Digitizing the Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings

FAIN: PW-234707-16

Arhoolie Foundation (El Cerrito, CA 94530-3123)
Tom Diamant (Project Director: July 2015 to September 2019)

The digitization of 24,000 recordings of Mexican American vernacular music from the Strachwitz Frontera Collection spanning 1901 to 1994.

A three year, $275,388 grant to continue its successful preservation, digitization, and creation of public access to the Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings (The Frontera Collection), the world's largest and most complete collection of Mexican American vernacular music. 110,000 have been preserved so far funded by previous grants from various organizations. This grant would provide for the preservation of a further 24,000 individual recordings from 33-rpm, 78-rpm and 45-rpm discs (digitizing, scanning of labels and graphics, creating keywords and metadata). Collaborating with the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Digital Library in partnership with the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, the Arhoolie Foundation will continue to make this unique and academically valuable collection available to the public through an integrated website (http://frontera.library.ucla.edu/), academic research and other publication strategies.