Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.
Cities have layers of history, of memory, constantly evolving, with new layers settling over old ones. While “the city’s name may remain the same, its physical expression is always in the process of transformation, deformation, or is forgotten and modified to suit other needs or destroyed for other purposes”[1]. The city that someone knew ten years ago is not the version of the city that I see now. However, memories have a way of sticking, remaining “deeply intertwined with the physical and social fabric of cities”[2]. Stories occupy the abandoned buildings we pass by on our walks, the apartments that our friends live in, the streets we drive through on our commute, whether we’re aware of them or not.
The University of San Antonio Libraries’ project, Mapping the Movimiento, reveals a layer of San Antonio’s history during the Mexican American Civil Rights movement in the ’60s and ’70s, by mapping and contextualizing 15 significant places for activists. Though these places are known within the community, this project ensures that the history lived in these buildings is relived and remembered through an ArcGIS StoryMap. This tool combines geographic information systems (GIS) with multimedia elements to create a digital storytelling medium. It hosts built-in mapping capabilities, but also allows users to upload maps from other sources. Users then bring the map to life by uploading videos, images, information, and whatever else helps contextualize significant places. This creates a simple yet effective multimedia map, which works well for public history projects such as this one.
As one scrolls through the StoryMap, this layer of San Antonio history comes alive. While the map of the city that they show is a modern one, the archival pictures that accompany each slide superimpose the past onto these places. The beauty of this project is that it achieves coexistence of the past and the present, not relegating these stories as bound for dusty archives and textbooks (though I quite enjoy a dusty archive). They stretch this history to the present, making us reckon with what is hiding beneath the buildings we think we know.
One such example is the Munguía Printers – a printshop owned by José Rómulo Munguía and Carolina Malpica de Munguía. They printed Chicano newsletters that no one else would, and their shop became an important meeting spot for activists. It stopped operations in the early 2000s, though their influence remains strong in San Antonio. Today, the building is an office and workspace, renovated by Rómulo’s grandson. He built upon the legacy of his grandfather, adding a layer to the building’s history and significance.
The StoryMap is narrated by John Philips Santos, adding an almost casual air to the project, as if there was someone in the car telling you about a building you’re driving past, and bringing memories out of hiding. Archival images cycle through as he narrates – the building itself, people protesting, newspapers – adding visual context of how people inhabited these places. Through these pictures, we not only get to know the building, but also see and imagine the liveliness within them.
This project brings together history, memory, and archives to make an accessible public history project, letting viewers explore San Antonio’s intertwined history, told with the help of archivists, librarians, and activists. Though many of the buildings are well known, this project dissects and shows the history cemented by those who came before us, who walked those streets before we did. It encourages us to inquire what is within those buildings we pass on our way to work, to pay more attention, and perhaps to visit our archives to remember, rediscover, and reconstruct versions of our cities that we may not have known before.
Related material in UTL collections:
Barrera, Baldemar James. “We Want Better Education!” : The 1960s Chicano Student Movement, School Walkouts, and the Quest for Educational Reform in South Texas / James B. Barrera. First edition., Texas A&M University Press, 2024.
García, Mario T., and Ellen McCracken, editors. Rewriting the Chicano Movement : New Histories of Mexican American Activism in the Civil Rights Era / Edited by Mario T. García and Ellen McCracken. The University of Arizona Press, 2021.
[1] Azadeh Lak and Pantea Hakimian, “Collective Memory and Urban Regeneration in Urban Spaces: Reproducing Memories in Baharestan Square, City of Tehran, Iran,” City, Culture and Society 18 (September 2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2019.100290.
[2] Cristian Olmos Herrera et al., “Mapas Parlantes: Collective Visual Methods to Map and Re−/Construct Urban Memories,” Community Development Journal, November 13, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsaf030.
