Richard Chabrán oral history interview, 2022.

Ways of Knowing Oral History Collection

Interviewee: Richard Chabrán, former coordinator of the Chicano Studies Library at the University of California, Berkeley and developer of the Chicano Thesaurus.

Interviewers: Emily Drabinski & Amanda Belantara

Date: August 11, 2022

Location: Virtual Interview; Whittier College

Amanda Belantara: Today, we're interviewing Richard Chabrán, the 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. And I went to a parochial school called St. Joseph, and then to Bishop Amat High School. And then, my brother was already attending the University of California Berkeley and he made sure to bring the papers home for me to apply. During those years was right after the Third World Strike. There was a lot of demands to have an ethnic studies college. And part of the demands was to have more minority professors and enroll more students of color and that kind of stuff. So, I actually was one of those students. I applied and I got in. Basically, when I went to the university, I studied anthropology. And so, I always have 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 very well 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, you know, what are you doing?" he says, and I explained it to him. And he says, "You know, 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. And I mean it wasn't my intention to become a librarian. I thought I would become an anthropologist though. You know, that was kind of the atmosphere. And when I first started working there, there had just been a study done. You know, normally they never did an assessment of what library resources would be available for the ethnic studies department at that time. But the students, they said, well, we need to have, you know, materials. It was really a struggle to try to make sure that we had, you know, materials. So, they themselves started collect materials. My first job in the library and that was really important for me, was taking care of what was called the Serial Collection, which included newspapers, periodicals, any kind of serial publication. And there were publications, very importantly, that we would say did not have a regular time schedule. And sometimes even the numbering was not all sort of it was supposed to be. So my job was to arrange, to make sure they were saved. We saved them in vertical files. And that was really important for me because I felt that those newspapers really represented the voices of communities across the country that you don't often hear about and you don't often read about. So, they were like an education for me. And a little later, you know, I also took care of the journals. A lot of the journals were alternative journals. They weren't a lot of times indexed by major publishers and they weren't indexed by, you know, the indexing services. But because I had to put them away, I got to really know them, right? And so, when people would come in, they would come in and ask me, "I want to know where this kind of article is," or "I know this person." And I was able to tell them, right? But of course, I knew that was not sustainable. So that really, you know, that was an entrance into, you know, my library career. And the other part that I wanted to just mention is that as another part of my job, there was many of us that were student workers, and a lot of us had a particular assignment. And so, one of my assignments was to create a bibliography on folklore. My marching orders was to go out into all the different libraries at Berkeley, which there was more than 20, and to find the information about Chicano folklore. And so, I did that. And so, you know, that was a great way for me to learn about the libraries and to find them. And what I found was that indeed there was material in all these different libraries. The problem was, is that for me, it was hidden, and I really felt that "the library" you know, in quotations, did a very poor job of providing access to that material. So, 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 after that, there was the civil rights movement. And then there was a Chicano student movement, Chicano Movement. And that was kind of like, there's a person I like to quote about that. His name is Richard Griswold del Castillo and he says that, you know, "The Chicano Movement was a radical attempt to redefine the political, social, economic, and cultural status of millions of persons of Mexican descent." You know, it was partly motivated by the convergence of the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, you know, and also the emergence of identity of this group of people. It was the first time they were starting to offer Chicano studies courses. But at that time, it was called La Raza Studies courses. At the same time, there was a bunch of students that had made sure there was more Mexican American students recruited onto the university. It was still not very many. And then, there was these other movements. There was the land grant struggles in New Mexico. There was La Raza Unida which was a political party that came about. There was the farm worker, you know, struggle and which manifests itself on our campus as kind of like an anti-lettuce campaign. There was a lot of pressure put on the university not to buy grapes. Those are the kind of things that were going on. Berkeley has this space that's called Sproul Plaza, where people congregate. So, you know, like you go to class, you're going to go past that space. There's always a lot of, you know, speeches going on. And sometimes, it's the preachers. The preachers are pretty famous. They would go and talk. There was a lot going on during that time I could not possibly capture it all myself.

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. And I've been reflecting about this more now and I think at the time, you know, one of the terms that really kind of caught my imagination was the idea of self-determination. So that in the self-determination, that meant something different to a lot of different people. But to me, it was an opportunity to say, well, you know, I haven't really learned the history of my people the way I thought it should be told. And so, self-determination to me meant the opportunity to do that, to develop that history, and to develop those resources. So that not just the people that were like me would know it, but the world would know it. I think that was, you know, 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, but also where they could congregate, A place where they could have a safe place because there wasn't very many, you know, like Chicanos on the campus at that time. They wanted to find the stuff that they were reading in the newspapers and the demonstrations they were at, where the cultural festivals that they attended and the people that were creating this poetry that they heard, they wanted that material. And so, I think it was that that inspired them to start this, I think, you could call a reading room, which is very small in Dwinelle Hall. And that's where the, at that time, it was called La Raza Studies was located. 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: Sure. You would go into this room and immediately when you came in, there would be some kind of a desk that would be there to welcome people. And usually, it would be students that would be the ones that would be greeting people. And then if 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. So, I would say more like shelving that you might find in a professor's office. Then they would be like, we didn't have that much space, so it'd start out in one and turn and then come back. And so, there was these little alcoves of books that were there. But then on the other side, more to the back wall, there was these vertical files. And the vertical files held a lot of newspaper articles, or pamphlets, or flyers and all of that. So, a lot of things that we might consider ephemera. Those were the things that were really the most important part of this library. So, those were there. And on top of that, the library collected posters. So, posters were like a really important graphic part of what you know was going on out there. There was from the United Farm Workers or there was local artists. And these were all really, a lot of them were just 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 all that kind of stuff. So, there was that kind of thing. And then, there was a catalog, you know, with the drawers, and mostly it was author title and a shelf list, which you know, was using a modified Library of Congress System. So, what I would like to do is kind of relay that, we weren't by ourselves. There was other universities where there was Latinos that were, you know, engaged in the same kind of issues. So, there was students mostly at Stanford, San Diego, UCLA, Santa Barbara, you know, in different places. So, we created an organization which we called ABC, where we would meet periodically, and we would try to help each other in what we were trying to do. And that really helped fortify our voice and gave us a little bit of a platform. And I remember one time that 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. So they said, "Oh, come over here. We're going to meet." And so, before I knew it, they were having a demonstration and I was in the library demonstrating, you know, to help them, you know, they needed this. So, they got like a section of the library. And today, that section has different cultural elements, but they're doing some really great work. So anyway, that's just to say that there was interest, primarily student-led, that started to really want to make a difference. And so, you know, together we did that. 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 at the time then discoverable by the main library's catalog system? Or would people need to visit the Chicano Studies Library in order to know that they were available?

Chabrán: I think I had referred to this other report that it was written right before I started working in the library and it was called, "Providing Library Services to the Chicano Studies Program." So, one of the recommendations that was in that report was that, you know, you could have different models. One model was that you're going to centralize everything. The second model was that there would be a bibliographic system that would do what you're talking about, make things discoverable in both places. So basically, the main library rejected both of those approaches. They said basically, "Well, we don't have the money to do that. It would cost too much money," and all that kind of stuff. But the Chicano Studies Program, the library, they were concerned about that, and they didn't have any way of telling the main library, "Well, you have to include in your catalog what we have." One of the things that they did was we would publish, I can't remember if it was monthly or, but we would publish what we'd call the recent additions to the Chicano Studies Library. And that was actually something that was done by a few different libraries across the country, Austin and I think 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. So, that didn't happen. But we were kind of like trying to do what we could to help at least the main library know what we were getting. But we made it, you know, more available to more people across the country. So, that's the way we tried to deal with that. The other thing we did was that we had some what we would call subject bibliographies in certain areas like folklore, linguistics, one on 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 in their libraries, right? So, we were trying to do, you know, we were on the outside, but we tried to do what we could to make things available.

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

Chabrán: The benefits were that we were going to do what we thought was the best. And so, that meant collecting what we wanted to collect, organizing things the way we felt was more important, and starting to begin to train people about how to use and to develop these systems. So, those are basically within our own purview. So, they couldn't stop us from doing that. I guess they could have, but they didn't. Now the downside was we didn't get money for doing that. In that time, universities would provide as part of the budget an allocation that was meant to be, well, this is going to kind of cover the library expenses. So, that money would go to the main library. Well, the main library did not want to hear about sharing that money. So, you know, a downside was we didn't get any of that money. But on the other hand, as part of the student movement at that time of Third World Strike, the Associated Student Body, they actually 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 not just the Chicano students. That was all students. That was a collective decision. And you know, students were pretty progressive. And of course, there was Chicano students, men and women, that were advocating for this at the time within student government. There was a disadvantage about we weren't really part of what was happening on the inside. But you know, I think the thing is that for me, you know, you may have gotten certain things that by being on the inside, but they would've controlled what you could do with it. And we did what we thought we should do with it. So, just judging from what happened at other places, this library became one of the most important collections in the country. Where other ones where they tried to do it more on the inside. They may do it on the inside for a while. It might work. And then they thought, "Okay, well the heat's off." Then, they stop supporting even what efforts they did have. So, it didn't make up for some of the losses. But we were not, I have to say, we were not against somehow creating that interface. And that interface came much later after other things happened. For example, many, many, many years later, there was a Senate Concurrent Resolution 43 which was where certain legislators said, "What's the University of California doing to support Latino studies?" And so, we had like a task force of librarians that worked on that and we did certain recommendations. And then at that time, you know, we're talking like 20 years later, something. That that time then one of the recommendations was that the holdings of this library should be reflected in an online catalog. So at that time, it happened. So that now they are reflected. Not everything, but a lot of the monographic holdings are. So eventually that thing 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 stuff. 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, you know, incorporated.

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

Chabrán: Well, like I said, they viewed them as the main ones as inadequate. When the library first started, they tried to use a Dewey Decimal System, but it became very unwieldy with all the numbers. They were going to start going across the book. And so, that's when they started to change to the Library of Congress System. But remember at this time, people were like questioning, you know, like, how are we being described. So there was this, we might say, utopian vision that we're going to make things different. Because then the other thing was people had an issue with was at that time, almost, if you went into the main library, most of the books you'd find them under E184. And so, there was this kind of merging or bringing together, melting together or whatever of all the materials. So, I think there was general dissatisfaction with the way that the materials were being classified and described. And so, one of the consequences was that when they weren't in that 184 one, they were somewhere in those other 40 libraries. So, you know, it was very difficult to really know what it was. And then, there was the issue with the classification system and the way they treated, like for example, Chicano literature. Chicano literature could either be with the Spanish stuff or it could be with the English stuff. And it was just very confusing for people. So, José created the Chicano Classification System. So it's a modified Library of Congress Classification System. He merged some of those things and made it a PX classification for Chicano as we thought of all as one thing, not something separate that was inherited from a European system that that made sense for, you know, but it didn't make any sense. And then, also there was things 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. There was that, you know, there was a place for that kind of stuff. So we really, it was something that was building off of what was coming out at the time. The Chicano Classification System didn't come about by him going some room somewhere and just thinking, "Okay, this is the way it should be." It was more like something that was developed from the bottoms 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 something that was some kind of academic thing that just happened. It was more, it was like emergent. And also, but most really importantly, the terminology that was used in order to provide access was not what I would use, like a term like Illegal aliens. This is like them trying to socialize me how I was going to call and look up and think about things that I did not think of in those terms. It was really objectionable to me to use those terms. And then, there was also cultural things where there was cultural customs that we would have a certain name for and weren't very well represented by the English term that was used. So it was a linguistic thing, it was a political thing, it was a cultural thing. All of those things didn't work for us. I think the philosophy was we don't want to dismiss totally what the Library of Congress, you know, had to offer. It wasn't like we were trying to be oppositional there, but where there was things that didn't fit right to what we kind of knew, it didn't work because for example, I couldn't go to the one place and find out where everything was. So, I kind of had to go to these different places and figure out how that worked. So, 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, that's also where there's the famous Bancroft Library that has a lot of collections about the history of California, and Mexico, and all that kind of stuff. As a librarian, I was really good friends with a lot of historians. And 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 stuff on Chicanos, because they wouldn't know what that is." 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, or you know, they just didn't know. Because I saw this as a problem. I said, "I'm going to make a guide to all the collections that I think are relevant to people studying Mexican American history." And so, I started to do that and then I made an appointment with the curator. And 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, you know, 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 was really kind of institutional barriers for us to do that kind of work. So, we did it by ourselves. Like, that was it.

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, and journals and bulletins and all that, which we thought were really important and which took a lot of space in the library. And so, those things were something that were sought after because a lot of libraries didn't collect that stuff. But then, like within about five or six years that a lot of the libraries thought, "Well, we need them." And then the professors at those places and Chicano Studies was developing, they started saying, "We need to have those titles." And the library didn't have them and some of them were not in print anymore. So, then what we did was we started to microfilm those journals and newspapers, which then we made available through university microfilms to the country. We weren't looking to do this just for one library. We wanted to make these things available nationally. So, that was an important part of which later on when we developed the Chicano Periodical Index was kind of a, you know, it was a needed part to that whole that we were trying to achieve. The Chicano Periodical Index Project was something that those of us that had worked in the library for a while, we knew if somebody came in and they said, "I want an article on women that focused on X, Y, and Z." Then there was no index to do that, right? The material was there, but how do you get to it? So several of us, because we had to keep answering these questions, we knew it was there because we had put them on the shelves. It was the closeness, my proximity, my handling of this material that allowed me to tell people where things were. That was not something that could be sustained. The literature was exploding and all that. So, we knew that we had to do something different. But the same time, what happened was there was 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 do this. 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?" You know, soon after we got together and we said, "You know, 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 more like 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. So that kind of laid out more like the general things. We want to do an index. It was, you know, a general statement about the general things that we were going to use, without getting into specifics of which titles or which terms. It was more like maybe more of a mission statement, I don't know. 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 it was like something 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. And in there, we had said we wanted to do this thing where we would do 18 titles. But that point we didn't say which titles they were. And so eventually, as a group, we agreed that this would be the ones that were going to be included. I think the principal people that were part of that effort was 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, who is an El Paso Community College, Elvira Chavarría, who was at the University of Texas at Austin. She was a recent librarian. 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 California State University, Fullerton [sic: Fullerton Public Library]. Helena Quintana, who was at New York, New Mexico State. Albert Camarillo, who was also at Fullerton that time. San Juanita Reyes, who was also at Pan American University. And Ron Rodriguez, who was working for me at UCLA. You know, they made, those people made up this Committee for the Development of Subject Access to Chicano Literature. And they were the indexers to the Chicano Periodical Index. And really, I can tell you, that the bulk of the work that had to be done, these people did it. It would never have happened. It was so much work, so many titles. You know, that index turned out to be four inches thick! It was a tremendous amount of work. They didn't get paid to do it. They volunteered. They thought it was important. To me, I look back at that and I'll say that was 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 that, but also one of the conferences that we had, we tried to get as many of them to come. But at the same time, we were trying to do this index, you know, of Chicano Periodical Literature, we understood that there was now beginning to be more representation of Chicano literature within all these emerging databases, like Dialog and BRS and all these things. So at the same time we were doing that we said we want people to understand what's the best way to have access to this. This was before a lot of people were being trained. And it was really expensive to do that kind of searching. It's important to remember now, you just go and search the databases yourself, right? At that time, you didn't. You had to do it mediated through a librarian and you had to go and sign up and they got charged by the second. Part of our job was familiarizing people, you know, with how this works. We didn't want them just to use what we were developing. We wanted to use all these 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 thesaurus. So, 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. So, we worked with this group called the National Chicano Research Network to have this training where we brought people together to know how to use these systems. So, we got the training to do that. But once we had people there, then we actually had a different training session at Berkeley where they came together and we used the processing manual. And we went over the instructions for doing the entries and that kind of thing. You know, the timing of this is like maybe not quite right, because we actually did some of the thesaurus work. Part of the processing manual, we did have a place where all the subject headings work. We created that before we actually gave people the worksheets. They had the thesaurus to help them to say what the subject headings were. We assigned different periodicals to everybody. And then, what they did was they sent those back to us, well, at that point was 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 Voort Corporation and it was using a mini computer. Some of the people that were indexers, some of them had never done that. And so, there was a learning curve for them to doing this. But we tried to provide as much orientation and instruction as we could. And so there was questions, but I think the steepest learning curve was working with a programmer. And we had to learn all that stuff and you know, the different approaches and you know, we had to agree to doing certain things versus other things. So, that was something that I think Francisco and myself, we did a lot of that interface with that person. I think there was a tremendous amount of learning curves. We learned a lot. When we got together, me and him, we would go across the bay to Mountain View, which was about an hour and a half drive, you know, and sometimes longer. So that was always a time of catching up. And so, we did a lot of learning just through communicating. And one other catalyst for doing this was that I had gotten invited to be on the advisory board of ERIC. I think they invited me because you know, like I had a certain expertise, but they also wanted to do a guide to how you use their collections for Mexican Americans. As part of the board, I ended up helping them to do a guide like that. When I worked with ERIC, my thing that I wanted to get out of it was I want to know how you do this. And so, she really showed me and introduced me to the people that were doing and how they did it and their own manual. We developed our own manual, which was really based on a lot of the way they did it. The specifics were different, but we had something we could all follow. We talked about this among the library staff, and I was the coordinator at that time. So, I had asked one of the work study students, her name was Linda Mariscal, around 1976. She worked on developing 3,000 item index using FAMULUS, which was a program that was developed by the Department of Forestry, but allowed us to basically use the campus computer to develop various lists. So we were just kind of getting our hands wet in this. But our central concern was then, you know, by this time of course there was a library catalog and databases, but it 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 source. At the same time, we were working with people who are, you know, had very sophisticated 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 it together and we came up with it. So we became familiar, you know, 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, you know, please do this or let us use your system. We were able to just use that system to develop this prototype.

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

Chabrán: Our main first objective was to develop an index, but we had done it using automation, looking forward to the time where it 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 back and then we would have them input. 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 one and we are using dumb terminals. So it wasn't like the ones you have now. We're able to access with no graphics or nothing like that. Just like what was there. And so that's the way we did our initial editing and all of that. Also, I would say that there was times when really there was a core of people. Indexers did all of this work. But really in terms of the database, there was Francisco García Ayvens from UCLA, and myself that we did a lot of that work. And we would actually spend a lot of time at that Voort Corporation, which is in Mountain View. So it was across the bay and it was like, you know, it was a day trip, right? There was issues. Sometimes things weren't working and all that stuff. We worked together with the programmer and we did that maintenance work together. So then there was a question, it's how are we going to get it out there? So we talked to some people, different librarians, and they said, "Well, you know, you might want to ask G.K. Hall because they've done all these catalogs from all these libraries and they actually did one on Latin America that's really popular. And you might want to ask them, they might want to do it." And so then, we approached them and they said, "Yes, we'll do it." And so then the first few volumes, they did it. And so, we had to get the data to them and then they made it look prettier. And it still looked really computer like. They created an author title and subject index, you know, and there was a list of the periodicals and the indexers, and all of that. I think for all of us, we were kind of like, "Wow, we did this." And we were kind of a little surprised, you know, 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 for us what the Chicano Thesaurus is?

Chabrán: The Chicano Thesaurus is a collection of keywords 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 using systematically 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 that it was excitement. It was just like, this has to be done. It was more like, how are we going to do it? And the determination that it would be done. And which was really important because when these collections started, first started to get developed, there was a little bit of competition between the different collections. And so, everybody wanted to have their own thing. And so, 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. So, 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. And 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 that worked on a lot of different things, not just this. But we didn't think about a year before we were going to call ourselves this and then do it. We just did it. I don't want to give this appearance like there's this real well planned thing and we're just following all these different steps. We were just doing it. And sometimes I think it was great we did it and I was like, "Would we have the guts to do that today?" You know, so it's, it was really that kind of 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, not in the terms that what we did, but Sandy Berman's work on subject headings that he did was really, you know, I got to meet him and I was like, "Hey, you know, like we're on the same page." So, there was other people who were doing this kind of work, not specifically on Mexican Americans, but on other groups. So that was really important. The Chicano Thesaurus is really just a response to the need to how do you describe this material in ways which the people that it's about can understand. And that those terms and that terminology would not be offensive. Case in point, Illegal aliens. We always said, that was like a number one example, where people said, well, you know, two things. One is who is somebody that's illegal and another one is the assumption that because you're a particular ethnicity that you are going to be illegal, right? So there was all these things, negative things that was associated with those terms like that. So, we wanted to have a terminology that was one that would be understood, and people would understand. I think when I first started using the library, I was, my thing was where would they put this? How would they describe us, right? So it was more an attempt to like how would we describe 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 or regional conferences like the Texas Library Association or the New Mexico Library Association, we were starting to meet at those places. And so, really 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 was a few other people that really weren't part of our conversation that came about. So, we reached out to them and they were very interested in doing this. So, that's the way we did it. It was not like systematic search. It was really the people that we were meeting together informally at these conferences that we brought together.

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 the technical part. You know, she really was one of the people that was the strong advocate for not using the structure of the Library of Congress term, you know. And she was really a good systems person to help us think through how we were going to do that. She did make some other substantive changes, but I can't really tell you what they were. But she was kind of an outside person that 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: One of her focuses in library schools was doing like automation and work. And she had worked with the Spanish-speaking mental health database and they had bibliography, but it wasn't really put into like to a database. So, she really had them figure out how to do that. Her work there had an impact on what we were doing. She was somebody that was open and saw the need to not just do things traditionally. So, she helped us with that bridge of how do we do the more cultural stuff with machine language stuff.

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. Right, 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 stuff. Later on, we started to include more, the City University of New York. So we got more Puerto Rican stuff. I think that we never had as much ties with Cuban American group. 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. That was good.

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 thesaurus really was principally these 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 ourself." It was Franciso Robert Trujillo which ended up being at Stanford. But at that time, it's at Santa Barbara and myself, we said, "Hey, you know, we're going to do this collaboratively." You know, we already had some work had done and we are just excited about being able to bring together this information. Once we did this and we produced a version of the thesaurus, which people could use the index. People were really excited about being able to use that and they made some suggestions and all that. But it was like when there was nothing there before and we had something, people were excited. That was basically it. And then we had the directions, the operational stuff that, you know, that we weren't going to make it like a Library of Congress thing. It was going to be this large terms and all of that. Just based on the simple things about how the thesaurus that's structured. We took those three lists and we did it. Like today, maybe we would take three years and figure out some of the... We just did it and shared it with people. And you know, when it didn't work, it didn't work and that kind of thing so.

Belantara: I'm going to also just ask quickly the Chicano Classification System, which was created by José Antonio Arce, did that 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're doing that. And like I said before, 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. So, 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? Or how were they creating those?

Chabrán: Mostly from the literature. 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 and I kind of was studying at that time, the emic and the etic, right? 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, right. So that was kind of just of 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 like the ephemeral material that they had. But UCLA at the beginning, remember they weren't librarians. They were mostly students. And we had these, like these vertical files, think about them. So, we needed to organize them in some fashion. And so, the headings that were used in those vertical files, those were some of the beginnings of these lists. And some places they may have been on cards, but they had to still be made available to us in some way. I think at Berkeley, we used our shelf heading list, because we had the card catalog. We had a shelf and we used those which were based on this Chicano classification system. We used those as the basis for creating our list. And then at Santa Barbara, the person there was name is Robert Trujillo, they actually had a card catalog that had these subject heading list. And so he had that put together. I don't think those lists exist anymore because sometimes they may have been just on cards. We took those lists. Principle upon them was UCLA, and Berkeley, and Santa Barbara. They had developed these lists and we took them and we merged them. I think that, you know, the actual bringing together, you know, I want to acknowledge both the work of Robert Trujillo and Francisco in that. In the end, I ended up doing a good amount of that work. But with definitely with their input, we merged those into one list. And I think I actually did the first thing of merging, but I would share copies of what I was doing with people. We had this corpus of headings that were not what ended up being at the end, but they were the items that we had for consideration to put into a thesaurus. When we met with Ed Kazlauskas, he was doing some work on software that could be used to develop a thesaurus. And so he told us, "Oh, there's this person, you know, that works in I think was Mountain View. His name was Tom Holt. He had his own company." So then we met with him and this is I think a really important part of the project. Our discussions with him, he 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, "You know, at this time in history, there's a lot of problems with doing pre-coordinated terms and that kind of thing. 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 terms that's going to stand alone, 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 proposed 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 to do. Because at that time, I was already going to library school, or I just finished. I already had exposure to a lot of that, you know, where we had to put together our own programs and used certain kinds of languages and stuff like that. They sent him back to us. And then we said, "Well, we don't really have that staff internally to be able to process all this stuff." So we talked to Tom Holt and they said, "Oh no problem. I have a person that can key all this stuff 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 it was so much disagreements, but there were different ways of saying something. You know, there was preferences to what you would use like different terms that'd say, "Well, there's that, but I'm not going to use that. You know, 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, like , right? That's like, you know, things, well, we just put and that made more sense to us. So, we included that kind of stuff. 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 work together on trying to figure that out. This has done a long time ago. As I look back, that was then 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 stuff. And I know that, and maybe you know Lily can speak to this better, but I know there was a point at which she had somebody kind that they worked on like the LGBT stuff. And I would think that's 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 these. So again, it doesn't have to be one or the other.

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 197575, so you know, I mean like, now, you know, I mean we just had this debate about Illegal aliens. Well, we are using Undocumented workers a long time before that and people embrace that. So it's like, okay, did we use Undocumented persons or Workers or all that kind of stuff. So there was discussions about that. But that was really a term that I think really captured it. Then, there was the terms that were the types of literary things that were going on. There's the term that's used, I 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. So, they're not. But you know, another term that I think you know is really important in terms of that is just like the term Chicana, right? That was like really, you know, like important because that was like not just signifying a gender, it was like an identity thing. We had a group of undergraduate women that did one a bibliography called, "Bibliography of Writings on La Mujer." But that was, you know, they identified themselves as Chicanas. Some of them became librarians. That was another thing which was really important. One term, that we always embraced, the thing about Land grants. But we found out that legally Land grants can only apply to certain things that are sanctioned by the government and all that. And now, it's like 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, you know, and published it. And that means that we did it and we made copies of it and sent it out to all the indexes. Eventually, it got revised a couple times. And much later it got accepted as one of the alternative subject list that approved by the Library of Congress, which you could use in a field that shows local headings.

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

Chabrán: Oh, we're not. So, 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: Well, I think we all felt very gratified, but I think at the point we were so busy with so many things that we never really stopped. So, we were really happy, you know, but it was always more like, okay, that's done. Here's the next thing. You know what I'm saying? So it was not like, "Okay, well we did that, now we can rest." Because there was always a struggle to keep it going, to do the next thing, to do all this stuff, you know? So, it was always a struggle. And we got the first thing out through G.K. Hall and then we had to immediately keep it going. And then they weren't going to do it. So, we had to do that next thing. It was always something. It was non-ending. We wanted to do this database like a national one. You know, there was always things. So we never, I don't think, stopped.

Belantara: What were some of the reactions that people shared? And then also I was just curious, once you actually printed the thesaurus, how did you go about getting it out to other institutions or other libraries?

Chabrán: So in the first version, it actually is published as part of the index. That's in there. 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 10 dollars, I don't know. But it wasn't that much. And you know, I just remember us getting together. And my reaction and theirs was just to say thank you, right? Thank you. We did it. I mean, there was no money involved. So, you know, it was just that. The thing that struck me the most was not so much their things, but the people who used it. And now to this day, people said, "You know, 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: And 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 that the thesaurus was part of it, we knew about this place called the Rosenberg Foundation in San Francisco. And this was in Berkeley, right? We went to the campus office and we said, "We want to apply to get some money there." And so they said, "Well, you can't." You know, 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 basically 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 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. So then we didn't have access to that funding because we weren't, at that time, we were not into writing grants and all that stuff. So then what we did was we said, "We have this revenue that we got from the microfilming of these journals." 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 Voort Corporation and for the computing time, and for the data entry, and all of that. 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 doing the indexing, by that time, 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, you know, because librarians, you have to have professional service or whatever. And so, 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 stuff. So, they were into doing that. 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, you know, thought it was great because we tried to give every institution as much credit as we could. So, they got something out of it. They 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 was all these institutions.

Drabinski: The thesaurus is now in use in commercial product. 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 counter. I mean, we didn't see ourselves as, you know, being against any of that. It was just like it didn't work for us. I guess I worry, you know, that we are able to do this and had a lot of momentum. I worry not that 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 time, my whole career to a particular area that we call Chicano Studies or Latino Studies. And now, my colleagues that I talked to them, they have like ten different subject areas they're doing. They don't really know 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 are 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 stuff 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. But you know, 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 stuff. And there was always a lot of questions, but like I said, I think she took it and ran with it, right. You know, she has special talents as an editor. She's a really great editor. So, she's really been able to upgrade it from what it was. The way I would say the best term is 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. You know, 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 are 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 separate was kind of directed at Chicanos, but better way of bringing in, which we eventually did a lot, you know, the Puerto Ricans and the Cubans, and you know, other Central Americans and all that. I would say like, how do we do that, finding other ways in which we could have brought together people more often. And we did it when we could. But I think, see that's where it really hurt us to not being able to get that funding outside. 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. So, if I talked to my younger yourself, how do we, how can we, you know, get more funds to bring people together more. That was something eventually happened and was great, but I think it could have done, we could have done a lot more. And again, I have to say that even though a large part of the project was using automation, people at that point didn't have, you know, the tools that we have now to communicate, the personal computers and forget about social media and all that. So, 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. But you know, I am so in awe of my colleagues that we're 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 would've wished that you would've had, hey, the thesaurus exists and continues to make different research more widely accessible.

Chabrán: But I would want to say too, that is like, 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. And in the latter part of the classes that I taught there, we always focused on the ways of telling and ways of knowing. I try 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, you know, 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, 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 knew this stuff, but I 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 they, their 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, right? Not something that's not real, but it's real. So, you know, you have to, it has to really emanate from that. And if you believe that, then every part of librarianship is, you know, affected by this. I think that the Thesaurus is one little piece of that. You know, people like to think about diversity as some thing 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.