La Casita Digital Archive Now Publicly Available on New York Heritage Archive

Nine digital collections from La Casita Cultural Center ’s Cultural Memory Archive are now publicly available in the New York Heritage Digital Collections thanks to a grant from the Central NY Library Resources Council (CLRC). The Digital Library Program at Syracuse University Libraries, in collaboration with La Casita, submitted the grant application to CLRC in 2020 to create digital access to the history and experience of Latine/Hispanic communities in Central and Upstate New York to advance scholarly research and understanding around this underrepresented culture in this region. The Libraries is the largest academic library in the CLRC region.

The collections include:

• Abuelas Project
• Balcón Criollo
• Community Stories
• Fusión Caribe
• Juan Cruz Collection
• Latinos in Baseball
• Latino Veterans and Military Families
• Oral History Project
• Pa’la Calle Exhibition

As the New York State Archives has observed in “A Guide to Documenting Latino/Hispanic History and Culture in New York State,” “Historical information is inadequately represented in the documentation of broad areas of Hispanic culture, including the fine arts, popular music and dance forms, and folk and traditional arts.”  Information pertaining to Hispanic businesses as well as the social, political and religious organizations of the community is also limited, and the historical record has poorly reflected Latine experiences related to immigration, discrimination and access to services.

These nine digital collections will begin to remedy the documentation gap relating to the Syracuse Latine community, supporting further work and study in the fields of anthropology, sociology, art, history and Latine studies. La Casita maintains both its physical and digital objects and collections with support from the Libraries, the Humanities Center, the Department of Languages, Literatures & Linguistics and Latino-Latin American Studies program in the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Museum Studies program in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, as well as from community partners including the Spanish Action League of Onondaga County, the Syracuse City School District and other colleges and educational institutions in the region.

“The collaboration between La Casita, Syracuse University Libraries, CLRC and the NY Heritage Digital Collections is a wonderful, combined effort that benefits all parties and the greater community, ensuring that these important resources are preserved and discovered by scholars, researchers and community members,” says Elisa Dekaney, associate provost for strategic initiatives.

New York Heritage Digital Collections includes over 400,000 digitized books, manuscripts, maps, letters, photographs and memorabilia. New York Heritage provides access to stories spanning the history of New York, with contributions from over 430 libraries, museums, archives and other community organizations.

“It is very exciting to see one of La Casita’s long-term goals, to make our Cultural Memory Archive accessible online, finally become a reality,” says Tere Paniagua ’82, executive director of the University’s Office of Cultural Engagement for the Hispanic Community. “This is a project developed by La Casita’s Bilingual Library, one that we have been working on for over a decade. Many graduate students from the University’s School of Information Studies have contributed to the project, and now that the platform was created for these first nine collections, we welcome more students to take on the task of building new online collections.”

Déirdre Joyce, head of digital stewardship and the Digital Library, added that “the Digital Library Program supports library, campus and community partnerships that find creative ways to publish and express their unique, local digital output to wider digital audiences. In this case, we were delighted to leverage the Libraries’ membership with CLRC on behalf of La Casita, thereby making this content–and  and the stories of this diverse, Syracuse community–broadly discoverable in New York Heritage. We look forward to continuing this important collaboration.”