The call to acknowledge and repair the historical erasure of Blackness and Indigeneity in the archive is central to reparative description and ethical archival practice. Thus, this study asks how mixed-race archival subjects are described in archival description of colonial collections, as well as whether these descriptive practices reveal larger gaps or trends in US archivists’ approach to describing race. Using findings from qualitative text analysis of archival finding aids from Texas repositories, this study argues that US archivists are further obscuring narratives of mestizaje – and by extension, Black and Indigenous histories – by failing to adequately index, define, and contextualize colonial descriptions of mixed-race subjects in colonial systems. These failures, though likely unintentional, suggest a broader issue of US archivists’ ignorance of Latin American archival traditions and indifference toward description of race, class, and gender as constructed outside the United States. This issue is especially pressing for repositories serving scholars of Latin America and US Latino/as, many of which are located in the Southwest US and have a vested interest in cultivating the archival record of their own colonial past.
To pursue these questions, I conducted large-scale qualitative analysis of finding aids for 70 archival collections that contain Black, Indigenous, and mixed-race subjects to determine patterns in descriptive practices that might inhibit archives’ users’ abilities to discover and understand such collections. The first part of my analysis centers on controlled vocabularies and subject headings, which I will argue are not being adequately utilized to aid researchers in conducting focused research on mestizaje in the archive. The second part of my analysis considers whether increased calls for reparative and culturally conscious descriptive practices in the archives field have informed the ways in which archivists produce descriptions about Black, Indigenous, and mixed-race subjects within colonial and postcolonial collections. Based on an analysis of historical context and definitions (or lack thereof) provided in finding aids, I will argue that the archival repositories represented are generally not making conscious interventions to explain the historical development and deployment of racial epithets.