Santa Anna in Life and Legend
Storytelling through curation.
The Benson Latin American Collection (BLAC) holds the memoirs of Mexican politician Antonio López de Santa Anna (1794-1876). It also holds abundant primary sources that add voices to his questionable account of Mexico’s history. In this project, I curated a collection of digitized documents related to the era of Santa Anna’s revolutions. Curation involved extensive research into a complex historical figure, notorious as the culprit behind Mexico’s cession of over half of its territory to the United States.
Out of over 700 relevant items from BLAC's archives, I made selections for the 40-item collection by considering how the materials could tell a story within a temporal-geospatial context. My target audience grounded this selection process. The collection is aimed at helping high school students gain a better understanding of Mexico's first decades of independence, through primary resources.
To support the collection's accessibility and preservation, this project entailed:
Generating robust, bilingual, item-level metadata in the MODS schema for the Spotlight Exhibits platform
Researching locations relevant to collection items and entering geospatial coordinates for each
Producing image derivatives for the hosting institution's GitHub account
Creating searchable, textual datasets:
- OCR of broadsides and circulars
- Transcription of hand-written letters
- Translation of select items from Spanish to EnglishDepositing textual and geospatial datasets into the Texas Data Repository, and exhibit content into Texas ScholarWorks
Digital Humanities and a viewer-centered exhibit.
To contextualize Santa Anna's complex history, I authored a narrative UTL Spotlight exhibit. Taking a viewer-centered approach, it poses questions that invite close looking at collection highlights.
I also built an interactive exhibit component on ArcGIS, by georeferencing each collection item. Viewers can navigate items on a map in a storytelling sequence, or through other facets. A color-coded layer indicates Mexico's cession of territory to the US over time, as tied to Santa Anna's career.
In this issue of “La Biblioteca del Niño Mexicano” (1900), the author represents Santa Anna with hindsight into his place in history.
On the illustrated cover, masts of ships peek behind the main scene. What two battles do you think the author juxtaposes within this issue? What details in the illustration reveal characteristics of Santa Anna's military career?
