Periodicals in the US-Mexico Border Region

Periodicals in the US-Mexico Border Region (“Periodicals”) is an online portal launched in May 2024 containing over 200 mostly Spanish-language digitized newspapers and magazines. The titles were published between 1850–1956, with the bulk of them published after 1910. Much of the digitized content—over 200,000 pages and 2,814 separate issues—is made available online for the first time. Focusing on lesser-known titles, the portal strongly supplements existing digitized periodicals archives of the southern borderlands.Accessed free of charge at latinonewspapers.uh.edu, the Periodicals portal was built by the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage program (informally known as “Recovery”) and the US Latino Digital Humanities Center, both of which are based at the University of Houston. Recovery is well-known in Latinx literary studies, specifically for the re-publication and translation of literary works that predate the 1960s artistic flourishing of the civil rights movement. Continuing in the spirit of Recovery, the new portal offers access to pre-movement materials from the US-Mexico border region. The database defines the region as approximately 200 miles on either side of the border ranging from Brownsville, Texas to San Diego, California and northern Mexican states of Baja California, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas. Nearly all the titles are in Spanish, although a few are in English or bilingual.Users might be surprised to see the absence of major newspapers like San Antonio’s La Prensa, Los Angeles’s La Opinión, or Tucson’s El Tucsonense. Those titles can be found, respectively, through Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808–1980, the California Digital Newspaper Collection, and Chronicling America. Instead, this portal makes widely available rare newspapers and magazines, many of which are currently thought to exist only in highly fragile fragments. These rare titles provide a chance to reconstruct a more nuanced understanding of the region’s periodical landscape. For example, one might study San Antonio’s print culture by supplementing La Prensa with Nemesio García Naranjo’s Revista Mexicana, a weekly illustrated magazine covering current events and culture. Even in cases when the portal reproduces material already available online, it still enhances coverage. For instance, Los Angeles’s La Opinión has a Sunday illustrated supplement whose issues are already available in black-and-white. To its credit, the Periodicals portal provides high-quality scans of these issues in color.Since the portal’s titles are lesser known, the suite of search features is important. Users can search by title, language, subject heading, keyword, and location. For location, users can navigate a clickable map that shows where periodicals cluster. Perhaps the most powerful search feature is through Spanish-language keyword, which is possible because each issue has been transcribed with optical character recognition. Unfortunately, anyone accustomed to advanced search, like Boolean operators and wildcard searches, will not find these features. Researchers interested in more advanced computational analysis are not without recourse, however, since every file is available for download in .txt format.While each title’s catalog is far from complete (and, alas, the portal does not mention how many issues are missing), there is enough material to formulate a sense of a publication’s purpose, style, and intended audience. A case in point is El Paso, Texas’s bimonthly religious newspaper El Mensajero Bautista. This Baptist paper included editorials, sermons, literary texts, and advertisements. From fourteen issues that span from May to November 1917, users can study this specimen of a publication with a well-defined focus and a strongly delimited audience. A publication with a strong focus and intended audience describes other titles in the portal. These include San Antonio, Texas’s pro-labor weekly newspaper, El Unionista and Villa Cecilia, Tamaulipas’s weekly anarchist newspaper ¡Avante! The magazine La Violeta from Monterrey, Nuevo León deserves special mention here. With fifty-eight issues available, ranging from October 1887 to May 1894, La Violeta was an entirely women-run magazine covering literature and women’s health and education. Providing such snapshots of discourse, the portal thus excels at its role as a supplement to larger and more comprehensive digital archives.A few warnings are in order. Users should know that transcriptions are not always accurate. Accents are not always reproduced appropriately, and some transcriptions require significant pruning before use. Sometimes these extant copies are in a condition that is difficult to read, but the portal helpfully summarizes each title with details about editors, publishers, and typical content. As with any archive, especially one of this size and varied content matter, subject headings in the search panel may not be relevant to all projects in periodical studies. According to these subject headings, the greatest emphasis is on political interests (“Labor Unions,” or “Libertarianism—Periodicals”) and religion (“Religion,” “Baptist Church,” and “Catholic Church”). Researchers interested in other topics will be better served searching either by location or by keywords and then filtering by year.The Periodicals portal is supported by the Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives program, an initiative by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) with funding from the Mellon Foundation. Other digitization projects supported by CLIR may be familiar to readers of JMPS. These projects include the Walt Reed Illustration Archive’s tear sheet collection, a digital archive from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century housed at Washington University in St. Louis. Another example is the multi-institution Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), which contains many periodicals of the interwar period in Spanish, English, and French. What all three digitization projects suggest is a progression from standardized cataloging to full reproduction, an intensification in the pursuit of coverage.Overall, the research portal Periodicals in the US-Mexico Border Region is the product of two values working in tandem: coverage and access. At a time when, according to recent news coverage, state and federal funding cuts threaten our access to resources like the California Digital News Archive, the union of coverage and access is increasingly fragile. The Periodicals portal reaffirms that union, which makes it all the more significant.