Diversity Award: Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Program

Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Program, led by Nicolás Kanellos and Carolina Villarroel at the University of Houston, is a 2014 recipient of the Diversity Award. The award recognizes an individual, group, or institution for outstanding contributions in advancing diversity within the archives profession, SAA, or the archival record.

The Recovery Program is being honored for its outstanding achievement in accessioning important Latino archives, organizing and describing them, and making them available broadly to educational institutions and communities via publication and electronic delivery. The program has accessioned, organized, and described such important collections like that of Leonor Villegas de Magnón, a Laredo activist who in the early twentieth century recruited Anglo Texan, Mexican American, and Mexican women for a nursing corps to tend to the wounded and fallen on the battlefields of the Mexican Revolution. As an early feminist, she documented the role of women in her writings. Recovery also has assembled the world’s largest collection of microfilmed Hispanic newspapers published in the United States from 1808 to 1960.

“[This program] has made these records accessible to increasingly larger numbers of researchers who have in turn significantly impacted the development of Latino Studies,” one supporter wrote. “This has become obvious in scholarly conferences that I have attended and noticed increasing numbers of scholars acknowledging the use of digitized records made available by the program.”

Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Program joins Jennifer O’Neal, university historian and archivist at the University of Oregon Libraries, as the 2014 recipients of the Diversity Award.