Colorado State Fair image. Part of the documentation in Colorado's Local Legacies projects.

Colorado

The American Folklife Center was created in 1976 by the U.S. Congress through Public Law 94-201 and charged to "preserve and present American folklife." The Center incorporates the Archive of Folk Culture, which was established at the Library of Congress in 1928, and is now one of the largest collections of ethnographic material from the United States and around the world.

Collections

The collections of the American Folklife Center contain rich and varied materials from Colorado that document the diversity of the state's folk traditions. Among its unique recordings are Mexican songs from the 1940s; Native American music; and cowboy poetry. In 1989-91, the Center conducted a field research project documenting the culture and traditions of Italian-Americans in the West, including the Italian-American community of Pueblo, Colorado.

The project culminated in a traveling exhibition and companion book of essays. The documentary material created during the project--hundreds of hours of interviews, thousands of photographs, and hundreds of pages of transcriptions and other documents--has been incorporated into the collections of the Center. In 1994 and 1995, the Center conducted a field school based in Colorado Springs and southern Colorado that resulted in a modest collection of photographs, recordings, and other documents.

• Colorado Collections in the Archive of Folk Culture [full text]

American Folklife Center Collections presented online through the American Memory project include Hispano Music and Culture of the Northern Rio Grande: the Juan Rael Collection, an ethnographic field collection documenting religious and secular music of Spanish-speaking residents of rural Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado compiled by Juan Batista Rael in 1940.

Colorado participated in the Library's Bicentennial Local Legacies project, which includes documentation of local traditions and celebrations for the American Folklife Center's Archive of Folk Culture.

• View Colorado's Local Legacies projects

Field School

An ethnographic field school was conducted in the San Luis Valley of Southern Colorado in 1994, documenting aagricultural traditions related to sustainable agriculture. The field school was co-sponsored by the Center and Colorado College. To read an article about the field school by James Hardin, see "Documenting Traditional Culture: A Colorado Field School," in Folklife Center News, Fall 1994. [full text]

Field Research Projects

• 1989-91 Italian-Americans in the West. [catalog record] [finding aid]

Public Programs

• 1984 "The American Cowboy" (exhibit), Denver Museum of Art, Denver.
• 1994 and 1995: "Documenting Traditional Culture" (Field School), Colorado College, Colorado Springs. [related article]

Publications

• Old Ties, New Attachments: Italian American Folklife in the West. [catalog record]
• A Brief List of Materials Related to Colorado Folk Music (bibliography from 1970). [full text]