This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Last October I attended the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Advisory Board Meeting and Biennial Conference: Prensa, Latinidad y Legado: Spanish-Language Press and Print Culture in Syracuse, NY.

The Recovery Project is “a national program based at the University of Houston that locates, identifies, preserves and disseminates the literary contributions of U.S. Hispanics from colonial times to 1960*”. This project was established in the 1990s by Nicholas Kanellos, “Brown Foundation Professor of Hispanic Studies and director of both Arte Público Press and the Recovery Project.*” The people involves with the Recovery Project feel very strongly about making sure that the documentary evidence of Hispanics in the United States don’t get lost or destroy because of lack of institutional or financial support at the state and federal level. This project was started in the 1990s because many Hispanics felt at the time that there were few ethnic archives supported by archival institutions (either private or state institutions), especially those interested in acquiring and preserving materials that documented the long history of the presence of Hispanic in the what it is known today as the United States. At the time, private funding was plentiful and they were able not only to create the first newspapers’ union catalog that track Hispanic newspapers from the XIXth century to the 1960s but later on to find, acquire and microfilmed many of these newspapers to make them accessible to researchers. Through a partnership with Readex* this collection was digitized and made available online as a product from which the Recovery Project gets royalties that they then reinvest to continue acquiring, cataloging and preserving these materials. After the success with Hispanic newspapers, they extended the project to include archival collections such as personal papers of distinguish Hispanic American involved in the civil rights movement. These collections of rare newspapers and archival collections that they acquired are now available at the University of Houston Hispanic Collection archives.

After 9/11 in 2001, funding for this kind of project has diminished and the Recover Project decided to partner with EBSCO to digitize and make available these new materials (pamphlets, books, newspapers, images, manuscripts, etc.) through a new product, The Latino-Hispanic American Experience: The Arte Público Hispanic Historical Collection** (Part 1 and 2) as a way to generate royalties that again are reinvested into the project to continue their works.

Every two years, as members of the Advisory Board, we meet to discuss Recovery current projects and new projects and this year the main discussion was to decide new directions for the Recovery project, in specific, to extend the time period for acquisition of materials from 1960 to 1990. Although we didn’t achieve a final consensus about the extension, there were many good discussions on why it is important to find sustainable ways to acquire, preserve and give access to materials that document the cultural heritage of Hispanic people in the United States after the 1960s especially considering the arrival of the Internet and the Web, electronic media and social media networks.

After the Advisory Board meeting, as board members we support the biennial conference as moderators of panels. I had the pleasure to moderate the panel: “Pedagogy, Research and Archives”. The panelists, Dr. Enrique Mallén, director and general editor of the On-line Picasso Project, https://picasso.shsu.edu/, Caryl Ward, subject librarian for Latin American Studies at Binghamton University, and Lisa Cruces, archivist of the newly created Hispanic Collections at University of Houston, talked about how to incorporate freely accessible digital collections, and archival collections into the teaching and research of Hispanic American print and media culture. A variety of challenges were discussed such as insufficient financial support and/or staffing, changing technologies, and quality of scanning, but all panelists agreed that it is worth the effort to make primary sources available freely to complement what is behind pay walls. They also emphasized the important to establish collaborations between librarians, archivists and faculty to make sure that their classes benefit from materials both found online and offline (in the archives).

Another panel that I attended of great interests to librarians and faculty alike was the presentation done by the library staff at Syracuse University which regaled us with three great presentations of the many hidden treasures that document Hispanic literary culture in the United States. For example, Brett Michael Barrie, Rare Book Cataloger and Lucy Mulroney, Interim Director of Special Collections shared their experience of processing donations that document the relationship between a NYC independent press (Grove Press) and many Latin American writers such as Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo and Pablo Neruda (and the correspondence between editors, translators and writers) about the translation of these writers works into English; and a Spanish professor’s book collection that documented  relationships between major writers from Latin America and Spain during the 20th century.

There were many other panels during the conference that I couldn’t attend but some of the ones I attended were for example one on the research documenting the presence of Dominican(s) in New York City, one example was the case of Juan Rodriguez, who was in New Amsterdam (today New York City) in 1613– while another focused on the strong presence of Cubans in New York city prior of 1898, especially the presence of Cuban Independence champion, José Martí. Other panels focused on the struggles of Mexican American in the United States after the Mexican-American War as documented in newspapers and personal correspondence. Much of the research done and discussed in this conference came from materials found by the Recovery project and available through Readex or EBSCO.

As a final note to this post, EBSCO did a presentation about Series II of the Arte Público collection and acknowledged that because missteps from their parts it hasn’t sold as well as series I. Part of the reason is that many libraries are unable or unwilling to pay the price set by them since it is too high and it used the whole FTE of an university regardless if only a fraction of the registered students would ever used this resource. Therefore EBSCO is considering for their pricing scheme to use instead something called relative FTE that account better the actual potential usage based on the departments and their student body size, instead of all the students at a particular university. So there is hope not only with this Arte Publico product but other primary sources products to be priced on a more reasonable way so more university can acquire it for their faculty and students.

Overall, this was a very worthy conference to attend and I am happy to be part of the advisory board of this commendable project. In 2016 is the 25th anniversary of the project which I hope to attend.

—-

• Notes:
  • * Syracuse Hosts U.S. Hispanic Literary Recovery Conference Oct. 9-11
  • ** We have this Readex product, Hispanic American Newspapers 1808-1980 http://rdl.lib.uconn.edu/databases/1628
  • *** We have Series 1 of this product, Arte Publico Hispanic Historical Collection: Series 1 (EBSCOhost) http://rdl.lib.uconn.edu/databases/1736
• Links:
  • Recovering U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage
  • Recovery Project, https://artepublicopress.com/recovery-project/