SDSU-IV partnership promotes local research
CALEXICO — A partnership between San Diego State University-Imperial Valley and the Imperial Valley Desert Museum is exposing history students to the kind of scholarship typically reserved for graduate school.
The partnership debuted in spring 2019 and requires students enrolled in the campus’ historiography and research class to write a term paper based largely on primary source material housed in the museum’s archives.
The arrangement has also benefitted the museum by allowing the students to further help organize and catalogue various materials in its possession that to date had been inaccessible to the general public and scholars.
“To me it seemed like a win-win situation all around,” said history professor Carlos Herrera. “We were able to transform our class, I think, into something far more meaningful to our students.”
The partnership is part of a long-term vision that Herrera, as director of the campus’ Borderlands Institute, has for the institute to serve as a conduit for scholars looking for archival material related to the histories of the Imperial, Yuma and Mexicali valleys.
That vision includes the possibility of one day having the Desert Museum exhibit some of its archival material at the Calexico campus’ library, as well as potentially partnering with Pioneers Museum and Mexicali-based institutions, Herrera said.
For now, the current partnership has introduced students to the terminology of archives and the hands-on experience of processing primary source material, much of which has been kept in storage for extended periods of time.
“This material had not seen the light of day for I don’t know how many decades,” Herrera said.
As part of its responsibilities, the museum had already reviewed much of the archival material and gotten a general sense of its content. Herrera then worked with current museum Director David Breeckner to select a number of topics that history students could research for their term papers using the museum’s archives.
Though undergraduate coursework typically involves reading and writing critically, positing a theory and drawing conclusions, the “craft” that historians practice often requires a different skillset that includes finding and analyzing primary source documents and incorporating them into one’s narrative.
That craft is being taught to the students enrolled in the campus’ historiography class.
“That kind of training for students doesn’t really begin until graduate school,” Herrera said.
And while the added work may have proven frustrating to some of the students, most found it equally rewarding, knowing that their research examined a topic that no other scholar had likely tackled before and which allowed the students to set the tone and narrative of future scholarship, Herrera said.
The historiography class required that students split their instruction time almost equally between the class and the museum. Nor were students allowed to pick their own research topic, and instead had to choose randomly from a hat.
Some of those pre-selected topics include analyzing museum records related to the Yuha man – skeletal remains discovered by local amateur archeologist Morlin Childers in 1974 in the desert near Ocotillo that were initially thought to be around 22,000 years old but were subsequently determined to be about 2,000 years old.
The research class’ students have shown a strong interest in the Yuha man, making it one the more sought after term paper topics.
The Yuha man’s archival material has been broken down to allow students three distinct areas of research, including a focus on the skeletal remains, an examination of Childers’ archeological records and of the skeleton’s controversial disappearance.
Other selected research topics include a history of the Desert View Tower, and the system of historic trials stretching between Yuma to San Diego that had been used by Native Americans in the past.
Some students from previous semesters had enjoyed the research class enough to reconsider their field of study and potential careers to include graduate school and working as museum curators.
“It’s made a big difference in their lives,” Herrera said. “This has had positive outcomes on so many levels.”
Establishing the research partnership proved educational for Herrera as well. Going forward, Herrera said he plans to replicate the effort with other archival repositories, and advocating to have the Desert Museum exhibit some of its material on campus.
He said he would prefer to see such an exhibit highlight the rich history of local Native American culture, an area of focus that the Borderlands Institute also is interested in further promoting.
The research partnership is the first of additional hoped-for partnerships that could further propel the mission of the institute. That mission is to promote local scholarship and help guide both local and visiting scholars to archival material found within the region.
“I want to make the scholarly world aware there are archives in Mexico on the border that tell the story of the Mexicali, Imperial and Yuma valleys,” Herrera said.