Media Contact: Desiree Aranda, Co-Chair, Latinos in Heritage Conservation, (602) 492-8719, latinoheritageconservation@gmail.com

Tucson, AZ, January 31, 2022 – Latinos in Heritage Conservation (LHC) has been awarded a $750,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The funding will support the building of a Latinx heritage and historic preservation network, organizational capacity, an expansion of a digital humanities project, programming, and advocacy. The funding will play a central role in LHC’s effort to transform the preservation movement at a national scale through creative projects and intergenerational collaborations that amplify Latinx voices and perspectives, and thus, American voices and perspectives.

Grant funding from the Mellon Foundation provides the means for LHC to hire its first executive director and expand its organizational capacity to continue contributing to a preservation movement that is centered on equity and social justice. The organization will launch and oversee multiple key initiatives including: a transformative digital humanities project to identify and document Latinx heritage; create a series of digital advocacy toolkits for individuals and communities working on the ground to preserve Latinx history; and will host educational forums that feature established and emerging Latinx heritage practitioners. Congreso, LHC’s biennial national convening of Latinxs leaders and allies in Latinx heritage and historic preservation, will take place April 2022 in Denver, Colorado as the first of several initiatives supported by the grant.

About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive.

About Latinos in Heritage Conservation

Founded in 2014, Latinos in Heritage Conservation is the leading organization for the preservation of Latina/o places, stories, and cultural heritage in the United States. Latinos in Heritage Conservation envisions a nation that values Latino history and recognizes it as a part of the greater American story. It is building a diverse network of intergenerational advocates conserving Latinx sites and living cultures in the fabric of American society to attain inclusion and representation in the field of heritage conservation and affirm the value of Latinx history in the hemispheric struggle for social justice. Follow LHC on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

For more information and career opportunities with LHC, visit:

https://www.latinoheritage.us/careers