Archiving the Central American Revolutions Micro Oral History Collection

In February 2014, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections hosted the annual Lozano Long Conference around the theme of Archiving the Central American Revolutions. The inter-disciplinary conference featured keynote talks by participants of the revolutionary movements in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua; panels with speakers from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico and the United States; a screening of the documentary Fire from the Mountain with the filmmaker; an archiving workshop with Benson Latin American Collection archivists; and the exhibition, ¡Venceremos! Posters and Ephemera of the Central American Revolutions that highlighted the archival holdings of the Benson Latin American Collection and the Human Rights Documentation Initiative. The conference featured a wide range of participants, from revolutionary actors and activists to clergy members, journalists, documentary filmmakers, solidarity activists, and scholars.

In addition to providing an academic forum to discuss critical interpretations of Central American history by multiple generations of scholars, the conference also aimed to initiate an ongoing project of acquisitioning documentary materials related to the revolutionary eras in Central America. To this aim, LLILAS Benson invited conference participants to record micro oral histories about their lives, research, and activism within Central America for archiving at the Benson Latin American Collection. The micro oral history project paired interviewees with University of Texas at Austin graduate student interviewers whose research interests closely aligned with the life and professional experience of the person they were interviewing. The loosely structured interviews discussed the interviewees’ work, scholarship, and experiences living and working in Central America. These oral histories contain personal anecdotes, reflections on the intersection of revolution, activism, solidarity and governmental transition in Central America, in addition to aspirations for and discussion of current and future events in Central America.