Newsletter Edition: Spring 2019
Behind the scenes at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center, you will find a driven and dedicated team working on a myriad of projects. The Center’s formal mission is to collect, preserve, and disseminate the visual history of the region with an emphasis on ethnic minority communities and photographers. The Bradley Center, featured in the Oviatt Spotlight article also promotes research, serves as a center for the exchange of ideas about our visual history, and contributes to the region’s educational efforts through our exhibitions, programs, and digital archives.
As you can imagine, it takes extensive coordination to accomplish these goals. Let’s meet the people who make it happen!
Pilar De Haro is a senior at California State University, Northridge majoring in journalism and minoring in computer science and Spanish-language journalism. Her interests in data analysis and cyber security is sparked by the way technology and other disciplines intersect. For the first couple of years at the Bradley center she worked on metadata for the Charles Williams photography collection, and went on to assist the production of a mini-documentary on the racial housing covenants in Los Angeles. Currently, she assists in overseeing the newly acquired Richard Cross collection that is part of a collection of images from the civil wars in Central America from 1970s to early 1980s.
Dalia Espinosa earned a bachelor's degree in Journalism and a minor in Gender and Women's Studies while studying at California State University Northridge. She interned at the Los Angeles Daily News, Migratory Notes, and now works at the Tom and Ethel Bradley Center as an archival assistant. Her research interests are rooted in humanitarian topics like immigration and the challenges facing low-income individuals and families in the U.S. She is happiest interviewing people and publishing their stories onto a larger audience.
Lorena Gauthier is from El Salvador and is a currently pursuing a second master’s degree in History and internship at the Tom and Ethel Bradley Center as an archival assistant at Cal State Northridge. Her current research interests include the exploitation of Latin America history, political culture and wars. She likes to research and keep learning, for that reason she is working on her second MA in History.
Guillermo Marquez is a third year graduate student in CSUN’s History Department. His research interests lie in the history of the United States, Mexico, the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands and Latin America, where he has focused on topics such as immigration, identity, ethnicity, gender, and race. At the Tom & and Ethel Bradley Center he is working on the Richard Cross Collection, digitizing and creating a bilingual metadata for images produced by the American photographer during the Cold War conflicts in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador during the late 1970s to the early 1980s.
Lucas Pastis is a graduate student at CSUN’s history department. His research emphasis is on Public History focusing on Southern California’s boosterism and preservation projects. He hopes to become an archivist or librarian at a public institute to help students and researchers cultivate their interests and find the materials they need. At the Bradley Center he focuses primarily on the John Kouns collection and his photography of civil rights marches and the United Farm Workers movements. His interests involve reading, playing music, and cooking.
Marta Valier is a graduate student in the Journalism Department at CSUN focusing on urban communication. She is a journalist and her interest for history, human rights, and visual communication brought her to the Bradley Center to learn about the diverse communities of Southern California. She is currently working on Richard Cross’ images from the Border Studies Collections. The photos document the wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and the refugee crisis in Southern Mexico in the early 1980s. She is using the archival material to create different multimedia projects.
Susana Willeford will complete her master’s degree in History in May 2019 and works as an archival assistant at the Tom and Ethel Bradley Center at Cal State Northridge. She holds a B.A. in History and Chicano/a Studies from the University of California Channel Islands, Camarillo. Upon completing her M.A., Susana will begin her Ph.D. Program in History at Claremont Graduate University. Her current research interests include the exploitation of women and migrant laborers in California labor camps during World War I. She’s happiest ransacking the archives of universities libraries, and museums across the state to complete a thesis worthy of publication.
Leslie Jimenez is a senior undergraduate student at CSUN majoring in Art, with a concentration in Art History and Photography and minoring in Cultural Anthropology. In 2017, she moved to Northridge from South Los Angeles to begin working on campus, she currently splits her work as a photo-lab assistant at the art department and a research assistant at the Bradley Center. Her experience in film photography and deep love for her neighborhood and cultural identity led her to join the Bradley Center where she currently works on cataloging and completing metadata for the newly acquired Richard Cross collection.
She is a strong supporter of the arts in public schools and in everyday life, she has served as the art history tutor for the art department in the past and currently dedicates time as a photography mentor for low-income high school students at Venice Arts.
When Leslie is not assisting students or the Bradley Center, Leslie can be found relaxing in her home with her pet cats, Chico and Pablo. She enjoys dancing Folklorico, attending concerts/cultural events, and being a big sister.
Wendy Christie is a college educator in the fields of journalism and mass communication. She is a graduate of CSUN with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s in mass communication. She treasures the knowledge acquired through her extensive research work at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center. As an immigrant from the Caribbean, the center serves as a catalyst for her understanding of the significant contributions of LA’s diverse communities. For her, it has been an unparalleled journey into the lives, legacy and history of Los Angeles. As a member of the supervising team, she helps to oversee staff assignments, reviews metadata and assists with licensing and publication requests.