Outfitted with national funding, the West Lafayette Public Library aims to discover local Latino history; recruit Latinos for oral history project.

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The history of local Latinos is missing from the West Lafayette archives, according to a local librarian.

“We don’t have a record of how the Latino American community formed in our community,” said Erica Brown, adult and teen services librarian for the West Lafayette Public Library.

But the library wants to right history’s wrongs, and a $3,000 national grant will help it record the experiences of an often-invisible population.

“It’s a growing population that we don’t really target at the library,” Brown said. “It’s one of our more forgotten minority groups.”

Although the overall population of West Lafayette declined nearly 2 percent, dropping to 30,137 in 2013 from 30,693 in 2009, the Hispanic population in West Lafayette grew during that time, rising 22 percent, from 806 to 987 residents, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

On Monday, the library received the grant, which was awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to the American Library Association to support the “Latino Americans: 500 Years of History” project that aims to publicly showcase Latino experiences across the country.

The West Lafayette Public Library was chosen as one of 203 recipients in the nation and one of five in the state.

The library will use the funding for public programing, such as discussion groups, local history exhibitions, performances about Latino history and culture and oral history initiatives.

“We’re curious about how (the Latino community) formed here and what that group went through,” Brown said. “We know a lot of the minority groups had trouble living in certain places in Lafayette and West Lafayette.”

Screenings of the documentary “Latino Americans” will be shown at the library and on Purdue University’s campus. WETA public television created the documentary for PBS, which aired it in fall 2013.

It chronicles the history of Latinos in the United States over a span of 500 years and features interviews with such Latino Americans as Rita Moreno, the Tony Award-winning Puerto Rican star of “West Side Story,” and Dolores Huerta, who in the 1960s co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with César Chávez.

Aurelio Curbelo, director of the Purdue Latino Cultural Center, and Song No, director of Latin-American and Latino studies at Purdue, will lead discussions tied to the screenings, Brown said.

The library also will use the funds to purchase books in Spanish, Spanish language DVDs and books written by Latino authors.

Brown said the library currently seeks local members of the Latino community who would be willing to be interviewed beginning in September for the oral history project.

The interviews will be recorded and transcribed into Spanish and English. They will be submitted to the West Lafayette History and Research Center at the library and the Tippecanoe County Historical Association for public access.

“It’s important to know where we’ve been to better put into perspective where we are going,” Brown said. “History informs the future. A lot of the time, the non-white history gets swept under the rug and ignored.”

Get involved

If interested in being interviewed for an oral history project or know someone who might, contact Erica Brown, at 765-743-2261 or email her at ebrown@wlaf.lib.in.us, to schedule an interview in September.

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