The East Los Angeles Archives (ELAA) is comprised of collections which document the lives and events of a historical community central to the social, political, and cultural history of the Chicano/Latino community in the United States. The ELAA is a program that advances scholarship in Chicano/Latino studies and Los Angeles history through its varied collection of primary research materials. This archives has a special interest in materials documenting the Chicano and Civil Rights movements in East Los Angeles during the 1960s and 1970s.

Gloria Arellanes (1946- ) was born in East Los Angeles and raised in El Monte, California. She attended El Monte High School in the early 1960s and in the mid 1960s she worked in the Neighborhood Adult Participation Project in South Los Angeles. In the late 1960s she became Minister of Finance and Correspondence of the Chicano Brown Beret organization’s founding East Los Angeles Chapter. As Minister of Finance and Correspondence she wrote press releases, letters, and edited La Causa, the East Los Angeles based Brown Beret Newspaper. She also served as administrator of El Barrio Free Clinic and was a member of the National Chicano Moratorium Committee (1969-1970). She attended the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. (1968), and the Denver Youth Conferences (1969 and 1970). After leaving the Brown Beret organization in early 1970, she organized the women’s group, Las Adelitas de Aztlan. She also coordinated la Clinica del Barrio and continued as a health care worker through the late 1970s. The bulk of the collection includes political flyers and broadsides, newspapers, books, buttons, posters and photographs dating from 1967 to the late 1970s. Documents also include materials related to her role as Minister of Finance and Correspondence and Free Clinic Coordinator, as well as to the founding of Las Adelitas de Aztlan and her involvement in the coordination of La Clinica Familiar del Barrio.

13.75 linear ft.

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Access is available by appointment for Cal State LA student and faculty researchers as well as independent researchers.