Finding Mestizaje in the Archive
Finding Mestizaje in the Archive is a digital humanities project that seeks to highlight persons identified as mixed-race in the archival record. Through collaboration with archival repositories in Texas, this project site presents newly digitized archival collection items that reveal various ways that mixed-race people were captured in the colonial-record keeping system. By connecting these disparate materials by the common thread of mixed-race identity, this project seeks to establish a material record of mestizaje that is often overlooked in U.S. archival collections.
In addition to the digital collection, this project also includes key insights and data visualizations from Finding Mestizaje in the Archive: A Qualitative Analysis of Archival Description of Race and Caste, a research paper which analyzes the ways in which race is described and contextualized across 70 finding aids published by Texas archival repositories.
This project was created as a capstone project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Archives and Public History at New York University.