Lindsey Passenger Wieck: El Tecolote, A Bilingual Neighborhood Newspaper and Community Building

Hello! I’m Lindsey Passenger Wieck, and this year I’m a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame (where I finished my Ph.D. earlier this year). This fall, I’m teaching an undergraduate course on the History of San Francisco that emphasizes digital writing and using DH tools. In 2017, I’m excited to work on some projects with our library’s Center for Digital Scholarship to help spread access to the digital humanities at our university. My manuscript, The Mission Impossible: The Cultural Politics of Community and Gentrification in Postwar San Francisco, explores Latino community formation in the Mission District of San Francisco and examines how this creates a space for gentrification. More broadly, I’m interested in the urban and spatial history, especially in the U.S. West.

At the Six-Shooters session, I’ll be talking a bit more about one of the digital components of my manuscript project. Using issues of El Tecolote, a bilingual community newspaper from the San Francisco  Mission District, I show how this newspaper served as tool for community building – for mobilizing residents in the neighborhood, for connecting them to resources and events, for promoting activism, and for warning the Mission’s inhabitants of unsafe spaces. During this panel, I’ll discuss how I conceptualized this mapping project and what I view as the next steps for it to delve deeper into this rich source base.