María Luisa Parra Velasco Selected to Receive Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative Grant

Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative (HMUI)

Latino Scenescapes: A Digital Mapping of the Communities in the Boston Area.

In the last 15 years, the advanced courses “Spanish in the Community” (59-59H) have connected Latino and non-Latino students with the Latino communities in the Boston area through a combination of academic learning and civic engagement. Each semester, students bring back to class their rich insights and experiences gathered while volunteering in the community, as they travel back and forward between Cambridge and diverse Boston neighborhoods. This Digital Humanities Project aims to capitalize on these experiences to lay the ground for mapping “Scenescapes” (Silver &Nichols Clark, 2016) (activities, places, aesthetics, and social interactions) that give the neighborhoods where Latino communities live their particular atmosphere and appeal.

Project Goals: With an urban focus and an interdisciplinary approach, this project aims to be a first step in building a Digital Humanities archive of multilingual and multimodal scenescapes (and “sensescapes”) of the Latino Communities in the Boston area. It looks to contribute to Latinos’ representation and visibility in all its linguistic, cultural, and social richness and complexity.

In this first stage, funding will support the design of the prototype and lay the basic structure of the project and the groundwork for future expansion through collaborations with other cohorts of the same course or with other programs, faculty, and students across a spectrum of disciplines (Spanish, Anthropology, Linguistics, Visual and Environmental Studies, Urban Studies, the Arts) interested in the Latino community in Boston. This initial stage will include: gathering the materials (multimedia texts), choosing the platform (StoryMaps/Omeka), designing the narrative and template for all neighborhoods, data cleaning, and uploading the first materials (at least from one neighborhood as a pilot). The project will include the following neighborhoods (the initial selection will depend on the location of organizations we will collaborate with through the Academic year 2025-2026): Allston, Brighton, Chelsea, East Boston, Jamaica Plain, South End. Each student (or team) would document the demographics, history, and presence of Latino communities through research, photographs, videos, audios, records of Spanish use, oral histories, and essays.