Since its founding in 1991, the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project has become a crucial center for research on Latino documentary history. Its holdings at the University of Houston include thousands of original books, manuscripts, archival items and ephemera; a microfilm collection of approximately 1,400 historical newspapers; and hundreds of thousands of microfilmed and digitized photographs and personal papers. The project has published or reprinted more than 40 historical books, two anthologies, and nine volumes of scholarly essays that have grown out of its biennial international conference, attended by some five thousand affiliated scholars, librarians and archivists.
This roundtable—aimed in particular at younger scholars who are still discovering their research agenda—will explore current and future directions for the Recovery Project, which recently expanded its temporal endpoint from 1960 to 1980. More broadly, it will explore the limits and possibilities of the concept of "recovery" itself. How have existing fields and knowledge-formations been transformed by this archival work, which is often unruly in the ways it exceeds and challenges disciplines? Presentation times will be strictly limited to allow at least a half-hour for dialogue and discussion. A/V requested.
1. Gabriela Baeza Ventura, Associate Professor, Department of Hispanic Studies, University of Houston. “The Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Project: Doing Work that Matters.” The Executive Editor for Arte Público Press offers an overview of the Recovery Project’s accomplishments and challenges, with an emphasis on new research opportunities yet to be undertaken, and on the international dissemination of this scholarship.
2. Rodrigo Lazo, Associate Professor, English Department, University of California Irvine. “Newspapers and Archival Remains.” The fact that Spanish-language newspapers were the most important venue for Latino publication in the nineteenth century clashes with the organization of knowledge around books, as well as with Anglophone normativity. Newspapers pose particular problems for the archive, even in the age of digitization.
3. Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Professor, Literature Department, University of California Santa Cruz. “How ‘American Literature’ Has Failed Us.” Despite the wealth of Latina/o texts made newly available over the past quarter-century, “American” literature as a field has made only token efforts at incorporating them into its canon—much less into its deep structures of knowledge. Attention to gender and sexuality is particularly lacking.
4. José F. Aranda, Jr., Associate Professor, Depts. of English and Spanish & Portuguese, Rice University. “Expanding the Limits of the Recovery Project Through Translation and Civil Rights Movement Archives.” Translation can be seen not just as an editorial expediency, but as a pedagogical and research opportunity. Moreover, the expansion of the Recovery Project’s scope to include the Civil Rights Movement offers new possibilities for preservation and documentation in English and Spanish.