My name is Wendy Nunez and I am a Reference and Instruction Librarian here at CSUN.
For the past two years, we have all been dealing with this COVID-19 virus. During the first months of lockdown, I did what everyone else was doing: exercise, clean and organize my house, learn new hobbies, and watch Netflix.
At some point, everything got boring, so I decided to do some research on my parents’ hometown back in Oaxaca, Mexico. I didn’t have anything specific in mind so I started by using Google and found a few newspaper articles from Oaxaca and some YouTube videos. Then I started to wonder if anyone had written anything more professional. I went to the library website and began searching OneSearch. The first thing I did was to just type in the name of my parents’ hometown: San Dionisio Ocotepec. It is located about an hour from the city of Oaxaca. These are results I got.
First, I found this book: Valence Changes in Zapotec: Synchrony, diachrony, typology by Natalie Operstein and Aaron Huey Sonnenschein.
This book has a chapter, “Valence Changing Morphology in San Dionisio Ocotepec,” by George Aaron Broadwell. It talks about the morphology change in the Zapotec dialect that is spoken there and its surrounding communities.
I also found these articles:
- “El Preclásico de San Dionisio Ocotepec, Oaxaca, Visto a Traves de sus Figurillas” by Bernd Fahmel Beyer
- “Una nueva localidad fosilífera en Oaxaca (México) y el registro más austral de Bison latifrons: Implicaciones paleobiogeográficas, paleoecológicas y paleoambientales” by Roberto Díaz-Sibaja, Eduardo Jiménez-Hidalgo and Ma. Luisa García-Zepeda
- “The Historical Development of the Progressive Aspect in Central Zapotec” by George Aaron Broadwell
I spent a couple of hours looking through OneSearch and was excited to see that I was able to find scholarly articles that mentioned my parents’ hometown. It gave me the opportunity to find people that are interested in writing about Oaxaca and connect with them.
I hope others do this as well and take a look at OneSearch. Who knows what you will find, or who you will connect with?
