Virginia Espino Program Coordinator for Latina and Latino History, UCLA Library's Center for Oral History Research; B.A., UC Santa Cruz [Psychology]; Ph.D., Arizona State University [History]
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California
9.5 hours
Félix Gutiérrez and Virginia Espino
This interview is part of the oral history series La Batalla Está Aquí: The Chicana/o Movement in Los Angeles. The purpose of this oral history series is to document the ideological transformation of the Chicana and Chicano generation in Los Angeles during the second half of the twentieth century. Dissatisfied with their position in U.S. society, Chicana and Chicano activists built a civil rights movement from the ground up creating new social, economic, and political power structures for their generation and for those to follow. Interviewees were selected based on their eyewitness accounts and firsthand experiences with organizations and social justice activities emblematic of the period. Collectively, the oral histories document a variety of social justice struggles that include, but are not limited to, educational improvement, union advocacy, voting and political rights, gender equality, and anti-war activism.
This interview was undertaken to document the life history of a notable Mexican American who came of age during the heyday of the Chicano Movement. His experiences chronicle the long arm of the of civil rights struggle for Mexican Americans that dates back to the turn of the century when his grandparents, Esau and Febronia Muñoz, immigrated to the United States to establish Spanish speaking Protestant congregations. This oral history examines his family’s influence on shaping a generation of social justice activists and documents the role of Felix Gutiérrez in preserving the history of the Spanish language press.
Virginia Espino prepared for the interview by consulting numerous secondary sources on the history of the Chicana and Chicano Movement in Los Angeles such Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement by Carlos Muñoz, Chicano Politics Reality and Promise 1940-1990 by Juan Gomez, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America by Vicki L. Ruiz, and Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice, by Ian F. Lopez Haney. The Historical Los Angeles Times database was consulted along with primary resources from the Chicana/o Movement housed at UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center.
The interviewer compiled the table of contents and interview history and supplied the spellings of proper nouns and the complete names entered in brackets in the text.
The transcript of this interview is a verbatim transcript of the audio recording. It was transcribed by a professional transcribing agency using a list of proper names and specialized terminology supplied by the interviewer. The interviewee was then given the opportunity to review the transcript in order to supply the missing or misspelled names and to verify the accuracy of the contents, and those corrections were entered into the text without further editing or review on the part of the Center for Oral History Research (COHR) staff. Félix Gutiérrez reviewed the final transcript and made a few minor corrections and additions and provided the accompanying curriculum vitae.
In some cases the audio recording may differ slightly from the transcript, either because the transcriptionist did not accurately transcribe what was said or because of the changes the interviewee made at the time of their review.
Records relating to the interview are located in the office of the UCLA Library’s Center for Oral History Research.