Review of the Onda Latina Collection

By Camille Garcia

Review of the Onda Latina Collection

Onda Latina Collection. Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection and University of Texas Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services and the Center for Mexican American Studies and History Department, 2009, http://www.laits.utexas.edu/onda_latina/index. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018.

As researchers, it’s always particularly interesting to find an archival resource that connects us more deeply to our subject’s humanity. I was reminded of this when I found the Onda Latina Collection, a digital archive that stores the audio recordings of episodes of two radio programs from the years 1976-1982: The Mexican American Experience and A esta hora conversamos. Each show featured a discussion on issues related to the Mexican-American community, with members of that community providing insight into the group’s politics, culture, concerns, and history during that time period.

Before the creation of the Onda Latina Collection in 2009, the episodes - which aired on the Longhorn Radio Network - existed solely on tapes. The University of Texas’ Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services, Center for Mexican American Studies, and the History Department collaborated to digitally preserve and organize these tapes of about 200 recordings for the online database. Now, anyone with access to a computer can connect in a more human way to the Mexican-American, Mexican, and Latin American subjects on the show by actually hearing their voices, music, traditions, and stories.

The Onda Latina homepage is a bit cluttered, but once you click on one of the homepage headers, the site is much more intuitive to use. The “About” page, a tab on the homepage, is a helpful starting point where the user can read a more extensive background on the collection and its contents. There, users also can click on the “How to Use This Site” link, which takes them to a page that describes in great detail how to use the site to perform research, how the “Search” and “Browse” functions work, and how to properly cite the database. The “How to Use This Site” page is a solid continuous reference point for researchers using the database because it describes how and where the shows came into being; who the hosts were; how the descriptions for each episode were written and who wrote them; and how to take notes when listening to episodes. Providing all of this content in one place likely helps researchers save valuable time in their work and gives them the necessary context to properly interpret the collection.

The site organizes the episodes in a coherent way, but some of the metadata is lacking. Each episode falls under a broad “Theme” - Culture, Society, Identity, or Politics - and also a smaller category within the “Theme” called “Series.” However, I found that some of these “Series” links do not contain data, which could mean that some stories are simply missing that keyword in their metadata. This also occurs when you attempt to search via the “Keyword” bar. Currently, plugging keywords into the “Search” bar is the most effective way to locate episodes in your interest. Site managers should consider updating that feature so that researchers can have an easier time locating specific topics in each show. Additionally, there is a discrepancy on whether the archive includes 198 recordings or 226. This inconsistency leads me to wonder if the Onda Latina Collection contains every recording from both radio shows, or if it has left some out.

The search results for episodes make it very clear to understand what each episode is about and whether it will be useful to your research. You are presented with the name of the episode (linked to the actual episode and its landing page), its categorized “Theme” and “Series,” the names of the host and interviewees, the broadcast date, and a brief description of the episode. Click on an episode to read a more detailed description of the episode’s discussion and to listen to or download the episode, if you wish.

Overall, this digital archive is an easy-to-use, interesting gateway to literally hear stories from the past, many of which are still relevant today and range from curanderismo and Tejano music to education reform and politics. As a researcher, it is key to note that the vast majority of the hosts and producers were Mexican-American and women - the most common host was Dr. Rosa Linda Fregoso - and the guests featured were almost always Mexican-American, Mexican, indigenous, women, or other members of the broader Latin American community. Some guests included famous Conjunto musician Flaco Jiménez and Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa, who along with other community members candidly shared their personal experiences and expertise with listeners across Texas and the Southwest United States. In this sense, the creation of the Onda Latina Collection is a way to literally give voices back to marginalized populations of the time instead of leaving those voices to collect dust as outdated tapes, leaving “history” to be solely defined by what was printed in mass media then. Still, we must recognize the impact the of being beholden to the University of Texas has had on the collection, since the shows were produced, edited, and eventually archived as a university project.

As Kathryn Burns wrote in Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru, “We historians are fond of regarding archives as windows on the past, or repositories of long-ago ‘voices,’” but if we critically analyze an archive, we often can notice silences and lacks of transparency (Burns 2010, 16-17). This archive is a good place to start comparative research of how larger media outlets and these smaller, community-based outlets reported important Mexican-American issues, keeping in mind, as Burns wrote, whose truth is actually being recorded (Burns 2010, 4).