Inside the former Sisters of Divine Providence Convent at Our Lady of the Lake University, a room filled with historic maps, photos, books and recordings houses the archives once tied to the Center for Mexican American Studies and Research. The center is now being closed and its work redistributed across the university, which officials say will make the collections more accessible.
“This university has such a historic legacy for Mexican-American research, as the birthplace of Hispanic Serving Institutions,” OLLU Provost Alan Silva said. “We really have a gold mine of great archives and special collections … but how many people know that? How could we put this out more into the public and make it more accessible not just to our students, our faculty, but more broadly.”
The center’s space and its collections will be preserved, officials said, and its work will be divided among multiple departments, including that of finding grants, partners and public engagement initiatives.
The special collections — including the Mexican-American collection, the Spanish Colonial collection, the María Antonietta Berriozábal collection — are now managed by the university’s Library under OLLU Library Director Maria Cabaniss and Liana Morales, special collections and archives librarian.
The timing of the change comes as universities all across the state and the nation are eliminating programs dedicated to diversity.
In February, the University of Texas at San Antonio announced it was preparing to merge its Department of Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Sexuality Studies with the Department of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies, a move that faculty said was more of a dissolution of the former, which houses Mexican American and Latino Studies and African Diaspora Studies.
But OLLU officials are proposing this change as an expansion of access, rather than the dissolution of any programs. The university, they say, remains rooted in its mission and focus on diversity and the region’s Mexican and Hispanic heritage.
The center’s former director, Christopher Carmona, said the move came as a surprise to him when he was notified in March that his position would no longer be available and the center would close. There was little explanation, he said, and a new position teaching was offered to him.
Carmona chose not to take the position, and said his contract was terminated a few months early after he refused the teaching job, which came with a huge pay cut, he said. But he wasn’t worried about his own future with the institution.
“What concerns me is the future of the center, because I’ve spent years cultivating relationships with the community,” Carmona said.
The center was itself a connection between the university and the Mexican American communities that surround it, he said. His job involved seeking grants that supported student scholarships, hosting events such as speaker series and culturally-relevant exhibitions.
“The job was to preserve the history and promote what we’re doing here,” Carmona said.
He now fears that if his role is split among other departments the actual focus on Mexican-American culture will be diluted or completely lost. He also wonders if funders will continue their support without the center.
OLLU officials said they could not comment on personnel matters.
Silva stated there will be no dissolution of the center’s efforts, programming and mission. He described the move as an opportunity to enhance the visibility and impact of these archives through the university’s efforts to revamp all of their special collections.
“The center built up the collections over the years,” Silva said. “But at least in my time here, and just prior to my time, there hasn’t been this outreach and connection and integration with the community.”
Inside the collectionsTucked inside a flat box labeled “maps” Morales found more than that. Maps issued by the Texas Land Office in the 1960s were rolled up on top of other documents — a storage method that’s not recommended, she said — and under all of that were magazines printed in the 70s and 80s titled “Revista Rio Bravo” and “Rayas,” a Chicano arts newsletter.
Morales had no idea the collections included these items, and if she didn’t know, these were likely not yet properly processed and documented. The process to document each item and properly organize and preserve these documents is a lengthy one, she said, and it takes an expert eye to know how to best take care of them.
“Ultimately my goal is to increase accessibility because these are important documents for research,” Morales said. “Whether you’re researching Texas history, or religious history, or community history. It’s fascinating how the different collections tell that story from different perspectives.”
Funding and lack of full-time staff, especially expert archivists, means that many of these documents could be poorly preserved, uncategorized and far from public access. Morales and Cabaniss hope to address these issues with the help of grants, university funds, and even volunteer help.
In 2019 the university received a small grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, or NEH, to assess its special collections with the goal to help create a plan for the future, Cabaniss said. Part of the process included procuring an expert consultant who visited the university and issued recommendations that are now guiding these changes.
“Ever since, we’ve been using that document as a guiding document for how we move forward,” Cabaniss said. “And thinking about what the priorities are and what the needs are for the collections.”
Some of the priorities include digitization of the archives, replacing storage containers, boxes and shelving to properly fit the growing collections. And hire helping hands to properly process each collection.
“The next step [is a] digital repository,” Morales said. “So a lot of these documents are going to be seen for the first time by a wider amount of people, which we are really excited about.”
Morales also envisions seeking the help of community and student volunteers who can help with the tedious task of helping document each item in the collections that haven’t yet been explored.
But Cabaniss and Morales applied for another NEH grant this year, intended to fund these preservation efforts for all of the university collections. If awarded, they could complete this process in a few years, but the work must be done without that grant, so they are preparing to seek alternative funding.
Right now, special collections are housed in three different spaces across the university, Cabaniss said. Ideally, funding could help them properly retrofit a space in the library to house all special collections under one roof.
All of these needs are happening at the same time federal funding and grants are less accessible for institutions seeking to fund diversity-related efforts. A challenge that Cabaniss said could also fuel the push to diversify their funding sources.
“As there’s this retraction [of funding] at the federal level and in different communities, this work becomes even more important to maintain,” she said. “This is a place to renew our focus and we have to be able to be creative in how we do that … We have to build the momentum internally as proof of concept, to show people that we are here and this is worth investing in.”
The San Antonio Report partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.