A Digital Pop-Up: Latino/a Mobility in California

The Latino/a Mobility Digital Pop-up was an open-air installation launching the Scalar web exhibition, Latina and Latino Mobility in 20th Century California. Drawing upon digital archives and original photographic collections held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, the pop-up engaged ethnic studies students in curating Latino/a histories of migration and creating visually rich-projects that can co-exist on a web platform and the built environment through digital projection.

An archive of the Digital Pop-up installation and its corresponding digital exhibit is now hosted on our Scalar site. The web exhibition serves as a guide to historical resources on Latino/a migration in California, the state with the largest concentration of Latino/as in the United States. It includes an additional digital exhibit with student produced content and metadata, a blog that places historical texts in conversation with current events, digital reviews of key new media projects on the topic, student portfolios, and a research guide to relevant collections in Latino/a studies held at Yale University. As an ethnic studies project seeking to bridge the digital divide, the pop-up and exhibit stand as an example of the ways emergent technologies can engage students of color and their allies in the process of building their digital literacy and becoming agents in knoweldge creation.