It was a simple accident. I was cleaning up photographs and had finished a large batch when the phone rang. I spun around in my chair and got caught in the USB cable connected to the portable hard drivethat housed all the scans of photographs and documents of Las Mujeres. As the hard drive fell to the floor I knew I was sunk. I had taught web development at Columbia College for a few years and one of my loudest and most frequent speeches was on backing up your work.

So as I picked up the drive, plugged it back in, listened to the platens not spin and watch my monitor for the drive now not appearing in Windows Explorer because it was no longer actively processing, I knew I had lost almost a year of work. Work that had not been properly backed up.

I would have to take a week of vacation and make my way across California and Texas to rescan all those documents. There were a few nice things about this trip, the first was that I got a great deal on five plane tickets (495 round trip from Chicago, to San Jose to LA to El Paso to Chicago). The second was that I got to spend another day with Margaret, scanning at her kitchen table and eventually making her some dinner. She would be gone less than a month later.

I also got to spend more time with Pauline in San Jose and since I wasn’t interviewing her, we got to talk about so many other things. My family and hers, San Jose and real estate. When I left her and her husband Gilbert, I really felt as though I had made a friend amongst my mother’s friends.

In Los Angeles I got to finally meet Yolanda Retter Vargas and experience the tremendous online cataloging system the Chicano Studies Library at UCLA has. Mike Stone, archivist has done an amazing job with the catalog so much so that searching for materials is excellent.  Mike all of us to lunch at the university cafeteria where we were all able to enjoy Lupe’s stories of the movement and Sylvia Morales’ stories of working in Hollywood.

Yolanda was nice enough to keep the library open a little later so that I could finish my work. It was nice to finally meet Yolanda and hear about her work with the Chicano Studies Library.

I was able to end my trip with a visit to El Paso for my mom’s 81st birthday, where we shared a lovely evening and cake with two of her closest friends in EP, Connie and Estella.