*New Episode:* Building Belonging in the Archive: USLDH
One of the recent episodes of the Center for Public History’s Public Historians at Work features the directors, program managers, and interns who work for Arte Público Press’ Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program (“Recovery”) and their US Latino Digital Humanities Center (USLDH). In the first part of this episode, Dr. Gabriela Baeza Ventura, Deputy Director for Arte Público Press and Co-Director of USLDH, Dr. Carolina Villarroel, Brown Foundation Director of Research for the Recovery program, and Dr. Lorena Gauthereau, Digital Programs Manager for USLDH, come together to discuss the missions at the heart of the “Recovery” program as well as the practices they hope to promote. Later in the episode, three student interns, Monica Jiminez, Natalia Siboldi, and Yadira Hermosillo, who worked on the USLDH project of digitizing and researching the Morales Funeral Home Records discuss these practices in action.
Dr. Villarroel provided some historical background for the creation of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program. Dr. Nicolás Kanellos launched “Recovery” in 1990 in an effort to create a counter to those intuitional archives, which continued to leave the histories and documents of Latinos and Latinas in the U.S out of their narratives. Arte Público Press, one of the main branches of the “Recovery” initiative, has sought “to locate, preserve, and make available all the written legacy of Latinos from colonial times to 1960,” a scope which has now expanded to include the contributions of Latina activists throughout the period.
Drs. Ventura and Gauthereau discussed the central role unkown writings have played at the archive. A special priority of “Recovery" is gathering not just published works, such as studies and novels, but also writings such as cook books, correspondence, etc. One of the program’s publications includes Maria Ruiz de Burton’s 1871 or 1873 novel, which is thought to be the first novel published by a Mexican woman in English.
Currently, the Recovery program houses more than 15,000 newspapers, written in Spanish, English, French, and Ladino, a vast collection of photographs, historic books ---like the one mentioned above--- in both digitized and analogue forms. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, USLDH also has a Grants-In-Aid program, wherein scholars are provided a stipend of up to $7,500 to work on a digital publication or project for the Center. As such, Dr. Villarroeal considers “Recovery” to have largely achieved success in meeting its early, extremely ambitious goals.
Now, the program seeks to engage and give back to its community, teaching its archival methods to community members and students alike, in hopes of promoting the protection of materials outside of formal archives and of creating a new generation of scholars operating under more ethical, innovative standards.
Bringing archival practices directly into the community not only helps everyday citizens preserve their own materials and those of their families, but it also helps to build trust between institutions and marginalized communities.
Dr. Ventura, in explaining this, tells the story of a family apron, which was donated to Arte Público. In this case, the archive was able to show local community members that they “could be respectful and supportive of the honor received by a daily garment of a grandmother that was used to produce knowledge.” Dr. Ventura explains what a valuable resource this apron has been, not just in documenting one family and one matriarch’s family but in documenting on what level history is made, that recognition that “your own family is a part of history.”
In discussing their effort to teach archival methods to students, and in so doing to put archival power into students' hands, Drs. Villarroel, Ventura, and Gauthereau first speak about their own time as students and what it was like learning these skills, before turning the floor over to the experiences of current students.
Dr. Ventura speaks powerfully here of the anger she felt when first exposed to community-driven archival practices, her sense of “why have I not been exposed to this, why did I not know this.” She goes on to say “there’s ways that we can build these bridges so that we make these materials for younger generations, so that they can see themselves in this literature and so that they can feel a sense of belonging. That Latinos belong to the U.S. There is history there.”
From here Drs. Ventura, Villarroel, and Gauthereau turn the floor over to their student interns, Monica Jimenez, Natalia Siboldi, and Yadira Hermosillo, who worked through the SIPHDH internship last summer. The Summer Internship in Public History and Digital Humanities (SIPHDH) is program by which undergrad students work for ten weeks on projects such as USLDH’s, gaining crucial experience in research, preservation, and digital media.
USLDH’s students were assigned to work on the Morales Funeral Home, where they digitalized and annotated records and materials connected to the Morales Family and the Funeral Home, as well as conducted additional research related to the collected items. In terms of specifics, Monica was responsible for the creation of a digital timeline, detailing the families lives and accomplishments. Yadira worked on digitiing box one of the Morales Funeral Home Records, which contain death records of last names beginning with letters a-c from 1931 to 1950. And Natalia created a digital flipbook of annotations and items kept in the Morales Family Bible.
The students share similar sentiments on the important skills and lessons they learned from their time working on the Morales Funeral Collection. In terms of technical, concrete level skills, Yadira and Natalia highlighted the value they gained from learning how to navigate and create metadata, translating physical records into digitized forms, and engaging in data cleaning. Monica also highlighted the importance of learning how to comb through archives in an effective and “detectivelike” manner.
On an abstract, big idea level, Yadira spoke on learning about the importance of interdisciplinary, collaborative methods to “to uncover these stories and patterns that likely wouldn’t have been known otherwise.” Monica spoke on “social responsibility” in public history, making knowledge available to all groups and communities as well as to make minority contributions to history more visible.
Lastly, Natalia put quite simply that “our stories are important and just because they aren’t preserved or shared doesn’t mean they can’t be, especially the unsung stories of minorities. In the future, I hope that similar stories are shared and celebrated.”
Listen to the full episode: https://publichistoriansatwork.buzzsprout.com/1267733/episodes/16016134-building-belonging-in-the-archive-usldh.
To learn more about Arte Público Press’ Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program (“Recovery”): https://artepublicopress.com/recovery-program/.