Bringing hundreds of New Mexico Spanish archives online

In the basement level of Zimmerman library, voices of 20th-century New Mexicans echo through the halls. Community elders and leaders often speaking Spanish unique to the region share stories and wisdom on tape.

Center for Southwest Research (CSWR) archivist Samuel Sisneros and Center for Regional Studies fellow María Feliza Monta-Jameson are at the helm of the New Mexico Spanish Language Archival Recovery Project. They are working to preserve archival collections of audio and video interviews of native New Mexico Spanish speakers. Many of these interviews are recorded on old technology, so Monta-Jameson is working to digitize and upload them to UNM's digital repository.

"We're linking the previous way of doing things to modern technology and making it more accessible. A lot of these collections have been sitting in boxes, and we're losing ways to play them because the technology isn't trustworthy anymore," said Sisneros.

This project encompasses the earliest and most extensive assemblage of recorded New Mexico spoken Spanish. These interviews were conducted primarily with regional community elders with the intent of documenting community knowledge.

"Our hope is that people can find this footage easily," Monta-Jameson said. "Oftentimes the descendants of those who participated in the interviews find the archive. We want to keep collective memory of Nuevo Mexicano culture alive."

Due to the variation of technology, there is limited access to the media, so they have to reprocess them into electronic files that are widely available. Additionally, they edit out long moments of silence or technical problems. Finally, they create written abstracts to explain the context of the clip. They have digitized around 800 interviews so far.

Monta-Jameson said that because Spanish is her first language and her background in the educational linguistics program, this intersection of knowledge have allowed her and Sisneros to quickly digitize around 800 interviews since the project began in 2025.

Sisneros said the acquisition of a famous show produced in New Mexico is what inspired this project. The Val De La O Show was one of the first nationally syndicated Spanish-language television programs and was on air from the 1960s until 1985. De La O was considered the "Spanish equivalent of Johnny Carson."

"It enriches the knowledge in terms of linguistic features because I now understand better why the varieties of Spanish spoken in different areas encapsulate the culture and the people who speak that language," Monta-Jameson said.