The University of Houston’s US Latino Digital Humanities Center (USLDH) announces the digital publication of Mexican American Theatre: Then and Now by Nicolás Kanellos (1983) on APPDigital. Kanellos’ collection compiles interviews, essays and vaudeville skits from the 1930s to the 1950s all pertaining to Mexican-American theater. It includes historical studies by Jorge Huerta, Nicolás Kanellos, Tomás Ybarra-Fausto and others; an exclusive interview of Luis Valdez; and vaudeville material from Lalo Astol, the Carpa García and others. Mexican American Theatre makes an excellent addition to US Latino, Mexican American, Ethnic and American studies, performing arts, history or literature courses.
Mexican American Theatre compliments the Hispanic Theater Collection digital exhibit, which showcases posters, flyers and photographs from the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage’s Hispanic Theater Collection, donated by Kanellos. This project was also developed by the USLDH Center.
Mexican American Theatre 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 read Mexican American Theatre: Then and Now, please visit APPDigital at: https://artepublicopress.manifoldapp.org/projects/matheatre
To purchase a paperback copy of Mexican American Theatre: Then and Now, please visit: https://artepublicopress.com/product/mexican-american-theatre-then-and-now/
To view the Hispanic Theater Collection digital exhibit on CollectionBuilder, please visit: https://recoveryapp.github.io/hispanictheater/