The University of Houston's Arte Público Press, a long-standing beacon for Hispanic literature preservation, has just unveiled an innovative website which is reshaping the field of Latino historical research. The platform, which rolled out in May, offers a freely accessible research portal teeming with texts from the American colonial period to the present day. Gabriela Baeza Ventura, Deputy Director of Arte Público Press, shed light on the richness of the archive, articulating that it encapsulates the entire spectrum of the Latino experience in America—a continuum stretching from the earliest immigrants to those who were present before the U.S. evolved into the nation it is today, according to a recent report from ABC13.
One major goal of this initiative is to bring to the forefront Latino history that straddles both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border and the newly launched website boasts access to an impressive collection of over 150 periodicals that document significant events touching on civil and immigrant rights, women's issues, and it also holds literature from numerous ancestors, said Mikaela Selley of Arte Público Press, sharing their intent to be the destination for students googling Latino history, so that they stumble upon this repository of significant yet oft-overlooked narratives.
In a parallel push to safeguard Latino histories, three dedicated women at the helm of Arte Público Press have made it their mission to document, preserve, and provide access to collections that illustrate the rich history of Houston's Latino and Hispanic communities, shared Houston Landing. The trio—Carolina Villarroel, Baeza Ventura, and Selley—works alongside a robust team to archive and research thousands of collections, providing a crucial service to a city where nearly half of the 2.3 million residents are Hispanic or Latino.
Highlighting the significance of their work, Villarroel underscored the importance of community access to their history, pointedly capturing the shared sentiment: "Many of the owners of this knowledge want for this to be known," a statement that reverberates with an evident truth given that up until recently, Arte Público was among the few entities consistently devoting resources to Latino archives. In recent developments, Houston has decided to lay down nearly $10 million for the establishment of a Hispanic History Research Center to further this cause. The narrative of these archival undertakings not only reinforces the need for such efforts but also echoes the communal desire for rightful representation and a deeper connection to heritage, as epitomized by the Morales family's Bible, crammed with personal documents, which was entrusted to Arte Público's care by Christina Morales in hopes of assisting others in unearthing fragments of their own histories, as per Houston Landing.
Arte Público's staff engage families in every step of the process of digitizing and preserving their collections without aiming to appropriate them, ensuring that the control and ownership of historical knowledge remain firmly in the hands of the community.
