Bracero History Archive Wins NCHP Outstanding Public History Project Award

On Saturday, March 13, 2010, the CHNM’s Bracero History Archive <http://braceroarchive.org> received the National Council on Public History’s award for “Outstanding Public History Project.”

The award recognizes excellence in work completed within the previous two calendar years that contributes to a broader public reflection and appreciation of the past or that serves as a model of professional public history practice. Sharon Leon and other project staff, including Peter Liebhold (NMAH), Kristine Navaro (UTEP), Mireya Loza (Brown), and Alma Carillo (Brown), were on hand to accept the honor from NCPH President Marianne Babal at the annual awards luncheon.

The Bracero History Archive is a landmark venture in collaborative documentation. With major partners at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, and dozens of other small cultural heritage and community organizations around the country, the project has worked to collect and make available the oral histories and artifacts pertaining to the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative that spanned the years 1942-1964. Millions of Mexican agricultural workers crossed the border under the program to work in more than half of the states in America.

The Bracero History Archive is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities through the Preservation and Access division.