Behind the Chicana Diasporic Project

Linda Garcia Merchant’s project “Chicana Diasporic: A Nomadic Journey of the Activist Exiled” organizes and catalogues the ideological lineage and migrations of Chicana activists affiliated with the NWPC (the National Women’s Political Caucus) through the Chicana Caucus. The project seeks to communicate to the importance of the caucus’ political work, as activists pushed out of movements as a result of their gender and race. The work gives credence to their narrative as women excluded from a male Chicano movement, and Chicanas excluded from a white Feminism. The sources used by the project include photographs, letters, newspaper prints, personal writings, oral history accounts, and other multimedia produced by or relating to members of the Chicana Caucus. Some sources are disparate and included in the project for their narrative relevance. The sources are diverse in medium, but are primarily presented in digital image form or in video format. The source archive of many images and data used in the project comes from an eight-year recovery project called Chicana Por Mi Raza Digital Memory Collective, where the material is catalogued and archived.

The processing aspect of the project focuses on organizing, contextualizing, and narrativizing the material provided from the digital repository. The data held in the images and materials are organized into sections and sub-sections that draw historical, cultural and political connective tissues from the work, in order to craft a story, of sorts. Each page contains digital images, quotes, and text that contributes to the narrative. The writing itself becomes part of the experience and reads like creative non-fiction. There are even sections with poems included as the outlining text.

The project’s presentation is built upon Scalar, a semantic web authoring tool that functions as a website builder that integrates data visualization into the website. This allows for different modes of data visualization, though this doesn’t necessarily translate to visualizing the metadata of the actual source material but rather the sections and sub-sections that contain them. It is not a perfect experience, but it allows for some navigational use in creating a network visualization. It might have been the wish of Garcia Merchant to avoid using this networking system to suggest genealogical connections between the Caucus members, and thus create demarcations that don’t really exist. Overall, I enjoyed browsing through the site, even though it combatted narrative linearity in content, the site itself functioned very linearly, which was a draw-back on the experience.