Oct 16, 2025 Construyendo Latinidades: Continuing on Our Ancestors’ Legacies

By Anna Neatrour, Head of Digital Library Services, J. Willard Marriott Library and Ed Muñoz, Associate Professor, Ethnic Studies

Construyendo Latinidades: Continuing on Our Ancestors’ Legacies
November 3, 3:00 P.M.
Marriott Library, Gould Auditorium, Level 1
Free and open to the public
Directions and parking

The Marriott Library, in collaboration with Ethnic Studies, celebrates the Construyendo Latinidad (Constructing Latinx identity) project. Dr. Ed Muñoz has been developing community-based digital collections since 2022, when he founded the Construyendo Latinidad Oral History project in partnership with Digital Library Services and Marriott Library Special Collections. The project developed out of a traveling museum exhibit Professor Munoz curated in collaboration with the Wyoming State Museum and the Wyoming State Archives (more here).

With community engaged learning as a core teaching value, undergraduate students have collected oral histories from Latinx Utahns with regards to national origin, history, race, ethnicity, gender, language, socioeconomic status, generational status, and/or regional presence. Together Dr. Muñoz and his students have collected over 20 oral histories, the majority of which have both Zoom video recordings and transcripts.

Dr. Muñoz has also contributed 14 Zoom videorecorded and transcribed oral histories to the Utah State Historical Society’s Peoples of Utah Revisited (POUR) project. With the assistance of a former UROP and SPUR research mentee and recent University of Utah graduate, Marylinda Gonzalez, they are creating an ArcGIS storymap featuring oral histories from Mexican Ballet Folklorico and Puerto Rican Bomba y Plena performers found in both archives.

A digital exhibit has also been created which features the voices and stories of the Latinx community in Utah. The first phase of the digital exhibit curates a selection of interviews with a focus on criminal justice professionals from the Latinx community, and was developed by Natalia Lopez as part of a 2025 Summer Program for Undergraduate Research project. She presented her work, “Latinx Criminal Justice Professionals: Exploring Career Motivations,” in a poster presentation at the University of Utah Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium.

Dr. Ed Muñoz comments, “It’s been a pleasure to work with both Marylinda and Natalia over the past three years, first as students in my classes, and most recently as undergraduate research mentees. What I really appreciate is their dedication to the goal of the project in amplifying the voice of the Utah Latinx community through oral history and digital display. That said, we’re blessed to have librarians Anna Neatrour and Camri Kohler as consultants and collaborators on the project. In fact, the oral history project owes much to Anna as she was in on the initial stages of creating the Construyendo Latinidad digital archive.”

This work will be celebrated at 3:00pm in the Gould Auditorium on November 3, during the event “Construyendo Latinidades: Continuing on Our Ancestors’ Legacies.” The digital exhibits will be displayed, and Dr. Muñoz will be in conversation with Marylinda Gonzalez and Natalia Lopez to discuss their work.