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Las Vegas, New Mexico
Building a Community Archive
A chile roasting event at New Mexico Highlands University in 2020 allowed students, faculty, and the community to come together as part of the Manitos project. Image courtesy Manitos Digital Community Archive.

A chile roasting event at New Mexico Highlands University in 2020 allowed students, faculty, and the community to come together as part of the Manitos project. Image courtesy Manitos Digital Community Archive.

The Manitos Digital Community Archive is an ongoing initiative to develop a community-based digital archive focused on the rural Indo-Hispano villages of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. Natives of this region—who often call themselves manitos and manitas from the Spanish hermano—are a population whose ancestors include both Native Americans and Spanish/Mexican settlers who arrived in the region in 1598. In 2020, the project faced the dual challenges of COVID-19 and a gap in the funding cycle. An NEH CARES grant provided the financial means for the project to continue its story-gathering and community engagement work.

“We’re always striving to make the archives useful and meaningful for people....The NEH allowed us to deepen that work.”

–Estevan Rael-Gálvez, project director

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