Gabriela Baeza Ventura, María Eugenia Cotera, Linda García Merchant, Lorena Gauthereau, and Carolina Villarroel

We have come together as a group of U.S. Latinx scholars who labor at the complex and often fraught intersection of Latinx studies and digital humanities. We use Latinx as a term that is inclusive of the complicated and interconnected histories of Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and queer communities in the United States.1 We offer these reflections in the form of a manifesto (a genre familiar to both Latino political movements and digital humanities) to document our aspirations, concerns, boundaries, and positions on Latinx digital humanities in the present moment. In doing so, we invoke the long tradition of Latin American and Latinx manifesto writing, specifically for political purposes, and stand on the shoulders of the intellectual labor of our ancestors of color, such as Luisa Capetillo, Daniel de León, Ramón Emeterio Betances, Alurista, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, Armando Rendón, the Flores Magón brothers, Blanca de Moncaleano, Arturo A. Schomburg, Anna Nieto-Gómez, and many other activists who have used this genre to take a stand for their beliefs, stoking the flames of political change, revolution, civil rights, feminism, gender rights, and human rights. Channeling this long tradition of political speech, our manifesto enunciates our challenge to digital humanities, describes our intentions, and above all, extends an invitation to action.

The Latinx DH community remains, as a whole, underfunded, underrecognized, nontenured, at-risk, precarious, and pushed to conform to extractive practices of knowledge production that do not benefit the communities with which we are allied. Funding remains unbalanced with regard to Latinx representation, with large-scale projects linked to powerful institutions receiving the lion’s share of foundation support. Predominantly white institutions (PWIs) often do not acknowledge the experience and cultural knowledge of Latinx scholars, resulting in nonexistent or, at best, limited institutional buy-in to support faculty and staff lines, graduate student research fellowships, projects, and community collaborations. Projects originating at PWIs tend to be led by scholars and supported by a system that perpetuates traditional canonical scholarship to keep the same authors, historical figures, archives, and data in the limelight. Despite the strained usage of this data in a field that praises innovation, it is this type of scholarship that continuously and unquestionably begets funding and attention. Top-down colonial models of digital humanities that appropriate community histories are recognized, valued, supported, and celebrated in scholarly and institutional spaces, whereas work by and for Latinx people is often seen as less cutting edge, as unscholarly, and as a form of community service. As a result, the methodological rigor, innovative praxis, and theoretical contributions of Latinx DH remain largely invisible to the world of hegemonic digital humanities. And yet in our work as digital practitioners, we must be three times as knowledgeable about Western European theory as our white colleagues, while also being experts in Latin American canons and the Spanish language, not to mention the fields of Latinx studies and DH, all while operating in an environment that constantly whitewashes our very existence.

Despite this lack of access to infrastructures of support, we remain committed to the preservation of histories and stories through culturally centered methods. To do this work, we draw on long traditions of self-determination, resistance, and survival within Latinx scholarship and the community at large. Unfortunately, this ethos of self-determination—which is both a response to systemic institutional disinvestment and an intentional form of community self-preservation—is all too often perceived as naively ambitious. Contrary to this impression, many Latinx digital practitioners have worked on projects that are far more successful and innovative than institutionally based, highly resourced DH projects, especially as regards their work with Latinx communities. Our commitment to self-determination is not just a throwback to decolonial gestures of the past, it is a challenge to the knowledge/power of the university and its attendant institutions today, a way of seeing digital humanities “otherwise.”2

Inasmuch as Latinx DH practitioners have been incorporated into the upper echelons of the DH world, they are often commodified as an ancillary labor force or as minority tokens whose value lies in the measure of the “diversity” they bring (or don’t bring) to the table. Although Latinx DH scholars may be invited to participate as collaborators, supporters, or contributors in major projects, and their methodological and theoretical insights are frequently drawn on as a resource, they are not always cited, acknowledged, funded, or placed in leadership roles within DH spaces. In these projects, the Latinx community’s histories are often ignored, misrepresented, or appropriated. This marginality in DH reflects our lack of representation in PWI spaces (foundations, programs, departments, organizations, archives, and libraries) and results in the illusion that Latinx people are not participating in the field.3

We recognize that producing a manifesto that occupies a space in a mainstream publication such as Debates in the Digital Humanities places us in a simultaneous position of privilege and vulnerability. On the one hand, we acknowledge that this opportunity to speak to our colleagues in DH grants us institutional visibility. On the other hand, this moment of visibility has not come easy, given our continued precarity in terms of funding, publication, access, distribution, and permanent employment.

We have come together not only to give voice to this precarity but also to incite/invite the DH community (scholars, programs, projects, libraries, organizations, and foundations) to seriously reflect on how all DH practitioners can reimagine relations of knowledge production in the digital age. As such, we offer the following principles, which draw from the ethical and community-centered values, practices, and experiences of Latinx Digital Humanities.

1. 1. Latinx Digital Humanities centers Latinx lives, community, intellectual production, scholarship, and archival collections.
2. 2. Latinx Digital Humanities endeavors to research, preserve, and make accessible the culture produced by Latinx in the United States.
3. 3. Latinx Digital Humanities engages the ethical protocols developed by ethnic studies and feminist practitioners to preserve the histories of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. As such, it centers an “ethics of care” for documents and the people they represent.4
4. 4. Latinx Digital Humanities is attentive to the politics of erasure that structures inquiry within institutionalized fields of study, including the erasure of Blackness, Indigeneity, and gender in historical imaginaries in the Americas.
5. 5. Latinx Digital Humanities foregrounds relationships and community building over the development or implementation of digital tools.
6. 6. Latinx Digital Humanities acknowledges that “expertise” does not come solely from the academy and strives to create horizontal relations of knowledge by honoring the instrumental role of Latinx communities in knowledge production, cultural life, and community activism.
7. 7. Latinx Digital Humanities rejects extractive models of research and digital production. It engages communities not just as sources of “data” but as partners in the production of knowledge.
8. 8. Latinx Digital Humanities centers pedagogy/capacity building over the ownership of knowledge.
9. 9. Latinx Digital Humanities recognizes that our community of practitioners and scholars includes K–12 students and educators; college and university students, faculty, and staff; independent scholars; and community members.
10. 10. Latinx Digital Humanities acknowledges and cites all forms of contribution (community members, collection producers, authors, research fellows, volunteers, interns, faculty, and staff).
11. 11. We believe that Latinx Digital Humanities should be integrated into the curriculum as an important component of undergraduate and graduate studies, especially in Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) and Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs).

As practitioners of Latinx Digital Humanities, we understand that our work is built on the foundation of generations of intellectuals inside and outside the academy who have sought to expand the field of discourse to include the experiences of marginalized communities. We walk in the footsteps of intellectuals like Martha Cotera, founder of the Chicana Research and Learning Center, a major resource for information on Chicanas and women of color in the 1970s; Nicolás Kanellos, founder and director of Arte Público Press and Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Program, who spearheaded the unified methods to locate, preserve, and make available the written legacy of Latina/os/x in the United States; and Arturo A. Schomberg, who established a massive repository on Black culture for the New York Public Library. Our predecessors have amply demonstrated that knowledge made by and for communities in struggle has the power to raise consciousness and transform practices of knowledge. Thus, we offer the principles above not only to articulate the political stakes of digital humanities by and for Latinx communities in the United States, but also because we believe that they represent a model for moving forward—and a way of “thinking otherwise” in the digital humanities.