Debates in US Latinx DH

Gabriela Baeza Ventura, María E. Cotera, Annemarie Perez, Carolina Villarroel, Editors

Deadline for 500-word abstracts, including proposed title and short bio: May 15, 2025

Part of the Debates in the Digital Humanities Series
A book series from the University of Minnesota Press
Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, Series Editors

Before turning our eyes “forward” let’s cast a look at the roads that led us here. The paths we have travelled on have been rocky and thorny, and no doubt they will continue to be so. But instead of the rocks and the thorns, we want to concentrate on the rain and the sunlight and the spiderwebs glistening on both.

(Anzaldúa xxvii, This Bridge Called My Back)

[US Latinx studies is] not as a discipline but as a field of study and intellectual community that, inspired by the political and social mobilizations from the 1960s and 70s, produces decolonial and alternative knowledges that aim to relocate the lives and struggles of U.S. Latinx communities at the center of our epistemologies.

(“Latinx Studies: Notes from an Emerita,” Frances R. Aparicio)

With Frances Aparicio’s anti-disciplinary identification of US Latinx studies in mind, this volume seeks to map the origins and directions of US Latino/a/x DH, centering the field’s resistant digital decolonialism. US Latinx studies represent a coming together of numerous fields, communities, and peoples. Like Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, we simultaneously move forward while examining and embracing our past. Likewise, US Latinx digital humanities builds and reinforces connections between our art, politics, and scholarship–current, past, and future.

The directions of US Latinx DH are diverse, multilingual, inter and anti-disciplinary, intergenerational, and transnational; they are frequently resistant to traditional academic spaces such as universities, libraries, and museums in the United States. In this sense, US Latinx DH constantly intervenes in and opposes nationalism and colonialism. Latinx digital humanities projects often begin by deconstructing technology’s languages and practices. These projects are frequently shaped by ethnic studies, critical race theory, and US Latinx epistemological praxis. In defining and “doing” or making US Latinx DH, we recognize that, historically educational, and cultural institutions (universities, galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (UGLAMs) do not always welcome US Latinx peoples, even in cases where our people and cultures are the subjects and objects of study. US Latinx DH reverses these practices, in part, by working closely with non-institutional archives, communities, and their institutions as partners, rather than treating them and their data as resources to be mined. Individuals and systems are met where they are, projects are shaped by unique needs and practices, rather than having to conform to the structures of traditional scholarship. Resources are brought to and preserved in rather than taken from communities. In its structure, implementation, and access, US Latinx DH seeks to heal harms done to our communities by fields such as anthropology, history, and literary, and library studies through institutional archives and museums.

The editors of Debates US Latinx DH welcome work from community members, scholars, artists, and students from various fields whose work speaks about US Latinx DH Praxis, past, present, and future, including:

  • reflections on what it means to be a US Latinx scholar working in and on and on the digital field;
  • methods for nurturing relationships with the US Latinx community;
  • contribution of Latinx Studies scholars and scholarship to digital humanities focusing on if/how these questions disrupt the status quo in both disciplines;
  • description, methodologies, and experiences learned through project development;
  • historical Latinx DH–before it was known as such, metadata conventions and challenges, technologies pre-DH, resources, sustainability, and techniques (rasquachismo);
  • use of commercial social media for digital projects;
  • pedagogical praxis geared to K-12 and beyond;
  • surveillance software and technology that affects brown and black bodies;
  • digital oral history; and other forms of memorializing that speak about communities as witnesses;
  • public history;
  • past, current, and future US Latinx digital humanities scholarship and research that documents, preserves, and makes available the lived experience of people of Hispanic descent in the United States. (What is the state of the field? What is its potential, its future?)
  • and others.

Editors welcome various forms of writing and genres, including articles, blog-length pieces, and from single- and multi-author collaborations. We also invite contributions of short sample documents (e.g. excerpts from manuals, usage guides, project charters, best practices) with critical analyses or reflections (1500-2500 words including citations) that help readers from other fields grasp the arguments embedded within those documents. The book will be published in English; however, if work is submitted in another language, the original language version will be published online as part of the collection.

Length: Articles should not exceed 3,000–4,000 words and may be accompanied by a limited number of print-quality images, graphs, and illustrations.

Language: The printed book will be in English. There will also be a digital version, located at http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu, in which original versions in other languages may be published alongside the English translation. It will be the author’s responsibility to provide the English translation and certify its accuracy. Although the editors can review original versions in Spanish, please provide an English translation for the peer-review evaluation.

Abstracts: Abstracts of no more than 500 words may be submitted in English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, or French with an English translation. They should be emailed to all four editors by May 15, 2025. Decisions will be conveyed by June 15, 2025. Authors will be requested to submit the finished articles, with all visuals and other material, plus translations if needed, within six months of acceptance.

Review and peer review: All articles will be reviewed by the editors and the publisher’s peer reviewer. In addition, in accordance with the practice of the _Debates in the Digital Humanities _series, the peer review process will ask each contributor to comment on at least two articles.

Tentative Deadlines:

  • Abstracts (500 words) and a short bio due: May 15, 2025 (Include in the abstract a projected length for the final contribution.)
  • Decisions on acceptance of abstracts by June 15, 2025
  • Full submissions (essays or other kinds of contributions) by August 15, 2025
  • Peer-to-peer reviewing and editors’ reviewing September 15–October 15, 2025
  • Revised submissions by November 4, 2025
  • Final editors’ review December 2, 2025 (final revisions by authors expected by December 12, 2025)
  • Submission of volume to U. Minnesota Press: January 12, 2026