Brown Foundation Professor for the University of Houston Nicolas Kanellos gave a seminar on the impact of Latino culture in the Stanley Marcus Reading Room in the DeGolyer Library on Thursday, thus marking the first lecture of the 2007 SMU Gilbert Lecture Series.
After receiving a warm welcome from library director Russell Martin, Kanellos held a seminar attended by scholars, students and professors on his continuing search of a lost era in Latino literature written in America from the mid-19th century to the late 1960s.
Dr. Kanellos started off the lecture by giving some background history about some of the stories, documents and historical papers he had found during his search across America and Mexico. He spoke about how the earliest documents written about America were not by Christopher Columbus or the settlers at Plymouth Rock, but rather by Spanish conquistadors and explorers who had found America long before anybody else.
Kanellos explained to the audience why it was important for these documents to be collected, stored and archived. He argued that the Latino presence from the time that Texas was annexed to the late 1960s was largely overlooked, and that a priceless amount of papers, stories, books and works of historical and cultural relevance had been lost because of the neglect of Latino culture by settlers from the Manifest Destiny era and afterward.
The texts that have been collected by his group range cover a wide spectrum of the Latino culture during that period, including items like missionary tracts, anarchist flyers, romance novels and much more. Included in the collection are articles written by Cuban intellectual Jose Marti during the Spanish-American War and an epic poem made by Latino settlers titled “La Florida.” Also included are extremely rare diaries and journals kept by important figures during that period.
“I like to tell my students in Houston that Cabeza de Vaca walked down Main Street,” Kanellos said enthusiastically.
Dr. Kanellos also explained that his research program “Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage” has worked in the margins to compile thousands of poems, books, articles and texts. His preferred method of archiving fragile and damaged documents is to photograph them using microfilm technology instead of digitization, because of the fact that today’s digital structure is “unstable” and rapidly changing every day.
He also had some entertaining anecdotes to tell about his improvisational research and acquisition methods, one of which included asking a janitor to help locate an unknown document in a vast archive when none of the staff knew where it was. This document later turned out to be a collection of 19th-century newspapers titled “Diarios de Nueva York,” the last known printed copies still in existence.
His staff is currently working on creating a Web page and an online database for archiving their collected works, and they are planning on eventually going public and cataloging their documents for public use once copies and translations have been made in order that the original texts are in no risk of public damage.
“Herencia,” his research staff’s most recent compilation of Latino heritage and literature, can be bought or rented at public bookstores and public libraries.
