Latino Roots Project
The Latino Roots Project is a bilingual public humanities initiative that documents, preserves, and shares the histories, experiences, and contributions of Latino communities in Oregon.
Administered through the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies (CLLAS), Latino Roots began in connection with a 2009 exhibit at the Lane County Historical Museum and has since grown into a dynamic, multi-part project that includes a university course sequence, documentary films, portable exhibit panels, a bilingual booklet, and a digital video archive.
Latino Roots brings together research, storytelling, teaching, and community engagement to ensure that Latino histories in Oregon are documented, accessible, and celebrated.
What Makes Latino Roots Unique
Latino Roots is more than an exhibit. It is a hands-on learning and storytelling model that teaches students about Latinx history, trains them in oral history methods, and empowers them to become historians, researchers, and documentarians.
Through the project, students work with Latino individuals, families, and communities across Oregon to record oral histories and transform those stories into documentary films. These films, along with the exhibit and related materials, are then shared with schools, universities, museums, nonprofits, and broader public audiences.
In this way, Latino Roots not only preserves community history but also creates new pathways for experiential learning, public scholarship, and intergenerational dialogue.
Project Components
- Portable Exhibit Panels: The Latino Roots exhibit includes lightweight bilingual panels featuring photographs, timelines, maps, demographic context, and stories of Latino families in Oregon.
- Documentary Films: Students and faculty help produce documentaries grounded in oral history and testimonio traditions, making community stories visible and accessible to broader audiences.
- Bilingual Booklet: A bilingual publication captures selected stories and images from the exhibit and can be used in educational settings.
- University of Oregon Course Sequence: Latino Roots is also a teaching project that helps students develop research, interviewing, writing, and documentary storytelling skills.
- Digital Archive: The website and documentary gallery serve as an ongoing archive of stories, films, and educational materials.
Community Impact
Latino Roots helps fill historical gaps by documenting stories that have too often been left out of archives, museums, and public memory. The project highlights the resilience, creativity, labor, cultural knowledge, and long-standing presence of Latino communities in Oregon.
At the same time, it creates meaningful opportunities for students to engage directly with community-based research and public-facing storytelling. The result is a project that builds knowledge, honors lived experience, and strengthens connections between the university and the communities it serves.
Book the Exhibit
The Latino Roots exhibition panels are available for educational and community use. The exhibit is an excellent resource for middle schools, high schools, colleges, universities, museums, libraries, and community organizations interested in sharing Latino histories in Oregon.
To book the Latino Roots exhibit, please email janiced@uoregon.edu.
