Thanks to a recent grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Indiana University is beginning the creation of the Central American and Mexican Video Archive (CAMVA) this week.  The $600,000 Technological and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access grant will assist the university over the next four years in creating an unprecedented digital archive of raw footage, videos and films for use in classrooms throughout the United States, Mexico and Central America, and everywhere in the world via the Internet.

Because of land loss, immigration and civil war, the rural peoples of Central America and Mexico have undergone a rapid socio-cultural transition. The archive is being designed to create anaudio-visual history of peasants, Indians and rural migrants. In addition to IU, Project CAMVA will include a consortium of research
institutions from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Mexico.

Starting immediately, Project CAMVA hopes to provide cultural and historical benchmarks on which future studies can be measured.  In Mexico, the focus will be footage of anthropological studies dealing with the people in Oaxaca, Veracruz and Chiapas.  In Nicaragua, the archive will provide access to raw video and film footage from the 1970s and 1980s. In El Salvador over sixty reels of film detailing the rural-based guerrilla struggle of the 1970s and 1980s will be processed. 

"It is highly important to recognize that the overwhelming majority of the rural people of Central America and Mexico
have not left written records, and therefore, these audio-visual archives can play a crucial role in allowing scholars and policy makers to understand the cultural roots of the new immigrants, their present cultural universe, and their evolving worldviews and practices" says Jeff Gould, co-director.

Project CAMVA is being headed by Jeffrey Gould, director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Rudy Professor of History, and Kris Brancolini director of the Digital Library Project. The project is also co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of History and Memory, whose co-directors are Chancellor's Professor John Bodnar and Mendel Professor Daniel James.