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UTEP library’s Special Collections is a ‘treasure trove’ of history [1]
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Date: 2025-05-25
From hard-core historians to people interested in family trees – or peccadilloes – researchers will find the mother lode in the C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department at the top floor of UTEP’s University Library.
The University of Texas at El Paso department houses about 800 collections that includes art, books, music, manuscripts, documents, photographs, microfilm, recordings, and personal papers of local artists, authors and politicians from municipal to federal.
“You don’t have to be special to use special collections,” quipped Claudia Rivers, head of the department. “Everyone can come.”
The department welcomed about 2,500 visitors during the 2023-24 fiscal year. Of the guests, many were researchers who were interested in the Old West or military history. However, a good number wanted to delve into county records such as wills, criminal cases and property boundaries.
Since September 1967 when it opened as the Archive Room in the previous library in what is now the Geological Sciences Building, scholars, students and the public have stopped by to learn about people and places related to West Texas, Southern New Mexico and Northern Mexico.
Rivers, who has been with the department since 1992, is well respected among researchers. They said her knowledge and support, as well as that of her team, in combination with the resources, makes the department invaluable.
Yolanda Chavez Leyva, director of UTEP’s Institute of Oral History, said she has used the university’s Special Collections department since she was a master’s student almost 40 years ago. (Daniel Perez / El Paso Matters)
Marcia Hatfield Daudistel, an author or editor of three books, said that she and some of her book’s contributors used the Special Collections department for research. Among her books was “Grace & Gumption: The Women of El Paso” from 2011.
“That place there is a total treasure trove,” Daudistel said during a phone interview. “If anybody ever wants to know El Paso history from start to finish, go there.”
Rivers and Susannah Holliday, assistant head of the department, talked about the collection during an interview in the department’s John H. McNeely Room, which often is used for special occasions.
Both called their department “intimate” because of its focus on regional history and personalities, and because users have a better chance to interact with staff.
“I think that’s really a benefit because you can really get into the research a little bit more deeply here than in other places where you might have to go to three or four different locations,” Holliday said.
The department has been on the sixth floor of the University Library since the building opened in 1984. It was named after Sonnichsen, author, historian and longtime professor of English at UTEP, in 1993, two years after his death.
UTEP doctoral student Diana Lopez plans to use information from the National Catholic Welfare Conference for her dissertation about immigration networks from 1965 to 2015. The records are part of the university’s Special Collections department. (Daniel Perez / El Paso Matters)
A branch of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, the department has an annual budget of about $50,000 from gifts and endowments to purchase and preserve its collection, which is stored on different floors in the library and in a remote storage area on campus.
Along with in-person guests, the department receives about 1,000 inquiries annually via emails, letters and phone calls. Digitization of materials has allowed more people to find the information they want with a few keystrokes.
But for some researchers such as Yolanda Chávez Leyva, director of the university’s Institute of Oral History, holding a hundred-year-old document is best. Leyva has used the collections since her years as a master’s student at UTEP almost 40 years ago.
She said her go-to files were from the National Catholic Welfare Conference, or NCWC, an organization launched in El Paso to help immigrants. It operated from 1919 to the late ’60s. She said the collection included heart-wrenching letters written by people who the U.S. deported to Mexico in the 1930s even though they were American citizens.
Leyva, an associate professor of history, said the people often wrote to Cleofas Calleros who is best remembered as a social worker and immigration specialist. She said those letters and other Calleros papers were keys to her research into Chicana/fronteriza history.
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On a different note, the professor remembered when an immigration lawyer asked her to find documents for a client who claimed he was born in El Paso’s Lower Valley in 1955 but had no papers, and kept getting deported. The only other thing the client remembered was that his mother left him and his siblings at a neighborhood bar. She suspected the mother was a sex worker and began to check the county’s arrest records around that era.
“I didn’t find (the mother), but I found my cousins,” Leyva said with a laugh.
Diana Lopez, a borderlands history Ph.D. student, also uses the NCWC files to find visa petitions, especially from families, for her research into immigration from 1965 through 2015. She is trying to find the petitions to match them with migration routes and networks. She also is checking U.S. Census records and plans to use some of the collection’s 1,600 oral histories.
Lopez said the staff is as helpful as the documents.
“They know where to point me for the records I need,” Lopez said.
Today, the department’s mission is to acquire, preserve and offer the collection to the community. It includes papers from artists such as Tom Lea, Marta Arat, Manuel Acosta, Mago Gandara and Hal Marcus, and El Paso politicians from mayors, congressmen, and state senators and representatives.
Lina Murillo, assistant professor of history at the University of Iowa, called UTEP’s Special Collections department one of the university’s greatest resources. (Photo courtesy of Lina Murillo)
When pressed about the most interesting part of the collection, which includes a prayer book from 1499 and documents from Colonial Mexico (1521-1821), Rivers and Holliday agreed that it was a cuneiform clay brick inscribed by script used in Mesopotamia and could be more than 3,000 years old.
Rivers also talked about the Casasola Studio Collection, which includes more than 50,000 unidentified negatives. In partnership with the El Paso Times and its website, the department has been able to identify approximately 650 of the people in the photos.
There also is an extensive collection of Planned Parenthood Papers to include correspondence with Margaret Sanger, the program’s founder.
Lina Murillo, an assistant professor of history, and of gender, women’s and sexuality studies at the University of Iowa, earned her Ph.D. in borderlands history from UTEP in 2016. Her dissertation became her book “Fighting for Control: Reproductive Care, Race, and Power in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.”
Murillo’s research focused on Planned Parenthood as an organization and many of its founders, as well as “Chicanas” who were active in El Paso’s health rights movement.
She spent the better part of 10 straight summers through 2023 on the sixth floor. She recommends the department to all doctoral students in the areas of Chicano studies, sociology and anthropology
Will Guzman, a North Carolina Central University administrator, used UTEP’s Special Collections for his dissertation, and said it’s materials gave researchers a broader perspective of the diverse history of America. (Photo courtesy of Will Guzman)
“Archives are usually known as a historian’s tool, but I recommend all students who are interested in understanding the history of where they’re studying,” Murillo said by phone. “It is one of the greatest resources that (UTEP) has.”
Will Guzman, assistant vice chancellor for International Programs & Community Engagement at North Carolina Central University, learned about the collection from his mentor, the late Maceo Dailey, former director of UTEP’s African American Studies Program. Guzman earned his Ph.D. in borderlands history in 2010 from UTEP.
He researched the life of Dr. Lawrence Nixon, a pioneering black physician and voting rights advocate. His dissertation became the book, “Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands: Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon and Black Activism.”
Guzman stressed that the department is one of the few operations with a depth and breadth of materials that goes beyond the stories of Europeans and their descendants to tell the history of America. It includes people of color – Mexicans, Native Americans and those from Asian and African countries.
“UTEP’s Special Collections is one of those rare collections that really reflects the diversity of the nation,” Guzman said in a phone interview. “I think that’s very important to know even though it’s not in vogue to know.”
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https://elpasomatters.org/2025/05/25/utep-special-collections-library-claudia-rivers-yolanda-leyva/
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