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Welcome to the Getting Started with Library Research guide from UC Merced Library. The Research & Learning Services unit is here to support your success as an undergraduate at UC Merced. This guide is mean to be an overview for anyone wanting to learn more about conducting college-level library research for assignments. It can also serve as a good refresher for graduate students or those returning to school after a break.
Friendly UC Merced librarians and functional experts are available to help you with this process and many related tasks from GIS to scholarly publishing. Check out our library liaison page to locate a contact.
Research is an iterative process. Instead of straightforward and linear, it is repetitive and cyclical. As you move through the steps to learn, you should modify and revise your strategies. Don't be afraid to return to an earlier step to reset your process!
Long description of "Research is a Process" for web accessibility
This course explores the border as both a concept and physical space in Mexican America. In order to examine the border’s complexity, you will learn to produce and grapple with relevant research questions; write creatively and critically on the subject; and discuss and deliberate the subject’s ambiguous meaning. Such acquired skills will improve your ability to think, write, and communicate clearly and effectively, especially as you deal with a common yet contested term like “the border.” This course will give you the opportunity to study Chicanx novels, stories, and films that contemplate the border in various ways. These texts range in setting and topic, beginning with the fateful nineteenth-century war between Mexico and the United States (1846-1848) and ending with the present-day issue of being undocumented in this country. To enhance your analytical skills, you will also read critical essays on how the border functions interculturally and intraculturally, as both a physical space of conflict and potentially ideological place of healing. Finally, this class will equip you the intellectual tools needed to investigate and understand how the border or “the wall” exists, changes, and persists in American politics and society today.
Borderlands (La Frontera): The New Mestiza, Revised ed. by
"Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the groundbreaking essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remapped our understanding of what a "border" is, seeing it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us."
George Washington Gómez, 2nd ed. by
This classic novel about the struggles of Texas Mexicans to preserve their property, culture and identity in the face of Anglo-American migration to and dominance of the Rio Grande Valley is available for the first time in Spanish. Born in the early part of the twentieth century, George Washington Gómez is named after the American rebel and hero because his parents are certain their son will be a great man too. George, or Guálinto as he's known, grows up in turbulent times. His family has lived for generations in what has become Texas. "I was born here. My father was born here and so was my grandfather and his father before him. And then they come, they come and take it, steal it and call it theirs," his Uncle Feliciano rages. The Texas Mexicans' attempts to take back their land from the Gringos and the rinches--the brutal Texas Rangers--fail. Guálinto's father, who never participated in the seditionist violence, is murdered in cold blood, and Feliciano makes a death-bed promise to raise his nephew without hatred. Young Guálinto comes of age in a world where Mexicans are treated as second-class citizens. Teachers can beat and mistreat them with impunity, and most of his Mexican-American friends drop out of school at a young age. But the Gómez family insists that he continue his education, which they know he will need in order to do great things for his people. And so his school years create a terrible conflict within him: Guálinto alternately hates and admires the Gringo, loves and despises the Mexican. Written in the 1930s but not published until 1990, George Washington Gómez has become mandatory reading for anyone interested in Mexican-American literature, culture and history.
The Undocumented Americans by
One of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard reveals the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans. Right after the election of 2016, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio realized the story she'd tried to steer clear of was the only one she wanted to tell. So she embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocumented immigrants - and to find the hidden key to her own.In her incandescent, relentlessly probing voice, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio combines sensitive reporting and powerful personal narratives to bring to light remarkable stories of resilience, madness, and death. She finds the singular, effervescent characters across the nation often reduced in the media to political pawns or nameless laborers.The stories she tells are not deferential or naively inspirational but show the love, magic, heartbreak, insanity, and vulgarity that infuse the day-to-day lives of her subjects. And through it all we see the author grappling with the biggest questions of love, duty, family, and survival.
By the end of this session, you will be able to
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