SCARC’s anti-racist descriptive activities were represented by Oregon Multicultural Archives curator Natalia Fernández at the National REFORMA Conference with a poster presentation titled “Moving from Words to Actions: Anti-Racist Description Projects of Archival Materials Pertaining to Oregon’s Latinx Community History.”
About the Conference
The National REFORMA Conference is the premier training and networking event for those dedicated to library services for Latinos and Spanish-speaking communities. It is hosted by REFORMA, established in 1971 as an affiliate of the American Library Association (ALA), as a national association to promote library and information services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking. The conference theme for this year was “Moving Forward Together: Empowering the Latino Community” and the conference took place September 18-21, 2025, in Long Beach, CA.
Poster Abstract
Archivists are actively engaging in anti-racist work, especially regarding how we describe the materials and collections we steward. This poster shares the Oregon State University Special Collections and Archives Research Center’s collaborative process for developing and completing anti-racist description projects. As examples, two projects pertaining to Oregon’s Latinx community history are featured: highlighting materials pertaining to Indigenous communities from Mexico present in the Erlinda Gonzales-Berry Papers and remediating the description for our online Braceros in Oregon Photographs collection.
Fernández spoke to 12 attendees during the 1 hour poster session to share SCARC’s work. Many attendees were not members of the special collections and archives community and were delighted and inspired that repositories across the county are engaging in anti-racist descriptive activities.
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Highlights from the National REFORMA Conference 2025
Keynote Speaker: Maria Hinojosa
In 1992, Hinojosa launched Latino USA, “the longest-running public radio Latino news and cultural program,” and in 2010, she founded Futuro Media Group which “creates multimedia content for and about the new American mainstream in the service of empowering people to navigate the complexities of an increasingly diverse and connected world.” (from Latino USA and Future Media Group about pages)
Tour! Chicano History & REFORMA Archives
Description: Explore the REFORMA Archives and uncover Chicano history in Los Angeles. Begin at the REFORMA archives at California State University, Los Angeles, to learn about the organization’s role in preserving and advocating for Latino library services. Then, visit the Chicano Resource Center at the East Los Angeles Library, a vital hub for research on Chicano heritage and activism.
REFORMA archives at California State University, Los Angeles
The Chicano Resource Center at the East Los Angeles Library
Resources Featured During Conference Sessions
Bibliopolítica: A Digital History of the Chicano Studies Library ~ at the intersection of Chicana/o/x Studies, Digital Humanities, and Library History, this online exhibit chronicles the history of one of the first Chicana/o/x collections, the Chicano Studies Library (CSL) at the University of California, Berkeley. Viewers are invited to explore the digital exhibit, listen to recorded oral histories, browse digitized archival items, or explore on their own path.
Cinco Books ~ making available the classic and also the newest from the Spanish speaking world / acceso a las obras clásicas de la literatura del mundo hispano hablante.
Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves ~ a session partially inspired by this article which defines vocational awe as “the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good, sacred notions, and therefore beyond critique.” The author states: “I argue that the concept of vocational awe directly correlates to problems within librarianship like burnout and low salary. This article aims to describe the phenomenon and its effects on library philosophies and practices so that they may be recognized and deconstructed.”
