Latino oral history initiative awarded $240,000 from NEH

From Todd Drake's "Give Me Eyes: Crossing Borders to the Heart," a book developed from a community art project with immigrants.
From Todd Drake’s “Give Me Eyes: Crossing Borders to the Heart,” a book developed from a community art project with immigrants.

A Latino oral history initiative at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been awarded $240,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. “New Roots: Improving Global Access of Latino Oral Histories” is a collaborative initiative of the Latino Migration Project and the Southern Oral History Program and the University Libraries.

The Latino Migration Project is a program of the Institute for the Study of the Americas in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Center for Global Initiatives. The Southern Oral History Program is also in the College.

The initiative was established in 2007 to document demographic transformations in the U.S. South by collecting stories of migration, settlement and integration in North Carolina. The collection receives regular contributions of at least 40 interviews annually from UNC scholars through an ongoing research program of the Latino Migration Project.

Oral histories are archived with the Southern Oral History Program and their collections in the Southern Historical Collection at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North  Carolina. The NEH grant, which is awarded from the NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources division, will make the New Roots collection accessible to new regional, national and global public constituencies, particularly within Spanish-speaking Latino and Latin American communities.

Activities will include the creation of a visually engaging bilingual web site for public audiences and people who have contributed their stories; a digital catalogue and finding aids in English and Spanish; an interactive portal for teachers to share lesson plans; and a dissemination plan with Latino communities, K-16 educators, national and international oral history networks and Mexican universities in the origin states of migrants living in North Carolina. The project will be based at Carolina and carried out over the course of three years.

“The New Roots project will provide wider access to this record of the many changes affecting North Carolina,” said Richard Szary, director of the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library and associate university librarian for Special Collections. “The bilingual features of the project are especially noteworthy in expanding access and will be a model for similar projects to making oral histories at UNC more discoverable to a wider audience.”