Benson Latin American Collection

Each fall, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections invites graduate and undergraduate students from all departments and disciplines across the university to submit photographs to the Field Notes student photography exhibition. Thirty images are chosen for display in the Benson Latin American Collection. Through these images, student photographers document moments from their research on Latin America or US Latina/o communities.

Over the summer, LLILAS Benson and El Salvador’s Museum of the Word and the Image (often referred to by its acronym, MUPI, for Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen) added yet another digital initiative to their long-standing partnership. Since 2012, the two institutions have worked closely to digitize archival materials related to the Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992), thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

On September 21, 2019, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections and the New Orleans Jazz Museum joined forces to make their colonial collections a bit more accessible. The two institutions led a joint transcribe-a-thon that convened community members in person at the Louisiana Historical Center, and remotely through the Benson Latin American Collection’s Facebook page. Together, participants transcribed handwritten Spanish and French documents from 1559 to 1817, with the goal of making these records more useful to teachers, students, researchers, and family historians.

The publishing industry of Cuba experienced a seismic shift in 1959 when Fidel Castro won a revolutionary war against dictator Fulgencio Batista. With this change, underground and subversive media creators of the Batista era became an important part of the new socialist culture. This helped to mobilize the masses in support of the new Castro government and against U.S. capitalistic ideology.

Fidel Castro understood that media and graphic art could guide ideology and could be used as an educational tool because he knew that it had already being used before in Cuba. 

Representatives from LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections and the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice visited Guatemala City on July 27 for a seminar on archival partnerships between the University of Texas and Guatemalan institutions.

Read more at Tex Libris.

The University of Texas Libraries will highlight the approaching centenary of the Latin American collections at the Benson Latin American Collection with the help of noted journalist Enrique Acevedo.

“An Evening of Discovery” will feature Acevedo discussing how the growth of Latin American populations and expanded interest in their history and culture has influenced the ascendency of Latin American media in the United States.

The Texas Archival Resources Online (TARO) consortium and the University of Texas Libraries have received a grant of $348,359 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to enhance their efforts to provide researchers worldwide with access to collection descriptions of archival primary sources in libraries, archives and museums across Texas.

Read more at Tex Libris.

¿Cómo le hacemos para entender 80 millones de páginas de documentos históricos?

Esta pregunta es de naturaleza filosófica. Se trata del poder de la mente para asimilar un número tan grande de documentos. El Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional (AHPN), en la Ciudad de Guatemala, contiene unos 80 millones de documentos, que abarcan unos 135 años de la historia de la Policía Nacional.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded a Documenting Endangered Languages Preservation Grant of $227,365 to Patience Epps and Susan Smythe Kung of the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) for support of their upcoming project entitled “Archiving Significant Collections of Endangered Languages: Two Multilingual Regions of Northwestern South America.”

In collaboration With the Thoma Foundation and the Blanton Museum of Art, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections is pleased to announce a call/ call for proposals for the grants Thoma for Research in Virreinal Arte Latinoamericano (Thoma Visiting Scholars in Spanish Colonial Art). The Scholarships Thoma will fund short-term visits for six scholars to conduct research on South American colonial art based on a long-term loan to the Blanton by the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation.