Chicana Por Mi Raza

Intent

Chicana Por Mi Raza is intended to inform people about the history of important chicana women. It has interviews with influential contemporary chicanas and a timeline delineating chicana feminism, the chicano student movement, raza unida party, and second wave feminism. It is mainly a public humanities project centered on the collection and digital preservation of archival materials, ephemera, and oral histories that document the development of Chicana feminist thought during the civil rights era.

Voice

The voice is passionate about intersectional feminism, intellectual, scholarly, but not boring.

Tone

The tone is very professional and academic. I wish it was a bit more colorful to make it more interesting. Once you get to the interviews, however, it is a bit more impersonal and relatable because of the women's voices and pictures posted on the site.

Brand

Since this is an archive of oral histories and not a website selling an item or service, the branding is very simple. It brands itself as an educational resource for people interested in learning about the subject.

Persona

Example 1: Student Activist, Priscila

Young student activists, especially young women, would be the main target. Whether it is for their own activism, or to gather information for a project, Chicana Por Mi Raza is important specifically to these young women. Priscila is a Latina student at CUNY City College who grew up in a predominantly Latino neighborhood and wants to learn more about the influential feminists involved in the various Chicano movements.

Example 2: Educator, Gloria

Gloria is a professor of Latino and Caribbean studies at NYU. Her Chicana students would like to learn more about influential women like them who have made an impact in history. She teaches her students using content from Chicana Por Mi Raza. Her students go on to become important Latin@ figures of their time.

Example 3: Leader of feminist organization, Quizayra

Quizayra is a Design Studies grad student who is interested in starting an organization for empowering young women of color. To empower the women in her organization, she teaches them about influential Chicanas that are on the websites, whose histories may have been forgotten otherwise. She ends up partnering her organization with Chicana Por Mi Raza and adding to the collection of histories already up.

Wireframe

Copy Deck

Title: Chicana Por Mi Raza

Header: Digital Memory Collective

Menu: About, Partners, Events, Timelines, Chicanas

Banner: Digital Memory Collective, Browse Timelines, Quote, Browse Records

Left panel: Make History with CPMR

Middle Panel: Learn about the Archive

Right panel: Browse Recent Uploads

Footer: The Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Project and Archive was created under the supervision of professor María Cotera and Linda Garcia Merchant in collaboration with The Institute for Computing in Humanities Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. This project was made possible through the generous financial support of the University of Michigan and the many women who shared their time, their memories, and their artifacts.

Competition

Because this website is purely for educational and archival purposes, there really isn't a competition for this website. There are related sites, like the Women's History Archive at Smith College or the Young Lords website, but they are much more plain and less interactive than this website. Chicana Por Mi Raza's web design is simple but nicely laid out. It makes information that might otherwise be boring to most people, more accessible and user friendly.