History of the Project
- The development of a Latin American Archive on Religions in Latin America and the Caribbean (DARLAC) has been central to LACIIR’s projects and activities.
- The first materials engaged by DARLAC were privately donated to the Green Library at FIU in 2013. The documents in the collection relate to Latin American Catholic social movements and organizations that contributed to shaping the history of the region during the second half of the twentieth century. The collection contains articles, books, newspapers, meeting reports and conclusions, and other materials from former members of religious, political and social movements produced between 1960 and 1985 in Latin America. The documents reflect processes such as the dissemination of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church in the region, the impact of Specialized Catholic Action movements, the rise of Liberation Theology, and overall, the various transformations of Christian religiosity that have taken place in the region since the seventies.
- During the last six years, DARLAC has gone through a long process of digitization and edition of 20 boxes of archival material, approximately 5,000 documents.5 It has also established a cooperative network between the different FIU departments involved (Religious Studies, History, Global and Socio-Cultural Studies, the Latin American and Caribbean Center, the Digital Library of the Caribbean and the Special Collections Department at the Green Library). DARLAC has importantly contributed to scale teaching and research activities at FIU. The archive has furnished relevant pedagogical material for graduate and undergraduate education by making available an impressive array of primary sources which have served teaching activities as well as student’s thesis and dissertations. The collection is currently at an advanced stage of edition, creation of metadata, and cataloging.
DARLAC (Digital Archives on Religions in Latin America and the Caribbean) is a digital platform available at: http://dpanther.fiu.edu/dPanther/collections/DARLAC. Its aim is to build an ultimate repository of unique and endangered intellectual sources that speak to the Latin American socio-religious movements of the twentieth century. This innovative digital initiative will serve as a large documentation reservoir for a complex and extremely rich historical process that has often been misrepresented in contemporary US narratives about Latin America. Bringing to light the primary sources of this historical process, this project will contribute substantially to scholarship, teaching, and public knowledge by facilitating more accurate and complete understandings about a crucial period of the history of the Americas.
The first materials engaged by DARLAC were privately donated to the Green Library at FIU in 2013, by the Carlos H. Uran’s Family Collection focusing on Latin American and Caribbean Catholic students’ organizations but the aim is to preserve materials in danger on all religious experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean.