue existing due to their silencing from government urge.