Nicolás Kanellos has devoted his life to unearthing and showcasing an unprecedented body of U.S. Latino literature. Over the course of a career spanning six decades, Kanellos has helped publish more than 600 books by Latino authors, preserved priceless documents and manuscripts, and written several of his own.
And his efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. Last fall former U.S. President Joe Biden presented Kanellos with the National Humanities Medal for his contributions to the nation’s literary heritage — an honor Kanellos is quick to point out he shares with the teams of dedicated researchers who’ve worked with him over the years.
A graduate of The University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts, Kanellos is the Brown Foundation professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston as well as the founder and director of Arte Público Press, the nation’s oldest and most respected Latino publishing house. Since its founding in 1979, Arte Público has grown to be the largest U.S. publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by Latino authors, and its catalog includes works by such literary giants as Sandra Cisneros, Luis Valdez, and Pat Mora. Beginning in 1992, the Press also started managing the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program (known as “Recovery”), a nationally coordinated archival project that aims to make lost Latino writings from the colonial period to the mid-20th century available to the public.
In his position as head of both Arte Público and Recovery, Kanellos has earned global recognition as one of the leading champions of Latino literature in the U.S. — quite the legacy for a man born in New York City to working-class Greek and Puerto Rican immigrant parents. But there is nothing usual about the life of this UT alumnus who received both his master’s and Ph.D. on the Forty Acres.
Growing up poor on the east coast, Kanellos describes his as a tumultuous childhood, where street fighting was commonplace and almost always racially motivated. “As a child, I became very aware of discrimination against Puerto Ricans in New York,” he says, and he recalls how difficult it was for members of his community to make names for themselves in any industry above the lowest levels. His role models were back in Puerto Rico where he had family who, despite also having limited means, were able to become doctors and lawyers through hard work.
“My mother once told me I should go back to Puerto Rico and become either a lawyer or a doctor,” he remembers. “I wanted to serve my own community here but wasn’t yet sure how I could really help Puerto Ricans living in the U.S.”
But from an early age, Kanellos understood the intrinsic value of community pride and the importance of cultural identity, history, and background. He had an intuitive understanding of the importance of physical records — whether of stories, memories, or traditions — in helping communities to preserve their identities. That is to say, he knew the value of literature.
After earning a B.A. in Spanish literature in 1966 from Farleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, Kanellos came to UT Austin to pursue a masters’ degree in romance languages followed by a Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese, graduating in 1974. “At the time, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UT was considered number one in the country,” Kanellos remembers, which made his grad school decision easy.
In the 1960s and early 70s, however, there were few Latinos amongst UT’s faculty or student body, even in his own department. Moreover, Kanellos says, the dominant culture guiding research and curricula was that of Spain itself, not the Americas. “Naturally, there wasn’t much of an appetite for the project I had begun formulating in my own mind: an recovering the writings of historical and contemporary Latinos in the U.S.,” he says.
Fortunately, he did find some inspiring mentors and supporters for his idea. In particular, he highlights the key role played by Américo Paredes, the late author, professor, and cofounder of UT’s Center for Mexican American Studies. This Texas-born scholar, known principally for his accounts of life on the Texas-Mexico border, became an important advocate for Kanellos’ vision.
“Paredes first planted the seeds of the research ideas that eventually developed into my efforts to recover U.S. Hispanic literary heritage,” Kanellos says.
Those efforts didn’t just require searching for existing literature lost in the annals of history or suppressed by colonial powers. “It also meant seeking out new and previously unpublished works by contemporary Latino authors in the U.S.,” says Kanellos.
Enter Arté Publico Press stage right, which Kanellos established in the late 1970s to publish both works by Latino authors. It was over a decade before the press launched the Recovery project, but inevitably the two went on to enjoy a symbiotic relationship as each informed the other.
“Having both Arté Publico and Recovery working in tandem allowed me to cover historical and contemporary Latino literature simultaneously,” Kanellos says.
Kanellos’ goal for the Recovery project was to do for Latino literature what other great national and linguistic archives had begun centuries before: to compile the largest possible collection of literature, texts, and imagery with a shared background. In Recovery’s case, Kanellos set out to collect material created by or related to Spanish- speaking people living in the U.S.
This was, of course, especially challenging in the pre-internet age. Today it is possible to access seemingly every known document via the World Wide Web. But in the early 1990s, when Recovery first launched, anyone who wished to build an archive of U.S. Hispanic literature spanning five centuries had no choice but to travel to physical archives across the world and create hard copies of each text.
“A team of researchers and I made frequent visits to Spain, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other libraries and archives across the United States to gather whatever information we could,” Kanellos remembers. “The greatest resources were often in Spain and Mexico, but we also unearthed some really unusual and rare finds in unlikely places in Europe too.”
As for writing produced in local communities through the United States, Américo Paredes directed Kanellos towards Spanish-language newspapers, reasoning that many Latino authors living in the U.S. would have had their first publishing break through local newspapers. Paredes was right, and this approach provided Kanellos with the texts and identities of many writers from throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Now all he had to do was track down their other texts, biographies and cultural activity.
In the 1990s, scholars began to realize the internet’s potential as a tool to help conduct, compile, and archive research. The Recovery program was among the first to start digitizing large bodies of texts, even before there was a way to make them available to scholars and students. By the 2000s, Recovery had signed contracts with Ebsco Inc., the world’s largest database publisher, and NewsBank, the distributor of digitized newspapers, to make hundreds of thousands of Latino texts and newspapers available through subscription.
For Kanellos, it’s this aspect of the archive — the way it makes centuries of literature and history available to anyone, from middle school students to thought-leading academics — that’s the most rewarding, and the most challenging. Recovery’s continued success is underpinned by the team of experts in big-data management and maintenance, he explains, without whom the archive simply wouldn’t exist.
“My name may be on this National Humanities Medal, but I’d be nothing without the team of experts in archives and digital humanities I’ve worked with every day for more than 40 years,” he stresses.
At 80 years of age, having created the world’s largest Latino literary archive, founded one of the most important Latino publishing houses, and being formally recognized by three sitting U.S. presidents, Kanellos has achieved more than most. This begs the question: What’s next?
“I’m done,” Kanellos says. “I’m ready to retire. I’m stepping down in September 2025.”
But while he may be retiring, Kanellos is confident Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage and Arte Público Press won’t end with him, and he says he sees the National Humanities Medal as an acknowledgment of the work that has been done and continues to be done by both.
“My legacy is in good hands,” he says.