FMURF Project Overview:

Working alongside Professor Raul Coronado, Mia Aguilar contributes to the Archive of Latinx Feelings, a digital humanities project focused on preserving and making accessible nineteenth-century Latinx family writings from the U.S. Southwest. The project centers letters and diaries as important historical sources, offering insight into everyday life, racial formation, and processes like mestizaje. As part of the team’s work, Mia helped develop an ACLS grant proposal that outlined plans for expanding digitization, improving AI-assisted transcription, and strengthening collaborations with archives and Latinx community partners, while maintaining an ethical, human-centered approach to the materials.

In addition to grant development, Mia has worked on the transcription and preparation of archival documents. This includes reviewing and correcting AI-generated transcriptions of nineteenth-century Spanish-language handwriting, which is often difficult to read and requires careful attention. This project looks to provide an archive for community members and scholars to access the writings of Latinx families in the 19th-century.