On Recovering and Making the Invisible Visible

Deena offers her thoughts on the panel by reflecting on her current project, a project that is now nearly two decades-long of transcribing and translating nearly 80 Spanish-Mexican women’s wills. "I would offer some... [ view full abstract ]

Deena offers her thoughts on the panel by reflecting on her current project, a project that is now nearly two decades-long of transcribing and translating nearly 80 Spanish-Mexican women’s wills.

"I would offer some thoughts on a nearly two decades-long project of transcribing and translating nearly 80 Spanish-Mexican women’s wills, a thousand page effort, with the scanned documents! The goal, the interest, to keep this moving along has been to think about recovery and visibility simultaneously. The “we are and we were there” aspects, the lament, but also their lamentations, centuries-old. The most difficult thing is to do this well, that is, good social history, focusing on the right things, but also pulling applicable meaning. There is something about being multi-purposeful in the social historian’s tasks, so I will offer an example and then some thoughts about where we are with such efforts."