Chicana/o student journalism, Peldaños 1974­-1977

My engagement with a local student news publication named Venceremos, which had first been published 1993 and was later revived after a five-year hiatus in 2008, provoked larger-scale critical inquiry on the history of alternative Chicano/a journalism in the state of Utah and the University of Utah campus. When it was suggested that Venceremos had a predecessor on the University of Utah campus, I engaged in historical research to locate the archives. I found the archives and the name of the historical college newsletter, Peldaños. The newsletter was produced by a Latino student of the university's Department of Communication and other members of the Chicano Student Association in the 1970s. My research analyzes the ideological, literary, and structural components of Peldaños as journalism in effort to answer the question: What did the Utah Chicana/o student newsletter Peldaños communicate in the mid-1970s and to who? Guided by theoretical frameworks of journalism practice and literature of alternative and/or community media, copies of Peldaños had been "coded" for content analysis. I also collected an oral history of a former student editor to supplement my research objective. The contents of Peldaños are discussed in historic context and in relation to current and future implications of media education through community and/or alternative journalism practices.