UT Collections
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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.
1982-2005 -
The U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project Collection is the product of an initiative that began in 1999 to document the experiences of Mexican Americans during WWII. The project is a joint initiative between the Center for Mexican American Studies and the UT School of Journalism designed to highlight the contributions of Mexican Americans that are not always recognized in traditional histories of the war. Individuals interviewed served in the U.S. armed forces during the conflict, whether as soldiers, nurses, technicians, or members of the civil service. The project may also be accessed through its own web page (http://www.lib.utexas.edu/ww2latinos/index.html) for additional information. The collection contains 400+ oral history interviews, including audio and video tapes and DVDs, transcripts, indexes to the interviews, narrative stories produced from the interviews, photographs, correspondence, and other documents from the U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project.
Civil Rights, Segregation, and Apartheid, Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, Immigrant Rights, War Crimes1999-present
