About the CRES Oral History Project
The Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Oral History (CRES-OH) project is a program of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department of Gonzaga University. CRES-OH seeks to document the early stages of organizing that both directly and indirectly led to the creation and institutionalization of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at Gonzaga University. These interviews chronicle the role of students, staff, faculty, and others whose activism demonstrated the necessity for CRES at Gonzaga and whose organizing advanced the eventual development and establishment of the CRES department. Beyond interviews, the CRES-OH also hosts Personal Accounts, which contain written firsthand narratives of individuals’ experiences with organizing, developing, and establishing the CRES department.
These remembrances serve to highlight the role of activism undertaken by members of the Gonzaga community, especially students, staff, and faculty of Color without whose labor the department would not exist in its current form. CRES-OH seeks to preserve documentation and narratives about the early development of the department in order to ensure that the memory of the extensive organizing, activism, and labor necessary to create the department is not lost. Through preserving these oral histories, we can better understand CRES not simply as an academic department, but as part of a larger national project of institutionalizing learning, teaching, and scholarship about People of Color and other marginalized communities with roots in the 1960s.
All interviews and Personal Accounts (unless otherwise negotiated) are released under a Creative Commons Attribution—NonCommercial 4.0 International license (BY-NC).