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Vol. 25:2 ISSN 0160-8460 Summer 1997
Hispanic Resources Seen at Risk
A Task Force on Hispanic Resources, headed by Nicolas Kanellos, director of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project at the University of Houston, has issued a report that argues the need for identifying, preserving, and creating access to the rich store of Spanish-language materials relevant to the Hispanic heritage of the United States. As noted in The Commission on Preservation and Access Newsletter (No. 97, March 1997), the Task Force urges that documents tracing the history of Hispanics in North America and their role in shaping its culture be recovered and saved, that they receive adequate bibliographic attention, and that they be made available to scholars and the general public.
Hispanic communities have supported hundreds of Spanish-language newspapers over the years, as well as professional theaters, publishing houses, and bookstores. Members of the Task Force believe that the most critical problem in preserving and making accessible the Hispanic documentary legacy will be to convince foundations and agencies at every level of society of the significance of what is at stake, and then to persuade them of the scale and urgency of funding needs. According to the report, "The loss of the Hispanic cultural heritage of this country has not been identified as a problem, and both private and public institutions have not created, and are hesitant to create, programs and funding categories that will specifically address this glaring need."
The report makes the following recommendations: (1) Regional, national, and international surveys of Hispanic materials should be undertaken as soon as possible to locate and register materials and assess their risk of loss. (2) Agencies and foundations should create specific funding categories at adequate levels to address these issues of preservation and access, with the former given priority. (3) Community-based projects should be created to work with local institutions (especially libraries), scholars, and families to further preservation and access efforts and promote the educational use of Hispanic-heritage materials. (4) Regional and state governments should play an appropriate role in this process, such as funding regional and local archives and community organizations. (5) More bilingual librarians and archivists should be trained. (6) Professional associations and the various Hispanic scholarly organizations should become more conscious of the issues involved in documenting the Hispanic heritage of the United States. (7) A task force or working group, to include representatives from foreign institutions, should be established to address these issues on a national and international basis.
For more information on the task force report, contact the project director, Nicolas Kanellos, at the University of Houston, telephone (713) 743-3129, e-mail artrec@jetson.uh.edu.
