Carnegie Cache: Latinx (Part 2

CARNEGIE CACHE: Representing Latinx in the Boulder County Historical Record, Part 2: Visibility and Cataloging

Nicole Docimo

In the last issue of the Open Book, I wrote an article talking about the challenges of collecting materials that tell the story of Latinx communities in Boulder County and some possible creative solutions to these challenges. In this issue, I would like to discuss another facet of representing marginalized populations in archives: making what we already have discoverable.

As I wrote in my last article: according to 2019 estimated census data, 9.7% of the City of Boulder population and 14% of Boulder County identifies as Hispanic or Latino. But at my best estimate, less than .6% of the records in the Carnegie Library catalog have identifying terms related to Latinx populations. By “identifying terms, ” I mean that the items were cataloged with a series of different keywords and subject headings including: Hispanics, Latinos, MexicanAmericans, Chicanos and other variations of these terms.

This list already points to one challenge in finding information about minority populations: identifying terms change over time and can include more and less specific groups (for example: Latino versus Mexican-American). Are there materials I am missing because I’m not searching the correct term or thinking of all the possible keywords? Possibly. We are working towards improving and standardizing our descriptions, but this process is complex and takes time with tricky questions continuing to arise like: how can we catalog consistently but still allow for nuance and make searching user-friendly? We can decide to consistently use the term “Latinx, ” but is that what patrons will search for? Another and more fundamental line of questioning also presents itself: how do we even decide to include an identifying term in a particular cataloging record? How do we determine whether archival materials are about or include Latinx communities? Below I will explore these questions through researching two photographs in the Carnegie Library collection.

Unidentified photograph of a family standing in front of a Louisville home. Call# 213-2-18, Carnegie Library for Local History/Museum of Boulder collection.

The photograph above is one photograph I turned up as part of the .6% of materials in our archive cataloged with descriptors related to Latinx communities.

Written on the back of the photograph are the words “Mexican-American. ” The actual photoprint is not old; my guess is that it was printed in the past 30 years by Carnegie staff

from a negative donation or possibly not long before it came to Carnegie, so the writing on the back of the print did not come from an original owner who knew the people in the photograph. The photograph appears in a Carnegie Library cataloging record titled “Louisville houses” along with four other undated, unidentified photographs of other Louisville homes, and is described as “An Hispanic family of three adults and five children on the porch of a stone building, some of them holding brass instruments. ” We have included a subject heading for MexicanAmericans in the cataloging record. I turned up a very similar photograph of the same family in front of the same house in another Carnegie collection (see below). That photograph is part of an album titled “Louisville. ” The album does not have any identifying notes, so it appears the information we have about this second photo was transferred over from the cataloging record of the first photo I found. Looking at the photographs, it quickly occurred to me that the best lead I had for identification was not the people, but the house. The house behind the group is distinct with unique stonework and an oval window. If I could identify the house, I could maybe find the owners and hopefully the family. I started trying to sift through Carnegie Library property records, but quickly realized I would be looking for a needle in a haystack. A quicker answer was likely outside of Carnegie Library—I turned to the Louisville Historical Museum. On their website I spotted a link about landmarked houses in Louisville—surely this house would be landmarked! A few clicks later, and I did a double-take: a stone house appeared on my screen identified as 701 Garfield Avenue in Louisville. The house appeared with the following text: “Anthony C.V. Romeo built Louisville’s only historic stone residence in 1907 out of stone from Marshall, Colorado. “Tony” Romeo was a miner, union organizer, owner of a second-hand goods store on Front Street, and head of a musical family. ” Bingo! A little more searching in the Louisville digitized photos by family name, and I found the exact same photo we have in our catalog (the second photo of the family above) identified as the Anthony Romeo family.

Now that I had identified the family, it was time to get down to the real business: were they Mexican-American? The name sounded Italian to me, and I knew that Louisville had an early Italian population, but I couldn’t be certain without proof. I jumped over to ancestry.com and after some sleuthing discovered a family tree for Anthony Charles Vincent Romeo that read: “Birth, 26 Sep 1877, Italy.

Unidentified photograph of the same Louisville family as above. Call# 715-5-(36-40), Martin Parsons Album and Negative Collection, Carnegie Library for Local History.

The information identifying this family as Latinx seemed flimsy to me, so I decided to go on a hunt to see if I could truly identify this family and find out if they were actually Mexican-American.

put a question into the folks at the Louisville Historical Museum for more information about the family, and the next day I received an email back confirming the Italian ancestry of the family. I also received a copy of a report on the house and family with fun information like Anthony’s last name was actually Romano, but it is believed he changed it to Romeo so it would be less common, and Anthony named his first son Philippine Island (yes, you read that right) “in an expression of his patriotism (Spain ceded the Philippines to the U.S. following its defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898).

This exercise proves an important point: true discoverability is only as good as the accuracy of your metadata. If the information does not come with the item, then you have two choices: leave it unidentified or do the research. This photograph’s misidentification is an example of a middle ground that can unfortunately lead to misrepresentation. But it also brings up other questions: what if the family had been MexicanAmerican and we had left it unidentified? How would we have ever found it again?

As much as I wish the cataloger had done more research or at least written the description to reflect possibility, not fact, I cannot help wondering how many other photographs there may be in our catalog that were left completely unidentified but could with some research prove that we have more Latinx materials in our collections than we think.

While we cannot go back and force every donor to write their names and addresses on the back of every photograph (but you should do this right now with your own family photos! Use pencil!), we can bring more thoughtfulness to the materials and our cataloging efforts. Many archives are launching re-discovery projects to look more closely through existing collections and find hidden materials that tell the stories of underrepresented groups. Others are rethinking how they describe materials in more inclusive and sensitive ways. As archivists we often walk a tricky line between spending the time to fully identify and describe materials and processing and digitizing materials as quickly as possible. Telling more complete stories of history will require us to slow down and spend more time and thought uncovering, researching, and describing items from and about underrepresented groups. We will have to make this work a priority over years and make every effort to continue to come back to it when other seemingly more urgent needs pull us away.

Above, the Carnegie Library building in Boulder.

Although Carnegie remains closed, basic research and scanning services are still available.

Email askcarnegie@boulderlibrary.org for information and inquiries.