The Benson Latin American Collection is home to the archive of Mexican politician, writer, and philosopher José Vasconcelos (1881–1959).
In a short essay, Diego Godoy describes a man of contradictions, “the personification of both the brightness and darkness” of post-revolutionary Mexico.
The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA), the University of Texas Libraries and LLILAS Benson extend their sympathy to the family, friends and former colleagues of Heidi Johnson, who passed away unexpectedly on Wednesday, February 2, 2022.
As the manager of AILLA from 2001 through 2012, Johnson played a central role in building the archive into the internationally recognized language repository that it is today.
On the night of March 24, 2022, the UT Tower will be lit in honor of the centennial of a crown jewel of our campus—the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. Established as the Latin American library on campus in 1921, the collection is beloved by students and faculty, and visited by scholars from all over the world.
The Benson Latin American Collection recently inaugurated Martín Fierro: From Marginal Outlaw to National Symbol in the Rare Books Reading Room.
For years, the LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Office has been experimenting with digital technologies to transform this “unreadable” Spanish colonial archive into accessible humanities data for scholars. However, we tried something new this past year and reversed the equation: We convened colonial Latin Americanists online to transform handwritten words on pages into digital text that they could then use to make the digital humanities (DH) more accessible.
LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections has been awarded Comprehensive National Resource Center (NRC) and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grants from the U.S. Department of Education. The total award is $2,183,792 for the 2022–2026 cycle. This includes $1,027,492 ($256,873 annually) for NRC activities and $1,156,300 ($289,075 annually) for FLAS fellowships. The grant will be managed by LLILAS Director Adela Pineda Franco in the role of Project Director.
Two members of the LLILAS Benson Digital Initiatives team recently visited Buenaventura, Colombia, to work with archivists and community leaders at Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN), a grassroots collective of organizations founded in 1993 that is working to transform the political, social, economic, and territorial reality of Colombia’s Black, Afro-descendant, Raizal, and Palenquera communities through the defense and revindication of their individual, collective, and ancestral rights.
Art historian Dr. Virginia E. Miller, a UT Austin alumna, has generously included support for LLILAS Benson in her estate. The bequest designates the creation of two program endowments: Virginia E. Miller Endowed Excellence Fund in Latin American Art Studies, to support the study of Latin American Art via LLILAS, and Virginia E. Miller Endowed Excellence Fund for the Benson Library, to support any function of the Benson Latin American Collection.
It was a doozy of a summer for the LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Office. Thanks to a Department of Education National Resource Center grant, we had the distinct opportunity to share some of the Benson Latin American Collection’s Spanish colonial treasures with a few communities outside of UT Austin. In a traveling exhibit titled A New Spain, 1521–1821, the reproduced materials demonstrated the cultural, social, and political evolution of colonial Mexico.
The Black Diaspora Archive (BDA) at The University of Texas at Austin documents the Black experience in the Americas and the Caribbean through the voices and stories of those who have championed the Black spaces that we use and benefit from today.
