Project feeds hunger for Latino history

STOCKTON — Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez grew up with a love for reading.

But none of the books available — not even the encyclopedia set her parents bought to teach her and her siblings — included stories about Latinos. And she knew what she had read was not the whole story.

“Where were we in all of that,” the 63year-old author and associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin said she wondered.

The lack of Latino representation in literature made her grow up “hungry for it.” So for almost two decades, Rivas-Rodriguez has been preserving and sharing the stories of hundreds of Latinos through her Voces Oral History Project, which has collected more than 1,200 interviews with men and women of the World War II, Korean and Vietnam War generations.

On Friday, Rivas-Rodriguez was at University of the Pacific for a reception and to present a lecture.

Ines Ruiz-Huston, Pacific’s Latinx outreach coordinator, said Rivas-Rodriguez inspires people not to forget their history and “how we need to treasure it and we need to promote it.”

It’s important to speak about who Latinos are and their contributions to this nation because it is part of the country’s history, Ruiz-Huston said.

On Saturday, Rivas-Rodriguez will be at the Chicano Research Center at 2182 E. Main St. in Stockton for “Menudo con Maggie.”

Attendees will be able to enjoy homemade menudo (traditional Mexican soup made with hominy and tripe) during a presentation by Rivas-Rodriguez, which will be followed by a question-and-answer session. The event starts at 7 a.m. at the Chicano Research Center. The center is asking for a $20 per person donation.

Rivas-Rodriguez spent more than 17 years as a journalist before shifting her focus to teaching. She started Voces, which translates to Voices, in 1999 at Texas.

In her time as a reporter, she said she came to the realization that many civil rights leaders were veterans but couldn’t find books about Mexican-Americans and WWII and their roles in civil rights movements.

Voces could help recover and preserve that history, she said.

Rivas-Rodriguez and her students at Texas have traveled across the country over the years to collect the first-hand accounts from Latino men and women. What started as a project focusing on WWII veterans now has expanded to include Latinos’ participation in other wars, as well as political and civic leaders. Voces also has accepted donated interviews from professors and other professionals. Included in the hundreds of Voces interviews collected are the stories of Rivas-Rodriguez’s parents, Ramon Martin Rivas and Henrietta Lopez Rivas — her father was a WWII veteran and her mother worked at a defense plant and as an interpreter during the war.

In 2007, Rivas-Rodriguez was involved in a nationwide protest of PBS and filmmaker Ken Burns for his documentary series “The War,” which she said was 14 hours long and had not included interviews with any Latinos.

“In the end, the film did include two Latinos and a Native American,” she said, adding that it was important to push for representation.

The effort to raise awareness of the Latino and Mexican American experience in the U.S. is not always easy but it’s necessary, she said.

Chicano Research Center Founder Richard Soto, who arranged to bring Rivas-Rodriguez to Stockton, said it’s critical that anywhere where you find a significant number of Latinos — Hispanics make up more than 40 percent of Stockton’s population — that their contributions are recognized.