ANNOUNCEMENT

Lilia Raquel Rosas awarded USLDH-Mellon Foundation grant for digital scholarship

August 16, 2021

AUSTIN, TEXAS – Lilia Raquel Rosas, Lecturer at the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, UT Austin, and Executive Director of the nonprofit Red Salmon Arts, recently received the U.S. Latino Digital Humanities Grants-in-Aid award. The grant was made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation endowment at the University of Houston to establish a first-of-its kind program that will give scholars access to the expansive collection of materials, published and unpublished, written by Latinos and Latinas from colonial times to 1960. 

Rosas is one of eleven recipients of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 2021-2022 award. The stipend will assist Rosas in the research and development of digital scholarship in the form of a visual chronology of “Tejana Historias: Indigenous Indentations and Transfrontera Transformations.”

“Tejana Historias: Indigenous Indentations and Transfrontera Transformations” will honor my commitment to bridge academic and community sites of knowledge formation by executing an accessible, usable and nuanced visualization of the Tejana experience,” Rosas said. The digital project, which will be housed by Arte Público Press in the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Digital Collections, “will capture this rich and dynamic subject matter in a way that will be useful to educators across the state of Texas.”

Rosas has been the executive director of Red Salmon Arts since 2013 and is caretaker of Resistencia Bookstore in East Austin, a multicultural literacy project founded in 1981 by poet Raúl R. Salinas. She has been dedicated to presenting Chicana/o/x, Latina/o/x and indigenous cultural arts to the community and providing creative opportunities for emerging writers and readers.

“My inspiration for my USLDH-Mellon Grants-in-Aid project, “Tejana Historias: Indigenous Indentations and Transfrontera Transformations through a Visual Chronology,” stems from both my work at UT Austin and Red Salmon Arts,” she said. “At Red Salmon Arts, I have envisioned and conceived the project, People’s Library of Resistance/Biblioteca del pueblo de Resistencia, to organize, archive, and digitize materials (out-of-print books, posters, prints, photographs, films, audio tapes) housed at RSA that document the grassroots histories of BIPOC resistance in Austin and across the Southwest of the late twentieth century.”

In addition to her position as lecturer since 2018 in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, she was also a Program Fellow at the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. She has been an adjunct professor at St. Edward’s University since 2019 and is a Ford Foundation Fellow in History. 

Recently, Rosas was a panelist for “La Chicana Then and Now, 50 years of Teaching at UT Austin,” presented by the Mexican American Cultural Center’s La Mujer Festival in

Austin: Red Salmon Press, 2018; Memoir of Un Ser Humano: The Life and Times de raúlrsalinas, Spanish-language editor, edited by Louis Mendoza, Austin: Red Salmon Press, 2018. 

For information, contact Rosas at [email protected] or visit artepublicopress.com.

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Press Contact: Lilia Raquel Rosas, Ph.D., https://sites.google.com/utexas.edu/lrdrosas-curriculum-vitae/home

Email: [email protected] or call (512) 471-2465