by Caroline Tanski
On May 1st, 1718, the Mission San Antonio de Valero (which would come to be known as the Alamo) was founded, and along with it the city of San Antonio, Texas. While activities will culminate in the first week of May, 2018, San Antonio is celebrating its tercentenary for the duration of the year with exhibits, events, and community service projects. One of these celebrations comes from the Special Collections and Archives of the University of Texas, San Antonio. It’s called La Puerta, and it’s an online exhibit that displays the sense of community, the humor, and the good food that make San Antonio a city unlike any other.
Comprising twelve categories, the photos represented in La Puerta were pulled from UTSA Special Collections as well as the archives of local newspapers. With well over three million photographs, the Special Collections photograph collection is one of the most popular resources in the archives. When initial conversations about the tercentenary began, says Kristin Law, the UTSA archivist who helped to conceive and execute La Puerta along with a team that included a digital archivist, a designer, and a communications professional, the idea was for a “portal to San Antonio history.” It quickly became clear that the most effective resource at their disposal was the wealth of photographs in the university’s collections. Dating back to the 1860s—long before the university’s founding in 1969—the photographs documented areas of life including activism, culinary traditions, the rodeo, and “stunts and critters,” all of which became categories in the final exhibit.
At the same time that exhibit planning began, UTSA got a new president, Thomas Taylor Eighmy. Katie Rojas, the manuscripts archivist for UTSA Special Collections, says that Eighmy has been “gunning for connecting to the community,” which has encouraged the university at all levels to optimize opportunities to reach out to the public. Special Collections prioritizes collecting materials that relate to the culture of San Antonio and South Texas: African-American and LGBTQ communities in the region, the history of women and gender, Mexican-American activism, and Tex-Mex food, among others. La Puerta was a timely way to tie the university’s history and holdings to the vibrant history of the city and generations of its occupants.
Law says that the exhibit was designed with minimalist text, partly due to time constraints—after the first conversations in June, the exhibit went live in February, 2018. In those eight months the photographs had to be scanned, metadata had to be created for them, and the website had to be built (the designer was able to customize a WordPress template, which saved a lot of time and effort). Each category in the exhibit has two or three sentences summarizing the grouping. Each photograph is labeled with a title, a call number, and the name of the collection from which it came. Without bulky text blocks, the viewer can scroll through the galleries and get lost in imagining the action, the life, in the vivid scenes captured.
When asked how she selected which photographs to include, Law says that she wanted to “stick with the themes but show people what they haven’t seen, what I would want to show to my friends and family.” Law recognizes that many of the photographs in the library’s holdings came from newspaper archives, which historically featured white residents and did not represent the true diversity of the population. Law and the other creators of La Puerta sought to find diverse people, activities, and lifestyles in the archives so that everyone who looked at the exhibit would be able to find something to which they could relate.
The exhibit, like the Special Collections and Archives, is intended for everyone. Rojas says that UTSA Special Collections serves “students and faculty as well as researchers from the community and, well, anywhere.” As the collecting priorities indicate, Special Collections is making a concerted effort to address gaps in its collections and to fully represent the wealth of variety of San Antonio life. With an enthusiastic university leader, Special Collections is continuing its normal outreach (including pop-up exhibits and zine fairs, which connected archivists and librarians to new people, some of whom had never heard of special collections) and pursuing opportunities such as La Puerta. Whether it’s in familiar faces, activities, streets they may drive down, or festivals they attend, Law says of La Puerta, “I hope the folks who see this get to see themselves in it, somehow. I just hope they get to see themselves.”