Arhoolie Foundation Receives Grant Award from California Humanities

We are happy to share that we have received a Humanities For All Project Grant award for Rumbo A California—An Exhibition of the Strachwitz Frontera Collection.

“Rumbo a California” is a multimedia traveling exhibition that will explore the Mexican American experience in California as documented on commercial recordings going back to the early 1920s. Featured media will include 78 and 45 rpm discs, LP covers, photographs, posters, cinema lobby cards, guided audio, and bilingual transcriptions of topical corridos (narrative ballads) covering aspects of Mexican and Mexican American life throughout the state: immigration, deportation, Pachuco culture, the United Farm Workers Movement, natural disasters, important historical figures, crime, politics, cultural identity, love, death, etc. The basis for this exhibit is the Arhoolie Foundation’s Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings, which we have been digitally preserving for many years in partnership with the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, and the UCLA Library. At over 150,000 individual recordings on 78, 45 and 33-rpm discs, as well as rare cassettes and open-reel master tapes, the Frontera Collection is the world’s largest collection of commercially recorded regional Mexican music.

“Rumbo a California” will travel to venues around the state beginning in January 2021.