A (Defiant) Chicana in the Archives (excerpt from the 2024 Davis Lecture, Gonzaga University)

The more I live and love, often losing in love, truth be told, but winning in wanting to learn more about women's survivance and resistance across time, assess and make sense of, from the ground up, I am reminded that the archives never abandon one, rarely do they betray us, and although incomplete and even chaotic, if we are doing as thorough a job as possible in our research, the story in them to be told is exciting and energizing; in many cases, they provide that needed respite from ordinary cares, like who is picking up what, feeding the pets, getting to the dry cleaners, remembering the onions and eggs and paper towels.The archives, I have always felt, take one away from this ordinariness that so marks our lives, and the quiet space in them when immersed in the research is what I imagine heaven to be.To be sure, as historians we are generally very removed from the people we research or the subjects we investigate.But in my case, as I hope you will see in this gallop across several centuries and many themes, the proximity and affinity I feel with the women I have found in the archives hits very close to home, has been the constant in my life, and I think constancy is probably an underdiscussed side of history and of history making that we could do more with as we might, still, with survivance and precarity.The women I have been lucky to find in the documents and to interpret and to highlight and make visible from those dusty, staid pages are then also what inspire the practice of