UT Collections

Bob Sanchez was a civil rights activist and attorney who focused his work on the rights of Mexican Americans. He helped to found the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and Texas Rural Legal Aid during the 1940s. Subsequently, Sanchez became involved with the American GI Forum, the National Council of La Raza and various migrant farm worker organizations. Sanchez was also active in Democratic political campaigns at the local, state and national levels, supporting candidates whose platforms on social justice and the civil rights of Mexican Americanss corresponded to the needs of Mexican Americans as Sanchez saw them. The collection includes materials from each of Sanchez's organizational involvements, his written works, collected materials of interest to him and photographs corresponding to various events sponsored by his organizations.

The Rethinking Power and Resistance: Gender and Human Rights from Texas to the Transnational Americas Conference Footage collection contains edited footage from the 2012 conference, including several panel discussions, a radio segment aired on KOOP 91.7 fm, and a post-conference promotional video produced by Andrea Zarate. The conference was sponsored by the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Texas at Austin as part of its Embrey Women’s Human Rights Initiative. The Rethinking Power & Resistance organizing committee envisioned a conference that would bring organizers and activist scholars together and foment collaborative work beyond the conference. As such, the conference centered around three community-university collaborations with the Transgender Jail Project, Conspire Theatre, and the Polochic Evictions Counteraction and foregrounded the themes of arts as advocacy, pedagogies of alliance and resisting criminalization. Videos are in English, Spanish and Portuguese, with some videos featuring consecutive translation into English.

Houston-based commercial litigation lawyer, Scott J. Atlas, collected the materials that comprise this collection through his pro bono work as a defense attorney for the capital murder trial of Ricardo Aldape Guerra. Guerra was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico wrongfully held on Texas Death Row for fifteen years before being exonerated in 1997. In 1982, twenty-year-old Guerra was arrested and indicted for the capital murder of Houston police officer J.D. Harris, despite all physical evidence pointing to Roberto Carrasco Flores as the one who shot and killed Officer Harris. Harris County prosecutors appealed to heightened anti-Mexican immigrant hostility in Houston by repeatedly emphasizing Guerra's undocumented immigration status to the jury in order to help secure his conviction and death sentence. After being released in 1997, Guerra returned to Mexico a national hero for overcoming what many Mexicans thought to be an unjust Texas legal system intent on punishing undocumented Mexican immigrants. The Scott J. Atlas Collection of Legal Materials on the Ricardo Aldape Guerra Case consists of digitized copies of all Atlas' related case files as well as audiovisual recordings of press coverage of the Aldape case. All the digitized case files are available for viewing online.

Nine members of the military junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1982 were put on trial by the Buenos Aires Federal Court of Criminal Appeals, a civilian court, and were charged with crimes including homicide, torture, illegal detention, and robbery. The collection consists of photocopies of case transcripts of testimonies by 828 witnesses at the 1985 trial of these military commanders. The 7630 sheets of testimonies, chiefly by released prisoners like Jacobo Timmerman, document instances of kidnapping, illegal detention in clandestine centers, systematic torture, coerced collaboration, and death under torture. Transcripts are arranged chronologically and a list of witnesses is included.