AUSTIN, Texas — Many believe so much of our future lies in preserving our past. And the past is right at your fingertips if you visit the Voces Oral History Center, located at the University of Texas at Austin's Moody College of Communication.
This center is the leading Latino oral history archive in the U.S. It opened in 1999 with a mission of documenting and telling untold stories of Latinos of the World War II generation.
At Voces, you'll find videotaped interviews with more than 18,000 Latinos and Latinas and over 25,000 scanned photographs. The center's goal is to continue to add collections to fill the gaps in the history of Latinos in the U.S.
"It's a great wealth of material that we have here that gets used all the time. It gets used by book authors, it gets used by journal authors. The other day, we got a request from the folks who do the AP exams," Voces Director Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez said.
"When you get a chance to hear it from the people that have lived through history, then you can see the connections and you can understand that how things are today that is not how it always has been," Rivas-Rodriguez said. "We really are trying to do our best to promote the use of oral history, to look at the Latino experience and show people how the way that we do it is the way that the most persnickety librarian, archivist, will say, 'That's a good oral history project.'"
Rivas-Rodriguez said dissemination is especially important to them.
"So, some sort of publication, some way of letting the world know that these interviews are there because what we don't want is, we don't want these interviews to sit on the shelf and nobody knows that they're there."
Although Voces is housed on the UT Austin campus, the center has partnerships with other universities and scholars across the country.
On Nov. 15, the Voces Oral History Center will host its 25th anniversary celebration. Distinguished guests and speakers will include Congressman Joaquin Castro, family members of World War II veterans and the first U.S. Latina fighter pilot, Olga Custodio.
