HOUSTON, TX–The University of Houston’s US Latino Digital Humanities Center (USLDH) announces the release of the interactive Hispanic Theater Collection curated and created by Dr. Gabriela Baeza Ventura and Dr. Lorena Gauthereau. The digital collection centers the Hispanic community within US theater production (1789-2000) and highlights the role that Hispanic theater (actors, writers, producers, musicians, technicians, artists and many others) played in the creation of cultural and sociopolitical capital. Some of the items feature: Miguel Piñero, Miriam Colón, Susy Astol, Chata Noloesca, Don Lalo (Leonardo García Astol), Carpa Theater, The Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, Teatro Campesino, among many others.
This digital exhibit draws from the Nicolás Kanellos Theater Collection at UH’s Special Collections. This valuable digital exhibit is a unique and useful teaching and research tool for educators, students and community members interested in performing arts, visual art, art history and Latina/o culture.
UH’s USLDH received funding from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and University of Idaho’s CollectionBuilder to digitize, create metadata, research geolocations, translate and create an exhibit on the CollectionBuilder platform. CollectionBuilder is an open source tool for creating digital collection and exhibit websites that are driven by metadata and powered by modern static web technology.
The digital collection is supported by the US Latino Digital Humanities Center/Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program. The USLDH Center is a first-of-its-kind program that gives scholars expanded access to a vast collection of written materials produced by Latinas and Latinos and archived by the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage (“Recovery”) program and UH’s Arte Público Press, the nation’s largest publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by Hispanic authors from the United States. They also produce digital scholarship in the form of visualizations, datasets, digital collections and exhibits. The Center is supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
UH’s MD Anderson Library is currently showcasing items from this collection on the first floor: https://libraries.uh.edu/about/news/hispanic-theater-exhibit=/