Founded in 1970, the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) at The University of Texas at Austin benefited from Chicano student activism of the 1960s. Members of the Mexican American Student Organization (MASO) and later the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) demanded equitable representation and resources be devoted to Mexican American studies on the UT campus. After years of activism, the Center was established. It stands as an institutional recognition of the importance of Mexican Americans and Latinos in the history, culture, and the politics of the United States.

Each fall, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections invites graduate and undergraduate students from all departments and disciplines across the university to submit photographs to the Field Notes student photography exhibition. Thirty images are chosen for display in the Benson Latin American Collection. Through these images, student photographers document moments from their research on Latin America or US Latina/o communities.

Over the summer, LLILAS Benson and El Salvador’s Museum of the Word and the Image (often referred to by its acronym, MUPI, for Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen) added yet another digital initiative to their long-standing partnership. Since 2012, the two institutions have worked closely to digitize archival materials related to the Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992), thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

On September 21, 2019, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections and the New Orleans Jazz Museum joined forces to make their colonial collections a bit more accessible. The two institutions led a joint transcribe-a-thon that convened community members in person at the Louisiana Historical Center, and remotely through the Benson Latin American Collection’s Facebook page. Together, participants transcribed handwritten Spanish and French documents from 1559 to 1817, with the goal of making these records more useful to teachers, students, researchers, and family historians.

The publishing industry of Cuba experienced a seismic shift in 1959 when Fidel Castro won a revolutionary war against dictator Fulgencio Batista. With this change, underground and subversive media creators of the Batista era became an important part of the new socialist culture. This helped to mobilize the masses in support of the new Castro government and against U.S. capitalistic ideology.

Fidel Castro understood that media and graphic art could guide ideology and could be used as an educational tool because he knew that it had already being used before in Cuba. 

The report of the Task Force on the Future of UT Libraries has been submitted to Provost Maurie McInnis. You can view the report at the following link: https://utexas.app.box.com/v/future-of-ut-libraries-report 

For background and more information on the Task Force, visit the website of the Office of the Provost. 

Staff who create and manage digital resources at the University of Texas Libraries will now be able to more effectively preserve and provide access to these collections thanks to the introduction of a new digital asset management system (DAMS). Digital files along with descriptive metadata are being added to the system, many of which will be made publicly accessible through a web portal.

The University of Texas Libraries announces the launch of new library search tools coming in January 2020. 

The new tools – designed specifically for use in libraries – will replace the Libraries’ current resource management system with a more robust option that will improve functionality for users while streamlining underlying management processes to provide a highly integrated solution for resource discovery.

The Texas Digital Library and a group of partners recently received an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant to support the development of the first nationally distributed digital preservation (DDP) service for sensitive data. 

This year’s graduates showed some real class.

The 2019 graduating seniors earmarked their senior class gift for the Libraries Tomorrow Fund, which provides additional monies for the University of Texas Libraries.

Students were encouraged by their peer leaders at the Texas Student Foundation to donate a gift in the amount of $20.19 for the class gift through the university’s crowdfunding platform, Hornraiser. To date, the gift has raised over $34,000 from more than 850 students and library supporters.