The US Latino Digital Humanities (USLDH) Grants-in-Aid program, funded by the Mellon Foundation, is designed to provide a stipend of up to $7,500 to scholars for research and development of digital scholarship in the form of a digital publication and/or a digital project. The University of Houston US Latino Digital Humanities Center (USLDH) is a digital scholarship/research undertaking to provide training and research on US Latino recovered materials. It is housed at Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage/Arte Público Press.
In 2019, the Mellon Foundation awarded the University of Houston with a grant to establish a first-of-its kind US Latino Digital Humanities Center in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. The program gives scholars expanded access to a vast collection of written materials produced by Latinos and archived by the Recovering the U.S. 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.
2024 Grants-in-Aid Recipients
- Marina del Sol, PhD (Howard University), Chicanx Arts Activism among Prison Poets and Writ Writers in Texas from 1848-1979
- Diana Flores Ruíz, PhD (University of Washington, Seattle), Recovering Latinx Resistance
- Aldo Lauria Santiago, PhD (Rutgers University, New Brunswick) and Ismael García Colón, PhD (City University of New York, College of Staten Island and Graduate Center), Documenting the Narratives of Puerto Rican Migration, 1940-1980
- Sarah McNamara (Texas A&M University), Nuestra Historia: A Public Art and Public History Project in Ybor City, Florida
- Anna Nogar (University of New Mexico), Aurora Lucero-White Lea (1893-1963), 20th-Century Pan- Americanism, and Indo-Hispano Folklore
- Annemarie Perez (California State University, Dominguez Hills), Recovering Marcella Lucero Trujillo: Digitalizing Memory, Space, and Place
- Christofer Rodelo (University of California, Irvine), Performing Latinx Histories
2023 Grants-in-Aid Recipients
Señora Power: A Chicana Mapping Project
The Señora Power project is a digital humanities, public-facing collaboration that traces the development of a political consciousness and identity formation of Chicanas from 1900-1984 in Houston and Los Angeles. Founding team members Sonia Del Hierro (Southwestern University), Gaby Barrios (UCLA) and Sophia Martínez Abbud (Rice University) have worked together since 2021 to research archives, interview community members, and piece together this long, sociopolitical narrative of consciousness-raising. Along with the podcast, our project will include physical pamphlets distributed at local community centers and a website showcasing our findings, because our primary goal seeks to make Chicana history and efforts widely accessible to a larger Chicane audience and beyond.
Co-PI: Sonia del Hierro, PhD
Associate Professor
Southwestern University
Co-PI: Gaby Barrios
PhD Candidate
Department of Spanish & Portuguese
University of California, Los Angeles
Co-PI: Sophia Martinez-Abbud
PhD Candidate
Department of English
Rice University
The Cristino Garza Peña Papers: From U.S. Expulsion to Leadership in Rural Mexico
Cristino Garza Peña fue un mexicano que, como muchos habitantes de frontera, cruzó de México a Estados Unidos junto con su familia cuando era pequeño. Pronto adquirió el conocimiento y experiencia como trabajador agrícola en los alrededores del Sur de Texas, ciudades y ranchos donde, debido a sus inquietudes e intereses en la organización laboral, formó parte de la Sociedad Mutualista de Trabajadores Mexicanos. A finales de 1930, él y su familia son obligados a regresar a México. Garza hizo migrar con él todo el conocimiento que adquirió como trabajador de campo y líder sindical. Recuperar su historia de vida y el archivo preservado por su hija Santos Garza Bermea, no sólo abre la posibilidad de contar una historia de migración y deportación alejada de la idea de fracaso, también visibiliza los liderazgos y luchas sociales que han sido protagonizadas por mexicanos trabajadores de campo.
PI: Maribel Bello
PhD Candidate
Department of Hispanic Studies
University of Houston
Precursors of leadership to the Central American Solidarity Movement in the United States
Precursors of Leadership to the Central American Solidarity Movement in the United States is an archive focused on the precursors to emergence of a Guatemala- centered, multiethnic organization in Los Angeles called the Guatemalan Information Center. The cofounders of GIC were Norma Chinchilla and Jorge Chinchilla. GIC was unique in the diversity of ethnicities and identities who worked together and I believe this model of organizing had its roots in the social movements of the 1960s and 70s to which my parents were exposed and in which they participated. This project aims to fill in gaps in U.S. Latino history and humanities regarding a lack of stories about Guatemalans in the U.S. prior to the 1980s.
PI: Maya Chinchilla, MFA
Independent Scholar
Reclaiming Film Histories of the U.S. Civil Rights Era: The Latina Film Recovery Project
The Latina Media Recovery Project (LMRP) is a dynamic online database initiated by Latinx film historian, arts and culture programmer, and collaborative digital archives scholar, Marisa Hicks-Alcaraz. The project aims to to enhance both academic and public engagement with 20th-century U.S. Latina film and media production. This first stage of the project, with funding from the USLDH and in collaboration with Yesenia Perez, a multimedia archivist and LMRP’s research associate, involved developing publicly available, multimedia resources on Latina media making, including an expanding filmography, bibliography of secondary sources, and the “Latinas Make Movies” digital timeline featuring career profiles of Latina film and media professionals active in the 20th-century. The forthcoming phase of the LMRP aims to expand its database to facilitate the sharing of resources both within and beyond the academic community, thereby promoting further research into the history of Latina film and media production in the 20th-century.
PI: Marisa Hicks-Alcaraz, PhD
Distinguished Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Gender and Women Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Research Associate: Yesenia Perez
March With Us! Lessons in Activism from San José State
March With Us! Lessons in Activism @ San José State is an archive of student activist wisdom, an educational resource promoting intergenerational dialogue, and a story that centers student voices and “foot soldier” perspectives. At San José State in the 1960s, campus activist groups made national and international headlines for taking action against various forms of systemic injustice: underrepresentation of students and faculty of color, the Vietnam War and its draft, housing discrimination, and a host of other issues. By combining archival research with oral history interviews, our project reconstructs 1960s and 70s student activist networks, identifying the leaders, foot soldiers, affiliations, and events that set SJS on the path to becoming one of California’s leading HSIs and AANIPISIs. A collaboration with Civil Rights era alumni and emeritus faculty, we amplify the voices of a community still fighting for justice and equality today.
PI: Mary Okin, PhD
Independent Scholar
Research Associate: Olivia Bowman
The Indigenous Episteme of the Borderlands: Conquest, Acculturation and Permanence
“Indigenous epistemes of the Borderlands” is a digital archive of primary sources focused on the decolonial ethnohistory of the indigenous groups that inhabited the region of northeastern Mexico and southeastern Texas during the viceregal period. From a methodological perspective that integrates philology, hermeneutics, ethnohistory of religions, and digital humanities, this project proposes the understanding of the territory as a secular cultural region, in which the mobility of indigenous groups, such as the Alazapas and Mezcales, was associated with their worldview and not only with a subsistence economy.
PI: Paloma Vargas Montes, PhD
Research Professor
Escuela de humanidades y educación
Tecnológico de Monterrey
DominiRicanDH
The title of our project, DominiRican, pays homage to the shared diasporic experiences of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and people of both Dominican and Puerto Rican descent. It engages the cultural productions and intellectual processes that emerge from these shared identities and experiences in the United States. This project is dedicated to mapping literary and cultural productions that emerge out of the coexistence of Dominican and Puerto Rican diaspora communities in the United States. DominiRicanDH is designed to exceed the parameters of a traditional digital humanities project in that it also wants to incorporate an archive and become a pedagogical tool while also mapping lines of thought in diaspora.
Co-PI: Keishla Rivera-Lopez, PhD
Lecturer
Effron Center for the Study of America
Princeton University
Co-PI: Omaris Z. Zamora, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies, Department of Africana Studies
Rutgers-New Brunswick
2021-22 Grants-in-Aid Projects
Black and Brown California: A Media Archeology of Raciality, Colonialisms and Identity in Alta California
This project seeks to highlight the histories and lived experiences of people of African descent in pre-US California in order to examine the changing ways race has been made in California across various colonial regimes. It will identify, locate and recover historical primary or derivative documents and/or popular culture illustrating the long presence of Afro-Latina/os, Californios of mixed African descent and Black Mexican settlers and citizens (by birth and naturalization) in the regions of Spanish and Mexican Alta California that now comprise US California. The first phase of this project will consist of identifying and digitally mapping the location of relevant archival materials.
PI: Caroline Collins, PhD
Cathryn P. Gamble Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Communication
UC San Diego
A Digital Inventory of the Tomasa “Tommie” Camarillo Archive/Library: Corazón as Method
Tommie Camarillo, Chair of the Chicano Park Steering Committee (CPSC), Stewards of Chicano Park, for over 40 years, has maintained an extensive library/archive of the history of Chicano Park. Chicano Park and the Chicano Park Monumental murals located in Barrio Logan/Logan Heights in San Diego, California is a National Landmark (2016) and listed on the National Register (2013). The archive/library documents a community’s self-determination to defy the City of San Diego and the State of California to build their own park in response to the Intrusion of Interstate 5 and the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge that displaced 75 percent of the residents in less than 14 years. The Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center’s Logan Heights Archival project is to digitize and inventory the Tomasa Camarillo archive/library of Chicano Park and Community history and to highlight a unique archival method embodied in the life of Tommie Camarillo and rooted in community values and empowerment that comes from the heart.
Co-PI: Josephine Talamantez
Co-Founder & Chairperson
Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center
Co-PI: Alberto López Pulido, PhD
Professor
Ethnic Studies Department
University of San Diego
Festival de Mujeres: Digital Windows to Mexicana-Chicana, Latina and LGBTQ Feminisms in Chicago (1979)
This project will enhance the digital history of Latinas in Chicago by examining the 1979 Festival de Mujeres, a significant women's event that took place in the Pilsen neighborhood, the heart of Mexican activism and arts in the Midwest. The Festival was a Latina-organized, Latina-led, one-day street festival coordinated by Mujeres Latinas en Acción (MLEA), an important early Latina organization. The Festival provides a window into Chicago’s Mexicana-Chicana feminism in 1979—its individuals, groups and alliances across generations, ethnicities and races. Diana Solís helped organize and participated in the Festival, and her photograph of neighborhood women was used as a model for the Festival's poster’s graphic.
Co-PI: Hinda Seif, PhD
Associate Professor
Women and Gender Studies
University of Illinois at Springfield
Faculty Board Member
U. of Illinois Press
Research Associate
Center for Comparative Immigration Studies
UC San Diego
Co-PI: Diana Solis
Visual Artist, Photographer & Educator
Chicago, IL
[Photo by Lucas Anti]
The Latino Catskills
The Latino Catskills is a digital project that resituates the rural Catskills region, located 100 miles northwest of New York City, as a generative space of Latino culture and identities. As this project documents, from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s, the Catskill mountains were a popular summer destination for countless Spaniards, Cubans, Puerto Ricans and others of Latin American descent. These Latino travelers took day trips (known as giras) or stayed at private dwellings and the many resorts owned by fellow Spanish speakers, such as the historic “Villas Hispanas” in Plattekill, New York. Our project reconstructs this important archive of Latino leisure culture through the development of a digital archive and map. By telling the stories of these forgotten sites, the project recenters recreation and leisure as important social components of the Latino experience, complementing dominant narratives of New York Latinidad, which have traditionally focused on the racialized experiences of urban poverty and toil.
Co-PI: Cristina Pérez Jiménez, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of English
Manhattan College
Co-PI: J. Bret Maney, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Lehman College, CUNY
Música de los cultos africanos en Cuba
The Música de los cultos africanos en Cuba collection consists of field recordings of music, chants and prayers produced by Lydia Cabrera and Josefina Tarafa in the mid-1950s, along with liner notes and photographs, and it is arguably the single most robust multimedia archive of Afro-Cuban musical traditions in the mid-20th century. Our project will develop an online, open access multimedia platform for the Música de los cultos recordings, creating a digital environment which will make the entire collection available to the public for the first time and establish a collaborative research project based on the recordings. The USLDH grant will support the creation of archival metadata for the collection and a proof of concept for a dynamic digital environment which incorporates the recordings, archival images, manuscripts and ephemera from the Lydia Cabrera Papers of the Cuban Heritage Collection, along with commentary from scholars, artists and priests.
Co-PI: David Font-Navarrete, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Music, Multimedia, Theatre & Dance
Lehman College, CUNY
Co-PI: Martin Tsang, PhD
Librarian
Cuban Heritage Collection
Curator
Latin American Collections
University of Miami Libraries
(Re)Discovering Carrascolendas: The Aida Barrera Digital Project
(Re)Discovering Carrascolendas: The Aida Barrera Digital Project highlights Aida Barrera’s career as creator of Carrascolendas. Through a close study of Carrascolendas, a bilingual children’s show produced during the 1970s in Austin, Texas, this digital humanities project demonstrates how Barrera, like other Latinas in the United States, engaged in social activism and contributed to race, gender and labor equality. While contextualizing Carrascolendas within broader histories, this project emphasizes the significance of Barrera’s labor and agency as a Latina in television production during the late twentieth century and examines how the Chicano and Civil Rights Movements influenced her approach to bilingual education. Additionally, (Re)Discovering Carrascolendas contributes to a wider understanding of race, gender, migration and language in the US-Mexico borderlands by underlining the immediate and long-term significance of Carrascolendas for Latino audiences.
PI: Veronica Durán
PhD Candidate
Department of History
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
The de la Riva Family Herstory Project
The story of the de la Riva family is deeply intertwined with significant moments in Chicanx history in California, beginning just after the turn of the 20th century. The de la Riva women have offered their art, community organizing skills, and creative vision—all deeply rooted in a passion for social justice and personal freedom.They were Instrumental in the founding of the Tiburcio Vasquez Health Center in Union City, Aztlán Boxing Club in Hayward and established the Centro de Arte in Long Beach which served the UFW and hosted artists including Linda Vallejo, Leo Limon, Gilbert “Magu” Lujan, Yreina Cervantez and Barbara Carrasco. Filmmaker, poet and kin, Osa de la Riva documented and archived this herstory through a collaborative, feminist and Chicanx methodology form of filmmaking she has coined Mujerista Movie Making. This project will catalogue and digitize artwork, stories, memories, and worldviews of her family members and make it available to the public within the Chicana por Mi Raza digital archive.
Co-PI: Erendina A. Delgadillo
Curator & Project Manager
California History
Co-PI: Osa de la Riva, PhD
Independent Scholar & Filmmaker
Archivist: Pablo Álvarez
Lecturer
Women & Gender Studies Department
Queer Studies
California State University Fullerton
Lecturer
Chicano and Latino Studies
California State University Long Beach
Tejana Historias: Indigenous Indentations and Transfrontera Transformations
Tejana Historias: Indigenous Indentations and Transfrontera Transformations will create a visual repository that reveals the struggles, resistance and liberation of Tejanas as indigenous, Spanish-Mexicans, (me)Xicanas, Chicanas, xicanindias, mestizas and afromexicanas from precontact to decolonization. Tejana Historias will additionally explore how the concepts of transborderism/transfronterizismo and transregionalism complicate these histories through a deep engagement of geography. This project will use both primary and secondary materials to provide a literal or figurative cultural/historical visualization that represents Tejana experiences. Visualizations will include artwork, photographs, newspaper articles, legal documents, treaties and maps, among other possible “artifacts.” The timeline will be composed of seven themes/periodizations: 1) Indigeneity y Tierra Natal, 2) Conquest and Colonization, 3) Migrations and Translocations within Modernity, 4) Empowering Communities in Juan Crow, 5) Articulations and Migrations, 6) Revolutions and Radical Transformations and 7) Reconquista. This phase of the project will concentrate on the first two themes and will be readily available for classrooms dedicated to social studies, Ethnic Studies or history as well as nontraditional educational settings as a tool of engagement for grade levels high school and above.
PI: Lilia Raquel D. Rosas, PhD
Assistant Professor of Instruction
Department of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies
University of Texas at Austin
Voices Veteranos: Vietnam in Mexican America
Voices Veteranos: Vietnam in Mexican America seeks to collect and digitize the personal letters written by and to Latinos while they served in the Vietnam War. Nearly 200,000 Latinos served in the US wars in Southeast Asia, representing nearly one out of every five draft age, Latino males. Their participation in war also served as a defining (and redefining) experience for more than one million of their loved ones “back home,” throughout the barrios of the Southwest. Our project attempts preserve perhaps the only remaining personal documentary evidence of this period, all in an effort to better understand how Latinx Americans made sense of their lives during exceptionally unique and impactful events.
PI: Tomás F. Summers Sandoval, Jr., PhD
Associate Professor
History & Chicanx-Latinx Studies Department
Pomona College
2020-21 Grants-in-Aid Projects
THE ENRIQUETA VÁSQUEZ DIGITAL HISTORY PROJECT
Enriqueta Vásquez, a central figure in the Chicano Movement in New Mexico and other localities, contributed to the movement’s publication El Grito del Norte and served as a voice for land struggles, Indigenous rights and the preservation of cultural heritage. However, no major institution has collected her archive. The project seeks to gather and preserve her work and stories through a digital archive for sharing with the general public through the Chicana Por Mi Raza Digital Archive and U.S. Latina/o Archive and Digital Humanities.
PI: Theresa J. Córdova, PhD
Visiting Scholar-In-Residence,
Center for Regional Studies;
Adjunct Faculty Member
Chican@ Studies
University of New Mexico
FIGHTING FASCIST SPAIN: THE EXHIBIT. WORKER ANTIFASCIST CULTURE IN US SPANISH-LANGUAGE PERIODICALS
Fighting Fascist Spain: The Exhibit intends to recover, preserve, and make available worker antifascist visual culture. As physical objects, images in US Spanish-language periodicals are fragile. This digital collection will document otherwise disappearing memories of local and global networks of political protest and solidarity. Visual sources recovered in The Exhibit comprise but are not limited to:
- announcements and photographs of rallies and demonstrations, photographs and obituaries of demonstrators
- announcements of cultural fundraisers and the antifascist plays, photographs and obituaries of participants
- cartoons, photographs and obituaries of artists
Fighting Fascist Spain (Collection)
PI: Montse Feu, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of World Languages and Cultures
Sam Houston State University
Technical Assistant:
Jenny Patlan, MA
Adjunct Professor
Lone Star College-North Harris, Houston
HISPANIC FEMINISM AND ANTIFASCISM IN LA VOZ (NEW YORK 1937-1939)
El primer número del periódico La voz se publicó en Nueva York en julio de 1937, estableciendo desde su editorial que se trataba de una empresa de intenciones democráticas. La existencia de un periódico publicado en español en esos años en Estados Unidos no es un hecho extraordinario pues la prensa periódica de habla hispana era común desde el siglo XIX en otras ciudades como Boston, Washington y Filadelfia, pero los años en que se publica La voz resultan particularmente significativos por corresponder con el conflicto civil español y el auge del fascismo en Europa. Los lectores de La voz eran precisamente la colonia antifascista que vivía en la zona de Nueva York: hispanxs y latinxs progresistas, emigrantes y exiliadxs. La voz es una publicación crucial para entender la oposición de lxs hispanxs y latinxs al fascismo en los años treinta. El periódico La voz no se encuentra digitalizado y hay pocas copias microfilmadas en Estados Unidos. Mi proyecto aspira a crear un archivo digital de artículos de opinión publicados en la “Página de la mujer”. Este archivo servirá como un repositorio y herramienta de trabajo para entender el papel de las mujeres en esa sociedad cambiante e inestable, su activismo intelectual y sus revolucionarios esfuerzos en la lucha contra el fascismo. Este proyecto aspira a digitalizar los textos y hacerlos de libre acceso, recuperando los artículos de periodistas y activistas hispanas y latinas que publicaron en sus páginas durante esos años. Su trabajo intelectual sirve de base para el estudio de las fuertes conexiones entre feminismo y antifascismo que los artículos de La voz ponen de evidencia.
PI: Ana María Díaz-Marcos, PhD
Professor of Spanish
Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages
University of Connecticut
MODESTA AVILA: OBSTRUCTING DEVELOPMENT SINCE 1889 (MAOD)
#MAOD1889 is defined as the Modesta Avila: Obstructing Development Since 1889 multimedia, digital-arts project. Modesta Avila is considered to be a folk heroine of Mexican/Mexican American folks. There are various versions of Modesta Avila's life and the various actions she took in the late 1880s to keep the Santa Fe Railroad from developing on her family's land, which was located in in the same region of what is now the San Juan Capistrano Train Station. The project will trace and focus on Modesta Avila’s life via a virtual timeline, a research contribution to the Recovery Program via their Omeka site and augmented reality. #MAOD1889 builds movement culture by preserving and re-presenting history from a people of color (POC) point of view. Among academic documentation, #MAOD1889 cites relevant photos, historical documents, media publications and urban tales from the community and local POC artists who have focused on Modesta Avila’s mugshot image to produce contemporary work. The archives will be used to source an online and book publication as well as a live hologram presentation. Through the use of the digital humanities, #MAOD1889 will provide readers and researchers the opportunity to scan the images with their phones and witness Modesta Avila come to life to tell her own story.
PI: Sarah Rafael García, MFA
Founder of Barrio Writers and LibroMobile
Research Coordinator:
Cecilia López
Undergraduate student
University of California-Berkeley
THE PUERTO RICAN LITERATURE PROJECT
The Puerto Rican Literature Project is a digital archive that maps the literary production of Puerto Rican writers from the archipelago and the diaspora since the Jones Act. It contains various photos, ephemera, and images of manuscripts in progress, some of which are housed at the archive at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, where a portion of this project began at a summer fellowship. In addition, we are creating various free digital teaching aids that educators can use to teach Puerto Rican literature in the classroom. Finally, the project will feature a page documenting the work of contemporary Puerto Rican writers through interviews, scholarly essays, craft talks, and book reviews.
Press release: UH Receives Mellon Foundation Grant to Establish Puerto Rican Literature Database
Co-PI: Claire Jiménez, MFA
Writer
PhD student
Department of English
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Co-PI: Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, PhD
Poet, translator & editor
University of Puerto Rico
2018-2019 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia
Co-PI: Ricardo Maldonado, MFA
Managing Director
92Y's Unterberg Poetry Center
RECOVERING BARRIO RHETORICS: A DISCURSIVE AND HISTORICAL REMEMBERING OF CHICANA BORDER WRITER RAMONA GONZÁLEZ
This project emphasizes the recovery of Ramírez’s maternal abuela’s writings. Her abuela, doña Ramona González, was born in El Paso, Texas in 1906 and wrote short stories, poems, fables, dichos, and more in 1960 – 1975. As an early Chicana writer, she published some of her writings in the important Chicano literary journal of El Grito’s (1967-1974) special issue Chicanas en la literatura y el arte of 1973. This project, however, focuses on doña Ramona’s seven hundred and fifty plus primary documents that she produced over her lifetime. Five years ago, the González/Hernández family (Ramírez’s immediate family) uncovered these documents tucked away in a cardboard box. These documents have now all been digitized, and a large majority have been translated by Dr. Ramírez’s father, Dr. Neil J. Devereaux. This project’s main goal is community accessibility of these primary document to the greater Latinx community.
PI: Cristina Ramírez, PhD
Associate Professor
Director of the Rhetoric, Composition & Teaching
English Department
University of Arizona
Research Assistant:
Teresa McKinney Davis
Instructional Designer
Digital Learning
University of Arizona
UNEARTHING BRAZILIAN, CUBAN, AND PUERTO RICAN ABOLITIONISM IN 19TH CENTURY US PRESS
This project understands 19th-century Latino publications from immigrant editors of Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico as fundamentally transnational phenomena engaged in the larger press networks of the Americas. The interactions between these three communities in the US often occurred in exchanges that have been lost or erased from the historical record despite their relevance to understanding how race and nationhood came to be understood locally and across national borders. By locating and digitizing reprinted articles from Latino periodicals, I am addressing the gaps in research and representation by digitally reconstructing the networks of Latino newspapers and the routes that their articles traveled.
PI: Joshua Ortiz Baco, MA
PhD Candidate
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
University of Texas at Austin
Call for Proposals (Closed)
University of Houston
Recovering the US Hispanic Heritage Program / US Latino Digital Humanities (USLDH)
Call for Proposals
GRANTS-IN-AID funded by the Mellon Foundation
The University of Houston US Latino Digital Humanities (USLDH) program is a digital scholarship/research undertaking to provide training and research on US Latino recovered materials. Proposals must draw from recovered primary and derivative sources produced by Latinas/os in what is now the United States, dating from the Colonial Period to 1980 (such as Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage collections, other repositories and/or the community).
The Grants-in-Aid program is designed to provide a stipend to scholars for research and development of digital scholarship in the form of a digital publication and/or a digital project. The grant covers any expense connected with research that will advance a project to the next stage or to a successful conclusion. Grantees are expected to present as part of the 2024 cohort virtual panel and produce a public-facing digital deliverable by December 2024.
Scholars will have the opportunity to publish their digital scholarship on Arte Público Press’ APPDigital publication platform. See sample digital scholarship/research on the following sites: Reanimate, CUNY, University of Washington and Temple University Press. Past USLDH projects are described below.
Scholars at different stages of their careers (academics, librarians, advanced graduate students, independent scholars, etc.) are encouraged to apply for a stipend of up to $7,500 for investigative work. Grantees are expected to attend virtual trainings (dates to be announced). We welcome applications in the following areas:
- Identification, location and recovery of any wide variety of historical documents and/or literary genres, including conventional literary prose and poetry, and such forms as letters, diaries, memoirs, testimonials, periodicals, historical records and written expressions of oral traditions, folklore and popular culture. Any documents that could prove relevant to the goals of the program will also be considered. The emphasis is on works by Mexican/Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Spanish, Central and South American and other Latina/o residents of what has become the United States, from the Colonial period to 1980.
- Bibliographic compilations, indexing projects pertaining to any of the above. Compilation of reference works, e.g. bibliographic dictionaries, thematic datasets, linguistic corpus, etc.
- Study of recovered primary source(s) for potential digital publication, including: text analysis, thematic dataset creation, visualization, metadata creation, etc.
- US Latina voices.
- Underrepresented archives, such as Afrolatinidad, Indigenous, gender, LGBTQI+, etc.
To apply, please submit a letter of interest, project description (2-3 pages), proposed budget and CV as a single PDF document via email to apprec@central.uh.edu by Monday, January 8, 2024. Two letters of recommendation should be sent directly to apprec@central.uh.edu by the recommenders. All documentation (including letters) are due on January 8, 2024.
Frequently Asked Questions