Building Belonging in the Archive: USLDH

Public Historians at Work

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The power of an archive to elevate an underrepresented community cannot be overstated. Since the early 1990s, Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program ("Recovery") under Arte Público Press at the University of Houston has focused on collecting and making accessible the written legacy of Hispanic and Latino peoples from colonial times to the late 20th century. In 2017, this effort to expand the historical record of the US took new form with the establishment of the US Latino Digital Humanities Center (USLDH), the first of its kind in the country.
In Part I of this episode recorded in Fall 2023, Dr. Gabriela Baeza Ventura (Deputy Director for Arte Público; "Recovery" Director; USLDH Co-Director; Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies), Dr. Carolina Villarroel ("Recovery" Brown Foundation Director of Research and Co-Director of USLDH), and Dr. Lorena Gauthereau ("Recovery" Digital Programs Manager) discuss the deep community connections and trust fostered by their approach to the digital archive. Their insistence on sharing authority and inquiry with the people donating material breaks down academic barriers, while the respect they give to each item digitized - including adding bilingual metadata - increases accessibility and representation.
In Part II of this episode recorded in Fall 2024, we get to hear about the efficacy of this practice through the experience of three student interns (Monica Jiminez, Natalia Siboldi, and Yadira Hermosillo), who helped process one family’s archive - the Morales Funeral collection. An introduction to their work is provided by Mikaela Selley, CPH alum and "Recovery" Program Manager.
For more on the amazing work of "Recovery" and USLDH, check out the embedded links above.
See also the written publications of these scholars, including:
Baeza Ventura, Gabriela, María Eugenia Cotera, Linda García Merchant, Lorena Gauthereau, and Carolina Villarroel. "A U.S. Latinx Digital Humanities Manifesto" in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023. Edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, 2023.
Baeza Ventura, Gabriela, Nicolás Kanellos and Carolina Villarroel. “Twenty-Five Years of Recovering Our Written Legacy” in Writing/Righting History: Twenty-Five Years of Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage. Edited by Antonia Castañeda and Clara Lomas. Houston, Arte Público Press, 2020, 5-18.
Transition music: "Por Medio De La Lectura" by Los Amparito. CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 MX.

The Center for Public History at the University of Houston. https://uh.edu/class/cph