Sunday, January 10, 2027: 11:40 AM
Rhythms Ballroom II (Sheraton New Orleans)
Alexa Rodríguez, University of Virginia
As attacks on non-White histories and scholarship intensify, it is more important than ever to research, archive, and preserve Black and Latine histories and affirm our shared humanity. The Dominican Voices Project/Proyecto Voces Dominicanas (DVP) is a bilingual digital humanities initiative that records, preserves, and analyzes audio and video interviews with Dominicans born and raised in the Dominican Republic during the early twentieth century. At its core, DVP asks: Where and how were people in the Dominican Republic educated during this period? What can the experiences of Dominican children tell us about childhood in Latin America? The project focuses on the post-1916 occupation era, particularly the thirty-year dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (1930–1961), which consolidated many of the changes initiated during the U.S. intervention.
As a digital archive of Dominican childhood and education, DVP seeks to address the historical lack of primary sources documenting the experiences of Black children, particularly in Latin America, whose stories have often been erased or omitted from traditional archives. Our video oral histories are filmed in an interview-style format that centers each individual. Collectively, these first-person narratives strive to “reclaim Black life” and restore the humanity that has too often been denied to, or unrecognized in, Black communities (Donaldson, 2021, p. 20). Ultimately, we aim to publish a collection of about 50 video and audio oral history interviews and related video clips, each accompanied by English and Spanish transcripts, to provide a bilingual digital resource for educators and scholars.
