The University of Houston’s US Latino Digital Humanities Center (USLDH) announces the digital publication of La patria perdida (1935) by the acclaimed Mexican journalist, Teodoro Torres (1888–1944) on APPDigital. This Spanish-language novel describes Torres’ first-hand experience as a Mexican immigrant to the United States as well as that of many immigrants in his community. The novel first appeared in the San Antonio newspaper, La Prensa, accompanied by engravings by the artist Fulgencio Corral. The digital version includes a scholarly introduction by Ethriam Cash Brammer translated into Spanish by Elías David Navarro. La patria perdida makes an excellent addition to US Latino, Mexican American, Ethnic, and American studies, history or literature courses.
Original image by Fulgencio Corral, which appeared in San Antonio’s La Prensa. Graphic design by Ryan Hoston.
This digital novel offers a virtual option for content and assignments. Educators and students can create free accounts on APPDigital, which gives them access to highlighting, annotating and sharing capabilities. Educators can create a private reading group and share an automatically generated invitation code that students can use to create annotations visible only to the class. Students may interact with questions the educator pre-adds to the margins, annotate the text with their thoughts in the margins and respond to their classmates’ annotations. The “Share” tool allows users to share a passage from the text on Twitter or generate a citation for the selected passage in APA, MLA or Chicago styles. The APPDigital platform is built using Manifold software and displays iterative texts, powerful annotation tools, rich media and robust community dialogue, transforming scholarly publications into interactive digital works.
APPDigital is an extension of the US Latino Digital Humanities Center. In 2019, the Mellon Foundation awarded UH a grant to establish a first-of-its-kind US Latino Digital Humanities Center in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. The Center provides scholars with expanded access to a vast collection of written materials produced by Latinas/os 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.
To view La patria perdida, please visit APPDigital at: https://artepublicopress.manifoldapp.org/projects/la-patria-perdida
A downloadable PDF version of La patria perdida is available for purchase via the Arte Público Press website.