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Ethical Community Archiving: Tools for Meaningful Partnerships
March 4, 2024 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm EST
Drawing from the experiences of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program, Drs. Gabriela Baeza Ventura and Carolina Villarroel explore in this recorded workshop strategies for collaborating with individuals and community organizations to ethically digitize, preserve, and disseminate historical materials. They share insights into the tools and resources utilized by the Recovery Program and the USLDH in such initiatives as Community Archiving Day, the Young Scholars Program, and various digital projects.
Central to their approach is the recognition of the vital role that Latina/o communities play in knowledge production, nation-building, and community activism. By prioritizing best practices, the program seeks to affirm and support community contributions. Rather than replicating traditional archival methods, the program focuses on creating inclusive spaces for mutual knowledge exchange. Workshop facilitators stress the importance of employing a lens of care and post-custodial approaches in identifying and making historical resources accessible.
Originally held on March 4, 2024, this workshop aims to equip participants with the tools and resources necessary for fostering partnerships and community relations to advance preservation efforts of marginalized collections.
Presenter Bios
Dr. Gabriela Baeza Ventura is associate professor of Spanish with a specialization on US Latinx literature in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston. She is executive editor at Arte Público Press, the premier US Latino publishing house, and co-founder of the US Latino Digital Humanities center. Baeza Ventura has published on various aspects of US Latino literature and digital humanities including women, immigration, recovery works, language and YA and children’s literary production. Baeza Ventura was selected to participate in the committee of Next-Generation Historical and Scholarly Digital Editions by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) and the National Endowment for the Humanities; to advise on US Latinx archives and data collecting to NHPRC and was recently appointed to the Mellon-ACLS funded Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship.
Carolina A. Villarroel holds a PhD in Spanish literature with a specialization in US Latino Literature and Women’s Studies from the University of Houston. She is the former archivist in charge of the Mexican American and African American Collections at the Houston Metropolitan Research Center at the Houston Public Library and in 2011. Her expertise in US Latino culture and literature has been fundamental to her positions at the University of Houston (UH), where she is the Brown Foundation Director of Research of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage, a national program whose goal is to identify, preserve, study and make accessible the written production of Latinos/as in the United States from the colonial period until 1980. She has served as an advisor and grant evaluator for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the NHPRC on US Latinx archives and data collecting. She is the co-founder of the US Latino Digital Humanities Center, the first of its kind in the nation.