ABSTRACT In the late 1960s and early 1970s, libraries and Chicano Studies departments at universities in California and the Southwest published Chicano bibliographies. In 1972, three events occurred that would jump-start the Chicano collection at California State University, Fullerton. First, the Chicano Studies Department chair, Robert Serros, sent a letter to university librarian Ernest Toy, asking why there were not enough resources by and about Chicanos in the library’s collection. That August the first of three cohorts of Mexican American graduate students started a federally funded program, Graduate Institute for Mexican American Library Science (GIMALS), to train Mexican American librarians. In November the library hired three Chicano students, current and future GIMALS participants, to build the Mexico and the Southwest Collection (MSWC) and compile its 1974 bibliography. After the initial investment, lack of financial support plagued the development of the university’s Chicanx collections for the next fifty years. This article describes the unique conditions under which the MSWC was founded and the importance of the collaboration between the Chicano Studies Department, the GIMALS program, and the University Library
Miller et al. (Sun,) studied this question.