The Southern Colorado Ethnic Heritage and Diversity Archives: A Campus-Community Partnership

 

In 2008, the Colorado State University-Pueblo Archives launched a new collecting initiative, the Southern Colorado Ethnic Heritage and Diversity Archives. SCEHADA’s mission is to preserve the rich heritage of Southern Colorado’s diverse ethnic, racial and cultural groups by collecting, preserving and making available the records of the individuals, families and organizations that make up these groups. The Colorado Chicano Movement Archives, the largest component of SCEHADA, was built with the enthusiastic assistance of grassroots Chicano organizers. Further, the Archives strengthened ties with the Chicano Studies program by enlisting students to conduct oral history interviews with Chicano activists and Latino veterans. The end result was that the students had a meaningful educational experience, the community group was able to participate collaboratively in preserving its history and the Archives helped raise the University’s profile in the largely Hispanic Pueblo. Win, win, win!

Beverly B. Allen

Beverly Allen is the University Archivist for the Colorado State University-Pueblo. Allen holds graduate degrees in history and library science from the University of Missouri-St. Louis and the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, respectively. In addition to responsibility for university records, Allen is charged to expand the Southern Colorado Ethnic Heritage and Diversity Archives. In that capacity, she has worked intensively with donors to build the Colorado Chicano Movement Archives. She has also collaborated on the Voices of Protest Oral History Project with CSUP’s Chicano Studies Department to interview Colorado Latino veterans and Chicano activists. Before coming to CSU-Pueblo, Allen worked as an archivist at the Bessemer Historical Society, Pueblo, Colorado and at Emory University.