Modern Endangered Archives Program in South America: Digital Archives and Contemporary History

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Join the Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP) for an online symposium exploring cultural heritage preservation in South America. The event will introduce new digital archives and feature a robust discussion on how digitization can shift research about and understanding of South America.

The Modern Endangered Archives Program at the UCLA Library has been funding projects to document and digitize at-risk cultural heritage materials around the world since 2019. 31% of these funded projects have been focused on preserving archival materials in South America. What kind of impact has MEAP made in the field of Latin American archives through these first five years of funding? How have individual projects and the expansion of digital archives opened up new opportunities for exploring and understanding 20th Century South American History?

This online symposium will take up these questions from the perspective of project leads and consider how collections from across South America document histories of profound transformation in the region. Bruno Witzel de Souza (Ibicaba Project, Brazil), Felipe Bellocq (Alonso Collection, Uruguay), and Ruth Borja and Charles Walker (Peruvian Peasant Confederation Archive) will discuss the process of converting physical archival material into digital collections, revealing both successes and challenges as they worked through the Covid-19 pandemic to share different kinds of historical materials.

This event will be conducted in English.