Richard Chabrán Oral History Interview

Amanda Belantara: Today, we're interviewing Richard Chabrán, former coordinator of the Chicano Studies Library at University of California, Berkeley. The interview was conducted for the Ways of Knowing Oral History Project. The interview took place virtually on August 11th, 2022, recorded locally by Sonia Chaidez at Whittier College. The interviewers are Amanda Belantara and Emily Drabinski.

Emily Drabinski: Richard, can you tell us a bit about your background in education and what led you to librarianship?

Richard Chabrán: I went to Catholic school in a city called La Puente, California, which is a small town east of Los Angeles. I went to a parochial school called St. Joseph, and then to Bishop Amat High School. My brother was already attending the University of California Berkeley and he made sure to bring the papers home for me to apply. It was right after the Third World Strike. There were a lot of demands to have an Ethnic Studies college and to have more minority professors and enroll more students of color. I was one of those students. I applied and I got in. When I went to the university, I studied Anthropology. I have always been fascinated by culture and cultural transmission and how that happens. And I was also very motivated because I always felt that our history, as we are both Mexican and Puerto Rican, was not represented in my education. So, that led me to an interest in seeing how I could preserve that history, and I was really in Anthropology. But then, I got recruited to work in what was called the Chicano Studies Library at the University of California at Berkeley. It was a student library and student run, but it was always like an alternative library. One of the people in the library, his name was José Arce, he himself was a graduate student in Architecture, but he was the coordinator of the library at that time. He said, "Hey, what are you doing?" and I explained that I was working as a museum preparator in the Lowie Museum of Anthropology. And he said, "Why don't you come and work in the Chicano Studies library?" I said, "Okay, I'll go and do that." So that was my entrance into working in the library. It wasn't my intention to become a librarian. I thought I would become an anthropologist. And when I first started working there, there had just been a report done on the status of the Chicano Studies Library. The University never did an assessment of what library resources would be available for the Ethnic Studies Department at that time. But the students said we need to have materials. It was really a struggle to try to make sure that we had the materials. So, they themselves started to collect materials. My first job in the library, that was really important for me, was taking care of what was called the Serial Collection, which included newspapers, periodicals, and any kind of serial publication. There were publications that did not have regular publication schedules. At times even the numbering was not consistent. My job was to arrange and make sure they were saved. We saved them in vertical files. This was really important for me because I came to realize that those newspapers represented the voices of communities across the country that you don't often hear or read about. They were an education for me. And a little later, I took care of the journals. A lot of the journals were alternative and were not indexed by major publishers nor the indexing services. Because I had to put them away, I became familiar with their content. When people would come into the library and say, "I want to know where this kind of article is." I was able to direct them to the articles they were looking for. I knew that with the growth of the literature this was not sustainable. That was my entrance into my library career. Many of the student workers had particular assignments. My assignment was to create a bibliography on folklore. My marching orders were to go out into all the different libraries at Berkeley, of which there were more than 20, and find information about Chicano folklore. Looking back, that was a great way for me to learn about the libraries and to find them. What I found was that indeed there was material in all these different libraries about Chicanos. The problem was it was hidden, and I really felt that "the library" in quotations, did a very poor job of providing access to that material. That was an entrance into my library career.

Drabinski: It sounds like this is related to broader political struggles. So, could you tell us a little about what the political environment was like?

Chabrán: Just previous to the time I went to Berkeley, there was a Free Speech Movement. And then there was the civil rights movement, and a Chicano student movement, and larger Chicano Movement. Richard Griswold del Castillo says "The Chicano Movement was a radical attempt to redefine the political, social, economic, and cultural status of millions of persons of Mexican descent." It was partly motivated by the convergence of the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement and also the emergence of identity of this group of people. It was the first time they were starting to offer Chicano studies courses. Initially it was called La Raza Studies Studies. At the same time, there were students that had advocated for the recruitment of more Mexican American students. When I arrived there were few Chicanos on the campus. There were many other movements. There were the land grant struggles in New Mexico, the La Raza Unida political party that came about. There were farm worker struggles which manifested itself on our campus as an anti-lettuce campaign. There was a lot of pressure put on the university not to buy grapes. Those are the kind of struggles that were going on. Berkeley has this space that's called Sproul Plaza, where people congregate. When you go to class, you would go past that space. There would always be a lot of speeches going on. Sometimes preachers would use this space to broadcast their message. The preachers were pretty famous. There was a lot going on during that time and I could not possibly capture it all.

Belantara: So, would you say that it was the environment that you were in at the time that really inspired you to then become a librarian when you weren't initially planning to do so?

Chabrán: I think that's a very fair statement. I've been reflecting about this more now and I think at the time one of the terms that caught my imagination was the idea of self-determination. Self-determination meant something different to different people. To me, it was an opportunity to acknowledge that I had not learned the history of my people the way I thought it should be taught. Self-determination meant the opportunity to develop that history, and to develop those resources. So that not not just my community, but the world would know it. That was a big inspiration for me. So yes, I wanted to become a librarian, but it was with a very particular purpose.

Belantara: What was the role of students in the founding of the collections and eventually the libraries?

Chabrán: We don't have a really perfect picture of that, but I would say that from my understanding, my knowledge, it was really students were the driving force, because they wanted a place where they could go and they could find material and where they could congregate, a place where they could have a safe place because there weren’t very many Chicanos on the campus at that time. They wanted to find out more about the issues that they were reading in the newspapers, the demonstrations they were at, the cultural festivals that they attended and the people that were creating this poetry that they heard, they wanted that material. I think that inspired them to start what we could call a reading room, which was a very small room in Dwinelle Hall. We had the collections and then we had this place where we could build these collections, but we really didn't have the money.

Belantara: Imagine that space that you just described, the reading room in Dwinelle Hall. Can you paint a picture for me?

Chabrán: You would go into this room and immediately there would be some kind of a desk that would be there to welcome people. Usually, it would be students that would be the ones that would be greeting people. When you went in a little further, there would be on the right-hand side, there would be library shelving. But maybe library shelving is not the correct term. I would say it was more like the shelving that you might find in a professor's office. There were these little alcoves of books that were there. On the other side, more to the back wall, there were vertical files. The vertical files held a lot of newspaper articles, or pamphlets, or flyers and all of that. A lot of things that we might consider ephemera. Those were the things that were really the most important part of this library. And on top of that, the library collected posters. The posters were a really important graphic part of what was going on out in the community. There were from the United Farm Workers from local artists. Many were from new artists. The walls were always filled with all these different kinds of posters and they covered different things like the war in Vietnam. And then, there was a catalog with the drawers with authors, titles and a shelf list, using a modified Library of Congress System. We weren't by ourselves. There were other universities where Latinos were engaged in building collections. For example there were students at Stanford, San Diego, UCLA, Santa Barbara. We created an organization which we called ABC, [La Asociación de Bibliotecas] and we would meet periodically, and try to help each other in what we were trying to do. It really helped fortify our voice and gave us a little bit of a platform. I remember one time I was asked to go to San Jose, where they had a group that wanted to have a library, but they didn't have anything. They asked me, "Come over here. We're going to meet." Before I knew it, they were having a demonstration and I was in the library demonstrating, helping them. They got a section of the library. And today, that section is called the Africana, Asian American, Chicano, & Native American Studies Center (AAACNA). They're doing really great work. That's just to say that there was interest, primarily student-led, that started to really want to make a difference. We had the will to do this. We said we want to do it.

Belantara: All of these amazing materials that you were collecting for the Chicano Studies Collections, were they discoverable by the main library's catalog system at the time? Or would people need to visit the Chicano Studies Library in order to know that they were available?

Chabrán: They were not discoverable by the main library’s catalog. One of the recommendations made in "Providing Library Services to the Chicano Studies Program" report was to consider different models for collecting and making Chicano library material accessible. One model was to centralize everything. The second model was that there would be a bibliographic system that would make things discoverable in both places. The main library rejected both of those approaches. They said, "We don't have the money to do that. It would cost too much money." While the Chicano Studies Library was concerned about the lack of the discoverability of their material in the main library, they didn't have any way of telling the main library, "You have to include what we have in your catalog." So, we would publish what we'd call the “Recent Additions to the Chicano Studies Library.” This was actually done by a few different libraries across the country, for example at Austin and Santa Barbara. A few places would have these recent additions where they would find things and then they would put them there. Now, that's not the same as having them discoverable in the main library. That didn't happen until much much later. We were trying to do what we could to help at least the main library know what we were getting. But we also made this list of new additions available to more people across the country. The other thing we did was that we made some, what we would call subject bibliographies in certain areas like folklore, linguistics, and women that would reflect the findings of what we had found in the main library. So, we published those also as a way of saying what we knew was available in the branches of the main library. We were trying to do what we could to make things discoverable.

Belantara: What would you say were the benefits and then the disadvantages of being outside the main system?

Chabrán: The benefits were that we were going to do what we thought was the best. That meant collecting what we wanted to, organizing things the way we felt was more important, and starting to train people about how to use and to develop these systems. These were within our own purview. They couldn't stop us from doing that. I guess they could have, but they didn't. Now the downside was that we didn't get money for doing the work. At that time, universities would provide a budget allocation to purchase material to cover library expenses in various disciplines. At Berkeley that money would go to the main library. The main library did not want to hear about sharing that money. A downside was we didn't get any of that money. On the other hand, one result of the Third World Strike, the Associated Student Body developed a pot of money that could be used for exactly that purpose.

Belantara: So, student groups didn't just help start the collections and found the library. They actually supported it financially when the university wouldn't, is that correct?

Chabrán: Right. But it wasn’t just the Chicano students. A vote was taken and the majority of all students supported this decision. During that time, students were pretty progressive. And of course there were Chicano students, men and women that were advocating for this at the time within student government. A disadvantage was that we weren't really part of what was happening on the inside of the University library. Being on the inside we may have gotten certain benefits but the library administration would've controlled what we could do. And we did what we thought we should do with the resources we had. Judging from what happened at other places, this library became one of the most important collections in the country. At other universities they were part of the main library. Being on the inside might work for a while. However, in some places the support given to develop Chicano collections and services would go away once outside pressure subsided. We were not against creating an interface with the main library. That interface came much later after other things happened. For example, many, many, many years later, there was Senate Concurrent Resolution 43, which was where legislators said, "What's the University of California doing to support Latino studies?" There was a task force of librarians that made several library recommendations. One recommendation was that the holdings of Chicano libraries in the University of California should be reflected in the university’s online catalog. So now they are reflected. Not everything, but a lot of the monographic holdings are. Eventually things got worked out after a lot of pressure. But it wasn't the idea of the library administration to do that. It was the pressure from outside. And it was like not like, okay, we're just going to take and incorporate your material. You have to do it the way we're doing it. No, it was like we had a big impact on the way it was going to be incorporated.

Belantara: How did people working in the Chicano Collections view the library systems at that time?

Chabrán: Well, like I said, they viewed the library systems in the main library as inadequate. When the Chicano Studies Library first started, they tried to use the Dewey Decimal System, but it became very unwieldy with all the numbers. The numbers were going to start going across the book. That's when staff started to change to the Library of Congress System. But remember at this time, people were questioning, “How are we being described? There was this utopian vision that we're going to make things different. Another issue was if you went into the main library, most of the books you'd find about Chicanos were in the E184 classification. There was this kind of merging or melting together of all the materials. There was general dissatisfaction with the way that the materials were being classified and described. One of the consequences was that when they weren't in that E184 classification they were somewhere in those other 20 libraries. It was very difficult to really know where you would find something, Take for example Chicano literature which could either be with the Spanish literature or it could be with the English literature. And it was just very confusing for people. So, José Arce created the Chicano Classification System. It's a modified Library of Congress Classification System. He added a PX classification for Chicano literature, not something separate that was inherited from a European system. And then there was literature within that classification system that was what we would call Chicanesca literature, which was literature that was written trying to emulate Chicano literature, but it was written by Anglos. The modified classification system had a place for that kind of literature. The modified system was something that was building off of what was coming out at the time. The Chicano Classification System didn't come about by Jose going to some room somewhere and just thinking, "Okay, this is the way it should be." It was more like something that was developed from the bottom up based on the literature, based on what they were getting, and based on the experience of people that were putting it together. It was not some kind of academic thing. It was emergent. Also, the terminology that was used in order to provide access in the Library of Congress was not what I would use. For example, a term like Illegal aliens. This was an example of the library system trying to socialize me, how I was going to call and look up and think about the world. It was really objectionable to me to use those terms. And then, there were cultural customs that we would have a certain name for and weren't very well represented by the English term that was used. It was linguistic, political, and cultural. All of those things didn't work for us. I think the philosophy was we don't want to totally dismiss what the Library of Congress had to offer. It wasn't like we were trying to be oppositional, but we wanted to create new spaces where there were things that didn't fit in the traditional system. For example, I couldn't go to one place and find out where everything was. I had to go to these different places and figure out how each of them worked. It's not that it couldn't work, but it was not friendly. Just another example that I want to share with you is that on the Berkeley campus, there's the famous Bancroft Library that has a lot of collections about the history of California and Mexico. As a librarian, I was really good friends with a lot of historians. The historians would go and use that collection. And they would always kind of joke with me and say, "Well, we're not going to go and ask him for this material on Chicanos, because they wouldn't know what that was." So just the language and the way it was represented, and if people didn't know about it. I mean, I'm not saying they were mean, they just didn't know. Because I saw this as a problem. I said, "I'm going to make a guide to all the archival collections that I think are relevant to people studying Mexican American history." I started by making an appointment with the curator. I went over there and I told her what I was going to do and I gave her some examples and I said, "Can you help me? Because I really just want to work together." And she says, "Well, I really can't help you. But there's this librarian that works in the Chicano Library across the way," which is me, right? So she didn't know who I was and all that, but, and still she didn't take the opportunity for us to do something different. I think today things are different, but that was at that point. So there were institutional barriers for us to do that kind of work. So, we did it by ourselves.

Drabinski: Now we'd like to talk a bit about the Chicano Periodical Index. Can you tell us about it and what the goal of that project was?

Chabrán: I continued to work on this Chicano Serials Project, which had these newspapers, journals and bulletins, which we thought were really important and which took a lot of space in the library. These publications were sought after because a lot of libraries didn't collect them. But then, within about five or six years some libraries came to the realization of their importance, and said "We need them." The professors at those places and Chicano Studies started saying, "We need to have those titles." And many libraries across the country didn't have them and some of them were not in print anymore. In order to preserve these publications we had them microfilmed and made available through Bay Microfilms. We weren't looking to do this just for one library. We wanted to make these things available nationally. So, that was an important element to the larger goals we were trying to achieve. Later on when we developed the Chicano Periodical Index, that was the next part of the project. Those of us that had worked in the library for a while knew how to find the material if somebody came in and said, "I want an article on women that focused on X, Y, and Z." Several of us, because we had to keep answering these questions, knew it was there because we had put them on the shelves. It was the closeness, the proximity, of handling this material that allowed me to tell people where things were. I also knew that was not something that could be sustained. The literature was exploding. But, at that time there was no index. The material was there, but how do you get to it? We knew that we had to do something different. But many of these periodicals that became very important were not being indexed by the mainstream indexes. So we thought wow, it's really important for us to create an index. In late 1977, I'd been asked to talk to the Texas Library Association. And there was a group of Chicanos and Chicanas that said, "Can you come and talk about what you're doing?" Soon after we got together and said, "We need to develop an index." We didn't have any grants to do it, but we just saw a great need to do it. We said, "This is what we're going to do." And we laid out a plan and we developed this prospectus for a Chicano Periodical Index. It was more like maybe more of a mission statement. So then, the goals of the index were to improve access to Chicano periodical literature, to provide a model index for developing a future comprehensive Chicano Periodical Index and database. And the specific objectives were to develop a vocabulary for indexing Chicano materials and to index 18 journals and periodicals, and to publish and distribute that as an index. So that was really early, but we just said, "Oh, let's just do this, right?" But we talked about it, and we had very specific goals.

Drabinski: Can you tell us a bit about who instigated the project and who was involved in this early iteration?

Chabrán: Well, I think that I instigated the project, I think that's fair to say. We developed this group and we did a prospectus. And we had meetings where we had them at different library conferences. We said we wanted to index 18 titles. But at that point we didn't say which titles they were. And so eventually, as a group, we agreed on which titles were going to be included. The principal people that were part of that effort were: Gilda Baeza, who was at El Paso Public Library, Rafaela Castro, who was a librarian at that time, Cesar Caballero, who was working with special collections at the University of Texas, now, he's the university librarian at Cal State San Bernardino. Luis Chaparro, was at El Paso Community College, Elvira Chavarría, who was at the University of Texas at Austin, Karin Durán, who was at Cal State University Northridge, Robert McDowell, who was at Pan American University in Edinburg, Texas, Albert Milo, who is working at Fullerton Public Library, Helena Quintana, who was at New Mexico State, San Juanita Reyes, who was also at Pan American University, and Ron Rodriguez, who was working for me at UCLA. These people made up the Committee for the Development of Subject Access to Chicano Literature. They were the indexers to the Chicano Periodical Index. I can tell you, that the bulk of the work that had to be done, these people did it. It would never have happened without them. It was so much work, so many titles. The index turned out to be four inches thick! It was a tremendous amount of work. They didn't get paid to do it. The indexers volunteered. They thought it was important. As I look back, that was a real commitment. So, we had the interest of a lot of librarians that were willing to help us to do this. I think there was a lot of excitement, not just because of what we were doing, but because they were forming a network of librarians that ended up working on all kinds of different things. It was really the establishment of a political identity, a group that really worked together and struggled together on a lot of different things besides the index.

Drabinski: Can you tell us what kind of training people received? Did you have documentation to use?

Chabrán: We developed a Chicano Periodical Index Processing Manual. We distributed the manual and many of the indexers attended a national conference where we provided informal training. At the same time, we were working on this index of Chicano periodical literature; we understood that Chicano literature was beginning to be represented in mainstream databases like Dialog and BRS. While we were working on the index we said we want people to understand how to access and search these other databases too. This was before a lot of people were being trained on online searching. Online searching was really expensive. It was different than it is now. Your search would be mediated through a librarian and you had to sign up and the library got charged by the second. Part of our job was familiarizing people with how this works. We wanted those librarians who were going to be indexers and were working with Latino populations to use many different tools that were being developed. So as part of that process, we got to see and be exposed to these different systems and subject headings and thesauri. Some of that made its way into our work. I just want to emphasize that we didn't do this in isolation. We really were being informed by the things that were going on around us. We worked with this group called the National Chicano Research Network to have a training where we brought people together to know how to use these systems. Once we had indexers, we had a different training session at Berkeley where the indexers came together and we provided an overview of the processing manual. We went over the instructions for constructing the entries. Part of the processing manual described how the index terms would be used. We created the thesaurus before we gave CHPI indexers the worksheets. They had the Chicano thesaurus to help them select the subject headings We assigned different periodicals to everybody. And then, what they did was they sent those back to us to me and Francisco García helped a lot. And then, they turned in their worksheets and we had them input into a system that was developed by this Vort Corporation using a mini computer. Some of the people that were indexers had never done that kind of work before. And so, there was a learning curve for them. We tried to provide as much orientation and instruction as we could. There were questions, but I think the steepest learning curve was working with a programmer. We had to learn all that technology and the different approaches. We had to agree to doing certain things versus other things. Francisco and myself did a lot of that interface with Vort Corporation. There was a tremendous learning curve. We learned a lot. When we got together, Francisco and I would go across the bay to Mountain View, which was about an hour and a half drive. The commute time was always a time of catching up. We did a lot of learning just through communicating with Tom Holt from the Vort Corporation. Another catalyst for this work was when Betty Rose Rios invited me to be on the advisory board of ERIC because I had a certain expertise. They had heard me speak at a regional conference. Betty Rose Rios was in charge of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Mexican Americans. She wanted to create a guide on how to use the ERIC database for Mexican Americans. As part of the board, I ended up helping them to develop that guide. One of my motivations for becoming an advisory board member was to learn how to develop a bibliographic database. Betty showed introduced me to the people that were doing the work and their manual. I developed our own manual, which was modeled on the ERIC manual. The specifics were different, but we had something we could all follow. We talked about this among the library staff, where I was the coordinator at that time. Around 1976, I asked Linda Mariscal, one of the work study students I supervised, to develop a sample index. She developed a 3,000 item index using FAMULUS, a software program developed by the Department of Forestry, that allowed us to use the campus computer to develop various lists. So we were just kind of getting our hands wet. By this time the main library had an online library catalog and databases, but all of this was very centralized. At that point, people weren't developing their own databases and we wanted to have the freedom to do what we thought was important. That's why we went with an alternative tool. At the same time, we were working with people who were very sophisticated in their use of computers and we just made it work for us. They didn't say, "This is the way it should be structured." We worked on developing the database system together. So we became familiar with some of the technology that was emerging at that time that we had access to. We didn't have to ask the main library, please do this or let us use your system. We were able to just use that system to develop the index.

Belantara: So once you assembled the initial index, how was it maintained and distributed?

Chabrán: Our main first objective was to develop an index, but we utilized software and hardware, looking forward to the time when the index would become an online database that could be searched. But our first goal was to get the print copy, so we did that. In that process, people would send their worksheets to Berkeley and then we would have them input by Vort. And then they'd get to see how it was coming together. Not all of us had access to that data, but the people at Berkeley and I had access using dumb terminals. It wasn't like the ones you have now. For example, there wasn’t a graphics interface, just text. And so that's the way we did our initial editing. Indexers did all of this work. But really in terms of the database, there was Francisco García Ayvens from UCLA, and myself, We did a lot of that work. And we would actually spend a lot of time in Mountain View at the Vort Corporation. There were issues. Sometimes things weren't working. We worked together with the programmer and we did that maintenance work together. Then there was a question, how are we going to get the index out to the general public? We talked to Norma Corral, a reference librarian from UCLA who said, "You might want to ask G.K. Hall because they've published all these catalogs from libraries and they published a catalog on Latin America that's really popular. So you might want to ask if they were interested in publishing it." I approached G.K. Hall and they said, "Yes, we'll do it." They published the first couple volumes of the Chicano Periodical Index. We had to get the data to them and then they made it look prettier though it still looked computer generated. G.K. Hall created an author title and subject index, and we added a list of the periodicals and the indexers, acknowledgements and an essay. I think for all of us, we were kind of like, "Wow, we did this." And we were kind of a little surprised that we were able to do it. Like I said, that process really brought together this group of people and a lot of them still work together.

Belantara: Can you define what the Chicano Thesaurus is?

Chabrán: The Chicano Thesaurus is a collection of terms that allow people to describe the material that's about Chicanos and really more broadly about Latinos. But really more specifically about Chicanos, in ways that really reflect the literature. Because up to that point in the library that I was a coordinator of, we had abstained from really developing and systematically using a subject heading list. In other words, we wanted the subject headings to emerge from the literature that we were collecting and organizing and all that.

Belantara: Can you remember where and how the idea for the Chicano Thesaurus came about? Can you remember that moment and what the energy might have been like when that idea was first shared?

Chabrán: When we started thinking about doing the index, we knew that we had to have a controlled vocabulary. And so, all of us, I don't know if I would describe it as excitement. It was this that had to be done. It was more like, how are we going to do it? And the determination that it would be done. This was really important because when the participating library collections first started to get developed, there was a little bit of competition between the different Chicano collections. Everybody wanted to have their own list. This was a watershed moment to say we're going to do something together. That was the excitement. We are not going to try to one up each other. We were going to do this together, whatever turned out. It was really a way for us to come together and it was really empowering, let's say it that way. That we could work together, and we could actually do something. We started feeling like, wow, this is really possible. We can really do this. And so, those people that were part of that initial group, we developed lifelong professional relationships and worked on a lot of different things, not just this. But we didn't lay out a detailed plan a year ahead of time, we just did it. I don't want to give this appearance like there was this real well planned thing and we followed all these different steps. We were just doing it. And sometimes I think it was great we did it and I wonder, "Would we have the guts to do that today?" It was really emergent, that's the best term I can use, where we all were getting together. Nobody told us we had to do it. We did it voluntarily and it was something we just got together and we knew we had to do, what we had to do. And also during that time, another person who was really influential was Sandy Berman. His work on subject headings was inspirational. Later, I got to meet him and felt like telling him, "Hey, we're on the same page." There were other people who were doing this kind of work, not specifically on Mexican Americans, but on other groups. The Chicano Thesaurus is really just a response to the need to describe material in ways which the people that it's about can understand. And that those terms and terminology would not be offensive. Case in point, Illegal aliens. We always said, that was like a number one example, where the terms said two things. What person is illegal and another one is the assumption that because you're a particular ethnicity that you are going to be illegal, right? So there were all these negative associations with those terms like illegal aliens. So, we wanted to have a terminology that was one that would be understood, and people would understand. When I first started using the library, I would ponder where would catalogers put this? How would they describe us? Right? The Thesaurus was an attempt at describing ourselves. That was really important.

Belantara: Could you tell us about the Committee for the Development of Subject Access to Chicano Literature? How were members identified and selected?

Chabrán: We had met people. We had these meetings and conferences. Based on that ABC group, that was the beginning of some of them. But that was mostly California. And then through the American Library Association conferences and regional conferences like the Texas Library Association or the New Mexico Library Association, we were starting to meet at those places. The committee was built on those connections. Then we would ask, "Okay, who are we missing? Who else is doing this work?" And so, then there were a few other people that really weren't part of our initial conversation that came about. We reached out to them and they were very interested in doing this. That's the way we did it. It was not a systematic search. It was really the people that we were meeting together informally at these conferences that we brought together. Importantly I need to stress there were few Latino librarians at that time.

Drabinski: It's been noted that Elva Yañez suggested revisions that had a significant impact on the Thesaurus. Could you talk about her contributions?

Chabrán: Well, I think that her contributions were significant. She was a systems person. She was a strong advocate for not using the structure of the Library of Congress subject headings. She was really smart and a good systems person who helped us think through how to construct a thesaurus. She helped us make substantive changes. While Elva was not formally part of our team she gave us a good outside perspective on what we were doing.

Drabinski: When you say she was more of a systems thinker, you mean library systems?

Chabrán: Yes library systems but her perspective was broader than libraries. One of her focuses in library schools was automation work. She had worked with the Spanish-speaking Mental Health Database. This was originally a bibliography but she helped develop the database. She helped them figure out how to do that conversion. Her work had an impact on what we were doing. She was somebody that was open and saw the need to not just do things traditionally. She helped us with that bridge of how to do the more cultural terms with machine language assistance.

Belantara: How do you feel the group's composition in terms of race, class, geographic location, impacted the thesaurus?

Chabrán: I think it impacted it. So the geographic location, we did pretty good in terms of Chicano stuff. But as a criticism, I would say that we represented mostly the Southwest. So geographically, it was the Southwest. Those are the ones that we had access to. Ethnically, it was aimed principally at Chicano material. Later on, we started to include more Latino groups when I began working with the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College at the City University of New York as part of the Inter University Consortium for Latino Studies, we began to include more Puerto Rican material. We never had as many ties with the Cuban American librarians. In terms of gender, I think we had a fair amount of representation of both men and women. Although, I do think that in the beginning the leadership was more male oriented. But when Lily took over, that changed.

Belantara: How did you decide on your methodological approach and what were some of the steps involved to get started?

Chabrán: Well, I think that the initial list was principally from three collections, UCLA, Santa Barbara, and Berkeley. At this point in time, the people that were in charge of those collections were very interested in collaborating. Previous to that time, some of those collections did not want to collaborate. They wanted to be like, "We're the best. We're gonna do it ourselves." It was Francisco, Robert Trujillo who wound up at Stanford, but at that time was at Santa Barbara and myself. We said, "We're going to do this collaboratively." We were just excited about being able to bring together this information. Once we did this and we produced a version of the thesaurus and then people could use the index. People were really excited about being able to use it! And they made some suggestions. It was like there was nothing there before and now we had something, people were excited! That was basically it. And then we had the directions, the operational process that we weren't going to make it like a Library of Congress clone. It was going to be based on the simple things about how the thesaurus that's structured. We took those three lists and we did it. Today, maybe we would take three years and figure out some of the steps. We just did it and shared it with people.

Belantara: Did the Chicano Classification System, which was created by José Antonio Arce have any impact on the generation of the thesaurus?

Chabrán: Oh yes, absolutely. It did. That was another one of those documents that we used while we were doing our work on the Thesaurus. We had very little faith in the Library of Congress Subject Headings. And specifically these three libraries had developed some of their own subject headings. The Thesaurus was a way of bringing that together.

Belantara: So each of those lists that came from the other Chicano Studies libraries, it was the librarians in charge there who were then just on their own generating lists of headings. Were they drawing those headings from the literature or from terms that they would just select on their own? How were they creating those?

Chabrán: Mostly from the literature. I'm not saying they never looked at the Library of Congress Subject Headings, but they weren't trying to reproduce that. In Anthropology, we have the terms, the emic and the etic. The emic is kind of like the people's term. The etic was the institutional term. So, we tried whenever we could to insert the emic. So that was our philosophy. Members of our group that had been developing their own subject headings that they used principally for indexing or for providing access to the ephemeral material that they had. And we had these vertical files. We needed to organize them in some fashion. The headings that were used in those vertical files, were some of the beginnings of the term lists. In some places they may have been on cards, but they had to still be made available to us. At Berkeley, we used our shelf heading list to develop our list.. We had a shelf and we used those which were based on the Chicano Classification System. We used those as the basis for creating our list. And then at Santa Barbara, they actually had a card catalog that had subject headings. So Robert Trujillo had that put together. I don't think those lists exist anymore because sometimes they may have been on cards. We took those lists. Principally from UCLA, Berkeley, and Santa Barbara. They had developed these term lists and we took them and we merged them. I think that the actual bringing together was done by Robert Trujillo and Francisco and myself. In the end, I ended up doing a good amount of that work. With their input, I merged the terms from all three libraries into one list. I would share copies of what I was doing with Robert and Francisco. We had this corpus of headings that were not what we ended up with at the end, but they were the items that we had for consideration to put into a thesaurus. When a group of us met with Ed Kazlauskas, Professor, at the University of Southern California, he was working on software that could be used to develop a thesaurus. He told us, "Oh, there's this person who works in Mountain View whose name is Tom Holt. He has his own company." So then we met with him and this is I think a really important part of the project. In our discussions with him, Tom made it clear, "You do not want to do like a regular subject heading list." It wasn't anything about the content of it, but he was saying, "At this time in history, there's a lot of problems with doing pre-coordinated terms. So when you're developing this, you need to think about this as a database. When you work on your terms, think about them as standalone terms that can be combined to let searchers know where to get to." So, we had a lot of conversations with him, saying what we wanted to do and he said, "Okay, this is the way I propose doing it." His system was kind of a basic system. The building blocks were there, but he had to do a lot of programming to get it to do what we wanted it to do. Because at that time, I was already going to library school, or I had just finished. I already had exposure to a lot of that where we had to put together our own programs and used various programming languages. The indexers would send us the worksheets and we would forward them to Vort. We said, "Well, we don't really have the staff internally to be able to input all these worksheets." So we talked to Tom Holt and he said, "No problem. I have a person that can key all the worksheets and we'll charge you X amount." And we used some of the money from the library's publications account.

Drabinski: Can you tell us a little about how the subject terms were decided and what that process was like? Were there any disagreements about the best term?

Chabrán: I don't know that there was so much disagreement, but there were different ways of saying something. There were preferences for what you would use, different terms that'd say, "Well, there's that, but I'm not going to use that. This makes more sense to me." And sometimes some of those had to do with, not all of them, but just an example, some of them had to do with using terms in Spanish that more reflected what people would look up. We just put things that made more sense to us. So, we included those kinds of terms. It was like, "Okay, you're putting this into some hierarchical term. Does that really make sense? Is that really part of that larger term? Should it be under that, or should it be under something else?" I think that's kind of where we worked together on trying to figure that out. This has been done a long time ago. As I look back, that was in a really compressed time period, and probably one that we had not scheduled enough time for, but one that we were under the gun to do. So if I look at it now, I could probably be pretty critical about some of our decisions. And I know that Lily can speak to this better, but I know there was a point at which she had somebody work on the LGBT terms. And I would think the thesaurus is like a living thing. And I don't think necessarily when we did it, that was the end of the dialogue, it was just the beginning. So I see it as something living and I hope that it changes. One of the other things that it did was that it ended up not getting used just for our index. It got used for collections in different universities. It got accepted as a kind of a subject heading. And by the Library of Congress, if you can use alternative headings in the MARC record, you can use Chicano Thesaurus terms.

Drabinski: Can you tell us a little about any of the terms in the thesaurus that were most meaningful to you or to the researchers?

Chabrán: So remember, this is like 1976 or 1975, there was a debate about Illegal aliens. We were using Undocumented workers for a long time before that and people embrace that. So it's like, okay, did we use Undocumented persons or Workers. So there were discussions about that. But that was really a term that I think really captured it. Then, there were the terms that were the types of literary things that were going on. There's the term that's used, I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's Chicanesca, which is like literature that's about the Chicano experience, but it's written by people who are not. Another term that I think is really important was the term Chicana. That was important because that was like not just signifying a gender, it was like an identity. We had a group of undergraduate women that did a bibliography called, "Bibliography of Writings on La Mujer." They identified themselves as Chicanas. Some of them became librarians. That was another thing which was really important. Another term we embraced was Land grants. We found out that legally Land grants can only apply in certain situations that are sanctioned by the government. That was a real lesson there, but we still use the term.

Drabinski: Once you finalized your word list, what was the next step?

Chabrán: Well, we published it. We put it together and published it in house. We made copies of it and sent it out to all the indexers. Eventually, it got revised a couple times. And much later it got accepted as one of the alternative subject lists approved by the Library of Congress, which you could use in a MARC field that shows local headings.

Drabinski: When did you know that you were done with the thesaurus?

Chabrán: Oh, we're not. I think that because of the number of terms that we used, the indexing was richer. Not just the terminology, but the application was more generous in terms of what it was about.

Belantara: How did that make you feel once you had completed or made your first version of the thesaurus? How did that make you feel, A, to get to that stage and then B, to see other people, other libraries using it and people being able to discover things that had perhaps been hidden before due to lack of appropriate description?

Chabrán: I think we all felt very gratified, but I think at that point we were so busy with so many things that we never really stopped. We were really happy, but it was always more like, okay, that's done. Here's the next thing. So it was not like, "Okay, well we did that, now we can rest." There was always a struggle to keep it going, to do the next thing. And we got the first Index published by G.K. Hall and then the Chicano Studies Library had to immediately keep publishing it. It was always something. It was non-ending. We wanted to do this database like a national one. There were always things to do. So we never stopped.

Belantara: What were some of the reactions that people shared? Once you printed the thesaurus, how did you go about getting it out to other institutions or other libraries?

Chabrán: The first widely distributed version was published as part of the index. But we had a separate one that we made available and a lot of people purchased that. It was probably, I don't know, wasn't that much. I want to say it was like seven or ten dollars, I don't know. But it wasn't that much. I just remember us getting together. And my reaction and theirs was just to say thank you. Thank you. We did it! I mean, there was no money involved. The thing that struck me the most was that it was being used. And now to this day, people said, "Until then we couldn't do this and then all of a sudden we could do all this research." To me, that was the most meaningful thing.

Belantara: Did you apply for or receive funding for the Chicano Thesaurus? What were the costs associated with the project?

Chabrán: When we first said we're going to do this project, the Chicano Periodical Index, which the thesaurus was part of, we knew about this place called the Rosenberg Foundation in San Francisco. We went to the campus office and we said, "We want to apply to get some money." They said, "Well, you can't. Our relationship with them is such that they won't receive proposals directly from you. You have to do it through the library.” And so, I said okay. So, I went to see the university librarian and we told him what we wanted to do. I believe it was just me and him. And then he said, "Well, we will not support you in that effort unless you use the Library of Congress Subject Headings." So I said, "Well, we are going to use our own terms." And so he said, "Well, I'm sorry, I can't support you." And that was the end of that conversation. Then we remembered that we had this revenue that we got from the microfilming of newspapers in our publications account. That turned out to be a good amount of money. So we used that money. The majority of those funds were used to pay for the consulting of Vort Corporation and for the computing time, and for the data entry. So, we really didn't ever get outside money to do that. It was just paid for that way.

Belantara: And how did the group gather institutional support? Was there ever any kind of pushback?

Chabrán: These people that worked on indexing, the majority of them, I would say almost all of them, I can't say a hundred percent, they were librarians. So they used their professional time because librarians, you have to do professional service or whatever. They used that to contribute their time to doing this work. I don't remember any of them actually asking their supervisor to do that. That may have been true, for example, at the University of Texas at the Benson Latin American Collection where they already kind were committed to this kind of activity. But I think most of the people didn't ask and they just did it. And probably, a lot of them would say they did it on their own time. There was really no pushback. Afterwards, of course, a lot of them thought it was great because we tried to give every institution as much credit as we could. So, they got something out of it. Administrators didn't put money into it, but they got a lot of recognition afterwards that they had contributed. It was right there on the first pages of the index that there were all these institutions.

Drabinski: The thesaurus is now in use in commercial products. It's been implemented by the Library of Congress as part of its MARC record standards. Can you say something about how you feel about this mainstream adoption of your work since it sounds like from the beginning it was sort of a project that was counter to those systems?

Chabrán: How do I say this? I don't think we ever wanted to be oppositional. I mean, we didn't see ourselves as being against any of that. It was just like it didn't work for us. I now worry not that index itself, but just that as time goes on, I see less people, librarians being able to devote the kind of time that it takes to really become specialists in this. I was lucky, man. I was able to devote my whole career to a particular area that we call Chicano Studies or Latino Studies. And now, my colleagues that I talked to, they have like ten different subject areas they're doing. They don't really know deeply about what most of them are. They have good tools to be able to cover them, but I got to know most of the people that were writing the literature. I got to know the literature really closely. So, I kind of worry about that more. At the same time, there's fantastic things that's being done. The literature is in a wholly different place. That gives me great gratitude.

Belantara: What were your hopes going forward at the time that you passed it on to Lillian?

Chabrán: I'm trying to remember, but I think that Francisco actually was working closely with her. I mean, there was overlap between them. She'll be able to tell you more than me. We've always had and continue to have a really close working relationship. Especially for a long time, she would call me a few times a week and we would go over questions. Maybe we can consider this a kind of mentorship. There were always a lot of questions, but like I said, I think she took it and ran with it, right. She has special talents as an editor. She's a really great editor. She's really been able to upgrade the database from what it was. I would say she's curated the database and the project. So, she's taken it from being what was on this minicomputer and then she took it from there and worked with programmers to get it on a personal computer using different kinds of database tools. Maybe she doesn't even think of it that way, but I know through the years, she's really taken and curated in such a way that keeps it together, the integrity.

Belantara: If you could talk to your younger self at the start of your career and your start of working on the Chicano Thesaurus, what would you tell your younger self?

Chabrán: I don't know what the right term is, but we were outspoken, sometimes a little bit rash or whatever. And so, I think that I would be softer, not so much with my colleagues, but trying to get other people to work together. I think that's one thing I would think of. I'll also think about how this work was kind directed at Chicanos, but a better way of bringing in, which we eventually did a lot, for example Puerto Ricans and Cubans, and Central Americans. I would say how do we do that, finding other ways in which we could have brought people togetherAnd we did it when we could. But I think what hurt us was to not be able to get outside funding. If we were able to get those initial grants, we would've done a lot more of that. So, we did it kind of on a shoestring. If I talked to my younger self, how do we, how can we,get more funds to bring people together more? We could have done a lot more. I have to say that even though a large part of the project was using automation, people at that point didn't have the tools that we have now to communicate, the personal computers and forget about social media and all that. That didn't exist. Using the tools that we had, I think, we did pretty good. But if we had more time together, we could have done more and we could have done it better. So, that's the main thing I would think. I remain in awe of my colleagues that were able to put in so much time and investment into something they were not going to get paid for.

Belantara: It's incredibly inspiring and impressive because despite not having the funding and all of the support that we wish that you would've had, hey, the thesaurus exists and continues to make different research more widely accessible.

Chabrán: But I want to say, I think I had told you I had the opportunity for about 20 years to teach part-time at the University of Arizona and their School of Information. In the latter part of the classes that I taught there, we always focused on the ways of telling and ways of knowing. I tried really hard to impress upon my students that if you want to make change, it's not just some bureaucratic thing. You have to be willing to hear, to listen, and to know that your own way of knowing is not the way everybody knows. And if you're not willing to do that, no matter what kind of library work you do, it will not be successful. And so, to me, a profound thing about, if you listen, you have to realize that people have different ways of knowing, they have different ways of telling. And so to me, the ways of telling, to capture that, you have to have a system that's willing to capture those different ways of telling and knowing. And I continue to believe, I'm sorry, but the Library of Congress fails on both counts. They do a lot. I don't want to discount them or anything, but if you don't do that, then you're always going to be the conqueror. We're bringing this in, and this is the way it's going to be, and bam. It's going to put it on the floor, and that's it. But that's not a very progressive way to capture things. And to me, I already understood this but it really was underscored for me when I taught the Native American students, and they talk about this a lot. It's not that they want to be excluded, but what they believe and their way of seeing the world is different. They don't want their ways of cosmology to be just viewed as folklore. Not something that's not real, but it's real. You have to, it has to really emanate from that. And if you believe that, then every part of librarianship is affected by this. I think that the Thesaurus is one little piece of that. People like to think about diversity as something that's not very deep, but if it's serious, it's got to go all the way through all of these systems. So that's that.