Nuestra Autohistoria: Toward a Chicana Digital Praxis

This essay explores the extent to which insurgent models of knowledge making offered up by theories of the "undercommons" and critical digital humanities can converge. I take up this question through an account of the Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective, an undercommons project that seeks to recover the history of Chicana feminist formations in the 1960s and 1970s and thereby build "new constituencies of resistance" (Chela Sandoval) inside and outside the academy. The essay explores the project's origins, its current work, and some of the contradictions and challenges that its collaborators have faced as "fugitive" scholars using the (digital) tools of the institution to develop an autonomous education project. The essay also lays out the multiple ways in which a Chicana Digital Praxis draws from both contemporary understandings of the undercommons and the knowledge practices of an earlier generation of Chicanas whose work is preserved and documented by the project. Links: www.chicanapormiraza.org/; chicanadiasporic.org/journey/chicana/index; legacy.lib.utexas.edu/voces/; braceroarchive.org/; www.saada.org/; www.caribbeanmemoryproject.com/; content.lib.washington.edu/wwrweb/; womenwhorockcommunity.org/.