On Tues. Apr. 18, 2023, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded Dr. Katherine Christoffersen (UTRGV, Project Director/Principal Investigator (PI)), Dr. Ana Carvalho (University of Arizona, co-PI), and Dr. Ryan Bessett (University of California San Diego, co-PI) a Humanities Collections and References Resource (HCRR) Implementation grant for their project entitled “Bilingual Voices in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands: Preserving, Expanding, and Elaborating Sociolinguistic Collections” in the amount of $349,975.

Their previous NEH HCRR Foundations grant built upon the team’s initial work to document bilingual language practices in the Rio Grande Valley and in Southern Arizona through two website-based collections of interviews with community members, the Corpus Bilingüe del Valle (CoBiVa) and Corpus de Español del Sur de Arizona (CESA). In that grant, we tested technologically-aided transcription methods and developed plans for preserving these valuable collections.

In this second phase of the project, the team will work with UTRGV Librarian Justin White and University of Arizona (UA) Librarians Fernando Rios, Lisa Duncan, and Stacey Erdman to archive and preserve the collections through the library systems. The team will also work to balance and diversify the datasets represented in the two collections, and finally they will work with UTRGV IT Carlos Zepeda and UA IT Bart Rossman and Jessica Draper to elaborate the websites.

We are particularly excited to fund students’ participation in research through the grant. We hope this project will help students and the community understand that these bilingual practices are highly sophisticated, complex, and beautiful expressions of a bilingual, bicultural identity. We believe the corpora are valuable local resources for community members, and especially for teaching Spanish to Heritage Language Learners.

We will share project findings on this blog, at conferences, as well as through publications, webinars, and workshops, which we hope will inspire the creation of more community-based, community-driven corpus projects.

Our main CoBiVa website (utrgv.edu/cobiva) includes a list of presentations and publications related to the project. Pending a short online request form, anyone can have open access to the collection of revised, anonymized interviews with audio files, clickable transcripts, and background and demographic information on the interviewees. We plan to have at least 100 interviews and audio files posted on the website by the end of the grant-funded period August 2026.

This project has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Read more about all of this year’s NEH grant-funded projects here.