Community-Engaged Fellows: Working with the Documenting the Past, Fostering the Future Project

Community scholar Celeste Martinez and a panel of local Chicanx leaders speak with the Social Movements class in spring 2023 as part of the Documenting the Past, Fostering the Future project at the University of Denver

7 days after I moved to the Denver area from Malawi, I started my graduate degree in Organizational Leadership with Project Management. While I complete my studies, I am also serving as a member of the 2024-2025 CCESL Community-Engaged Fellows cohort. Our community of CCESL graduate students meets every week to talk about our work with our community partner organizations. 

The DU community partner organization I’m working with is called Documenting the Past, Fostering the Future. It is an initiative that supports faculty members from the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences who incorporate into their classes some opportunities for DU’s undergraduate students to meet and directly learn from leaders in the local Latinx/e/a community.  For example, in Spring of 2024 students in Professor Hava Gordon’s class, Social Movements, hosted a panel of 7 Chicano activists and then participated in one-on-one interviews with the guests. These interviews are now being edited for submission into the oral history collection of the History Colorado museum so that the stories of local leaders can be shared broadly. Students in Professor Carlos Jimenez’s class, Producing Video for Social Media, and students in Professor Runchao Liu’s class, Popular Music and Social Justice, had opportunities to take field trips to visit the Chican@ Murals of Colorado located around Denver and to learn about the role of the murals in local Chicanx history from local scholar Lucha Martinez de Luna. Students will have similar opportunities to interact with local leaders and learn about the legacies of local Chicanx culture in the sixteen classes being offered in conjunction with the project during the 2024-2025 academic year.

This project involves undergraduate students in community engaged research and learning in several ways. First, it introduces students directly to community leaders who have shaped the local Chicanx communities through their efforts, giving leaders an opportunity to share their stories with new audiences of young people and giving students a more direct path into understanding local communities, their needs, and their contributions. Second, as the students are involved in the collection and editing of stories for larger audiences through a partnership with History Colorado, they are contributing to locally significant research. Their efforts broaden their own learning while also contributing to new and permanent research records.

In Malawi, I worked as a Project Officer with the Catholic Development Commission in Malawi organization that emphasizes local knowledge as a significant starting point for producing sustainable agricultural programs. Working with this project is meaningful for me as it similarly emphasizes local knowledge. Without the creation of recorded oral histories, this knowledge might never be known or shared. 

As a member of the team for this year, I will be working on efforts that help students to learn about their opportunities to take classes and to learn more about local histories. I’ll also have opportunities to attend local musical and artistic events of the Chicanx community.  I look forward to participating in documentation and all the events related to my work.