As a Colombian American, I have lived most of my life surrounded by Latinx people who spoke Spanish, initially as a child in Colombia and later as a young person living in New York City. In 2010 I moved to Jacksonville to work at the University of North Florida. What I missed more than anything was the Latinx community. At first, I didn't see Latinos either on campus or in the city and did not hear Spanish outside of my department. By word of mouth, little by little, I found people and places scattered throughout Jacksonville. I was surprised because, although there were Latinos, there really wasn’t a united community like in other cities in Florida and across the country.

In many ways, this is directly related to the city's geography and history. Unlike Central and South Florida, where the density of those identifying as Hispanic/Latino is greater, in Duval County individuals self-reporting in those categories represent only 12.6% of the total population, according to estimates based on the 2023 American Community Survey [U.S. Census Bureau n.d.]. [2] While this is a considerable figure, due to the city’s physical characteristics and a complex history with minority groups, this population, until very recently, went unnoticed. Jacksonville is so large that it occupies an entire county, Duval County, which makes everything quite spread out. There are no neighborhoods or cultural centers representative of Latino communities, but rather, businesses, restaurants, etc. are scattered throughout a city that long ago abandoned its downtown and today blends into a larger metropolitan area across multiple counties.

From that need to encounter a Spanish speaking community both at the university and in the city, I came up with the idea for this oral history project. On the one hand, I was intrigued by the possibility of uniting a variety of voices, and on the other, by the desire to make them visible with the aid of the digital tools available to me. In 2012, with a group of 23 students from different Spanish-speaking countries, I started what would become Voces y Caras: Latinx Communities of North Florida.

Since its inception, Voces y Caras has been a central component of the undergraduate course Communication and Communities for Heritage Speakers of Spanish, which I teach every spring. Heritage speakers of Spanish are those who have grown up in the United States speaking Spanish with their families and communities, but who generally have had little formal training in the language. In North Florida, these students come from a broad range of national backgrounds. While the largest groups are those whose families come from Colombia, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, the course has involved students from nearly every country in the Hispanic world. Their level of experience in the language varies, with some having native or near-native fluency but many others functioning at lower levels of proficiency. Most have grown up navigating between Latino spaces and mainstream US culture.

These students often feel that their Spanish is imperfect and that, as Latinx, they should have greater mastery of the language. They often also feel disconnected from the traditions that define their cultural heritage and long to better understand their experiences and those of their families and communities. Communication and Communities for Heritage Speakers of Spanish focuses, therefore, on helping students to both appreciate the linguistic varieties and cultural richness that students themselves offer and gain the confidence they need to use their linguistic skills in professional settings. [3]

Since UNF is a predominantly white institution, [4] Latinx students frequently feel ostracized, and, as they are commonly the first members of their families to attend college, the campus is often a foreign space to their parents and other relatives. The participation of these students in projects that have been recognized by the university and community is a source of pride for themselves and for their loved ones. Our in-person events are essential for connecting with the community. The first one is the final class presentation, in which students reflect on their interviews and their experiences with their interviewees. Beyond being a class presentation, it is a heartfelt ceremony and celebration to which the interviewees, their families, and the general public are invited. It takes place in important university locations such as the UNF Art Gallery. The second event is an exhibition during Hispanic Heritage Month in which the interviews are presented alongside artwork by Latinx students and alumni. During Opening Night, interviewees, artists, and the community at large are welcomed. During these events, some of the students have had the opportunity to speak to the press and have been interviewed for the university newspaper and other media. Additionally, many of my students have continued working on the project beyond class, working on the technology side, helping with website construction, and/or attending national and international conferences to present about their own interviews and the project in general. At UNF, we have more Spanish-speaking students than ever, and as the Hispanic/Latinx community continues to grow and is increasingly present in all aspects of society in and around our city, celebrating our heritage, contributions, and language is essential.

My class relies on a sentipensante (feeling/thinking) pedagogical model that allows the individual to learn by reflecting on the aspects of society that marginalize them while using creativity to incite critical thinking and hands-on knowledge. Laura Rendón explains that a sentipensante pedagogy:

is a culturally-validating, deep learning experience that addresses the harmonic balance and interconnection between intellectual, social, emotional, and inner-life skill development. This is a pedagogy that connects learning experiences to equity and justice issues in our society and that fosters deep learning through the use of prácticas de conocimiento/illuminative knowledge tools that can potentially engage body, mind, and sensory processes. Examples of these prácticas include autoethnography, storytelling, moments of silence, music, poetry, arts-based projects, testimonios, socially-driven art and photography, ritual, cultural immersions, and bearing witness, among others

[Rendón 2023, 2].

This course and oral history project, and all the preparation it entails, allows for an approach to teaching that involves horizontal communication within the classroom. As a professor, I bring certain parameters within which the students should work, but their contributions, their knowledge of the migrant experience and that of their families are crucial to creating community. As this is a particular group that, although diverse, has shared experiences, it is important to first recognize our historical marginality, to create ways of thinking and critically discussing our cultures and modes of knowledge production. Through class discussions we learn to understand how we contribute to society and our value as bicultural and bilingual people. We discuss the challenges that many Latinx youth face in not necessarily belonging to their parents’ culture and at the same time feeling like they don't belong in the “American” culture. Our approach allows us to recognize ways in which our narratives/stories are essential to the creation of a rich and diverse culture in the United States.

I divide our semester into three parts. The first is an exploration of our own identity and the culture we have inherited. Our class discussions and roundtables include sharing our family immigration history. This is particularly important because students realize that there are many different stories to learn about right in our classroom. Additionally, Spanish-language podcasts like Radio Ambulante and Crónicas al Borde are very helpful, as students learn how stories are told. I choose podcasts about diverse migrant experiences, some serious and others humorous, which reveal that not all stories have to be sad, and that no migrant experience is more relevant than another. We read several articles by experts on how interviews are conducted. However, I believe the best teaching tool I have is the Voces y Caras website, where students listen to interviews from previous years and see concrete examples of what is expected in class, as well as how to improve the way we ask questions and listen to our interviewees. We have activities where these interviews are critically analyzed.

These reflections also help students identify the people they would like to interview and write questions for those conversations. Over the course of the semester, they record and edit the interviews, and at the end of the term, they participate in the aforementioned public presentation, at which they discuss their interviews and their experiences working on the project. Over the summer, we publish the recordings of the interviews with captions in Spanish, along with the summaries and photographs of the interviewees, on a WordPress website supported by the UNF Center for Instruction and Research Technology and the UNF Digital Humanities Institute. In the fall of each year, Voces y Caras hosts a multimedia exhibit to commemorate Hispanic Heritage Month at the UNF Gallery of Art, in partnership with the Department of Art, Art History and Design, with an opening reception attended by the students, their families, the interviewees and the public in general. [5]

Communication and cooperation through group activities allow students to feel confident in selecting members of our community to interview (family members, friends, professionals from different fields, etc.). By sharing their own experiences of the interview process with their peers, they reflect on the direction they want to take and use their language skills in a more structured and deliberate way. The experience of successfully conducting interviews, hearing their own voices on recordings, and preparing to speak to a wide audience gives them the opportunity to discover the agency they can exercise through their knowledge of Spanish. By the end of the semester, students feel more confident in their language skills, and the transformation is even evident in their posture and the way they project their voices. Some of them even feel they can communicate with their own families in Spanish without being mocked. In this way, language is not only a tool for personal communication or a marker of identity, but also a source of power that students can wield in the world around them. [6]

Initially, the project was conceived with the two goals discussed so far: to serve as a vehicle for Heritage language learners to employ their language skills in an applied setting and to visibilize the Hispanic/Latinx community in our area. However, the benefits for students and for myself have gone beyond those objectives. Since the beginning, students have expressed that the project has impacted them in ways I had not anticipated. For some, these benefits have been practical, and for many, they have also been personal.

In terms of practical outcomes, Voces y Caras has provided a way for several to complete internships and honors capstone requirements. Participants in these roles have assumed a higher level of responsibility with the project, as well as a greater sense of ownership. They have created content, updated the WordPress website, and maintained social media accounts. They have also helped to curate the annual exhibition of Voces y Caras that takes place during Hispanic Heritage Month.

This work, in turn, has allowed several of them to gain experience with professional and scholarly communication. Nine students have presented posters on their work with Voces y Caras at events organized by the UNF Digital Humanities Institute, the UNF Office of Undergraduate Research, the Florida Undergraduate Research Association, and the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium. [7] Three of those students also participated in the VI Encuentro de Humanistas Digitales in San Luis Potosí in November 2023 and are co-authors of a recent article [López Baquero et. al 2026]

More importantly, Voces y Caras has provided all participants the opportunity to better understand themselves and their communities. Through knowledge practices, students have learned to proudly celebrate their stories, their culture, and their contributions as first and second-generation immigrants. They have also gained appreciation for the efforts of their parents, whom they consider to be people who contribute to society and make it better. Many times, they discover their generational trauma and, although they are full of love for their families and roots, they also address the challenges they have faced growing up in these families and criticize and address the cultural customs that affect them. 

The opportunity to be part of a different kind of knowledge production is especially valuable in a time when higher education is in crisis. The capabilities of artificial intelligence have rapidly increased at the same time that a general societal skepticism of higher education seems to worsen. Both trends threaten to devalue scholarly production, a decline that experiences like those described in this study can help to counter. Acting as equal participants in the construction of community knowledge gives students a chance to see that the work of scholars is often built not merely on the writing of books and articles but also on the cultivation of human relationships, the establishment of trust, and solidarity with publics outside the academic sphere. 

For me, this work has made me think critically about teaching and the objectives of education. More and more, what I want to bring to the classroom is an education where the affective bond has a place, where a personal and collective transformation is achieved, where what is done in class are life and ethics lessons, where seeds for change are sown.

Involvement in Voces y Caras has had consequences not only for the students and for me, but also their families and others from the community who have given us their time and have shared their stories and dreams with us. It is also a project of many tears of sadness for what has been left behind and joy in discovering that our community has a voice. Our interviewees have responded with enormous gratitude for being listened to and valued as people who build a better city and a better country. This is evident particularly when we ask them questions such as “How do you think Latinos contribute to U.S. society?” The interviewees’ responses often highlight the hard work that immigrants do and the pride they feel in the sacrifices they have made because their children are obtaining an education. They frequently thank their interviewers for creating spaces in which their stories can be appreciated.

Voces y Caras does not exist in isolation, but rather forms part of a growing body of projects focused on capturing the experiences of Latinx populations in the U.S. Discussed elsewhere in this special issue, Humanizing Deportation is a project based at the University of California, Davis, that serves as “a community based digital storytelling project” that examines “the human consequences of contemporary regimes of migration and border control in the United States and Mexico” [Humanizing Deportation n.d.]. The Bracero History Archive, a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and several partner institutions, gathers interviews with individuals whose families were impacted by the Bracero migrant worker program that ran from 1942 to 1964 [Bracero History Archive n.d.]. Elena Foulis led Oral Narratives of Latin@s in Ohio, hosted by the Center for Folklore Studies at the Ohio State University [Center for Folklife Studies n.d.], and has published widely on Latinx oral history, including in the forthcoming book Embodied Encounters: Oral History Archives of Latine/x Experiences. The Yale University Library maintains a research guide that lists other Latinx oral history projects [Yale University Library n.d.], and the Voces Oral History Center at the University of Texas-Austin has promoted this type of work for over twenty-five years, through both its archive and the publication of the US Latina and Latino Oral History Journal [Voces Oral History Center n.d.].

Voces y Caras likewise forms part of a growing movement toward conducting scholarship that is not only public-facing but involves the public as creators and collaborators. Scholars have argued that taking academic work to communities and engaging with them in meaningful partnerships creates networks of support and resistance in the face of challenges such as misinformation and the neo-fascist rhetoric about minority groups that has become increasingly mainstream and threatens the wellbeing and survival of those communities. In the context of the wholesale devaluation of humanities disciplines, some scholars also see in such engagement and activism a way to make the humanities relevant again. [8]

In this sense, Voces y Caras also intersects with conversations around the role of community building in both research and teaching. Engaging students in work that is meaningful and that considers community stories as a fundamental part of the educational experience with historical ramifications has the capacity to promote profound changes in the students themselves and in society. This type of work avoids what David Wiley has called “the disposable assignment,” referring to all those tasks that students must do that have no meaning for them or for us as teachers (“What is”). In the case of heritage language students, working with their community and family members can be a transformative experience that promotes a dialogue that goes beyond the classroom. 

Projects like Voces y Caras that aim to make a difference beyond the academy build upon the ideas of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921–1997) who promulgated an education for the change of society [Freire 1971]. In particular, it is important, as Freire says, to acquire a "critical consciousness" in the face of our marginalization as migrants and from there, work in a community so that learning becomes a "practice of freedom" [Freire 1971, 35]. I apply this freedom in my classroom as a process of letting go of the fear of identifying as Latinos and speaking Spanish. Students understand that our identity contributes to making the society we live in better. They also realize that although they are neither from here nor from there, they are bicultural, bilingual individuals, and that by coming together, they can combine the best of these places where their roots and cultures come from, and the best of the country they live in. Academic work that engages with communities offers the opportunity to democratize knowledge, and this is perhaps truer today than ever, with technologies at our fingertips that offer immediate ways to interact with and serve communities. However, as Sheila Brennan has cautioned, these projects must be easily accessible:

First, any public digital humanities project should be designed such that people of all abilities can use and access it on the Web. Second, projects should be built in ways that reach primary audiences on the platforms they regularly use. This may mean designing a light mobile framework to reach people who only access the Web from handheld devices. If users communicate on one specific social media space, the project should be there. If users speak multiple languages, the platform choice must allow for that content to be accessible in those languages. Third, the language, symbols, and navigational paths embedded in the digital project must be understandable by its users and participants. A public digital humanities project should never make the audience feel dumb or unwelcome in that space. Fourth, names are important. Projects should be named after something meaningful to the targeted audiences

[Brennan 2016, 387].

Voces y Caras: Latinx Communities of North Florida is a project created with the community in mind. The title of the project was chosen by the first cohort of students to reflect both the languages that most of our students speak or understand. The name also refers to the visibility/invisibility of our community which has a voice that is not always heard. Caras (faces) represent the diversity of our people who cannot be cataloged or pigeonholed because they come from very different places with diverse experiences.

Adding to Brennan’s list of caveats, I propose that digital public humanities projects should also, when possible, involve non-digital components. The presence of Voces y Caras on digital platforms makes it available to many publics, but the full potential of the project for building community is realized through the physical/in-person events and exhibits. Those activities provide opportunities for students and community members to meet, discover a sense of solidarity, and see themselves and their stories represented. Having their work exhibited in important places on campus has also allowed Latinx students to feel recognized within the university.

In this way, Voces y Caras was designed to be both a digital project and a vehicle for building in-person connections, and the two modalities complement and build off each other. Celebrating the work of students and community members in the building of the digital archive motivates the in-person events. Those experiences, in turn, help create the relationships on campus and beyond that allow the project to continue to grow and thrive. 

The circumstances under which people migrate are as diverse as individuals themselves. However, discourses around immigration in the U.S. today tend to reduce immigrants to a single category that is often associated with the pejorative designation “illegal.” Such rhetoric deliberately positions immigrants as invaders and takers of resources and seeks to invisibilize, dehumanize, and deliberately erase migrants. This attempt to classify human beings helps elites and political powers launch smear campaigns that often serve to hide or divert attention from much larger problems. This old tactic has served many repressive governments around the world as a fascist tool to move the masses through hatred toward others. For this reason, projects that focus on human dignity are essential since they put a face to numbers and give voice to those who have been silenced or ignored.

In different ways, all the stories that Voces y Caras has collected over the years offer something that connects us to the human experience and breaks down stereotypes about immigrants in Florida. Part of the impact of the collection resides in the sheer variety of lives that it catalogues. Some of the stories intersect with current discourse around immigration, including accounts of crossing the United States-Mexico border, but do so in ways that directly counter the stereotypes about migrants that appear in the news and popular media. Others present visions of migration and adaptation that the popular imagination around immigration does not contemplate. In all cases, the interviews express in powerful ways the individuality of each interviewee and the uniqueness of their lived experience. I believe this variety and its power is best demonstrated by highlighting a few examples.

As an educational practice, digital oral history is an effective method for communities that have been historically marginalized. The interview as a learning tool lends itself as a way of recognizing, on the one hand, one’s own marginal situation, and on the other, the power of group learning. These two conditions are essential for critical education. This requires creating a community within the classroom and working together and learning from each other. This teaching method generates a cooperation that transcends the classroom experiences, as the friendship that arises from working together is one of the most important aspects of the project.

Voces y Caras is a model that can be replicated and adapted for teaching Heritage Speakers at other institutions located in places where minority groups feel isolated. Although the formal aspects of the language are important, approaches that focus on linguistic remediation can make Heritage speaker students feel inadequate, highlighting the differences between the formal registers of the language and the ways in which students and their families actually speak. By celebrating the mother tongue and its linguistic varieties — including the ways Spanish is spoken by Latinx in the U.S. — and by emphasizing the value of personal experience, students feel empowered and even begin to develop other language skills and registers. Learning the use of different technologies aids in the professionalization of these students, but beyond formal knowledge, the value of working in a community must be emphasized. It is a skill that increases their self-esteem, making profound changes in the students that allow them to not feel ashamed or inferior because they are different or due to the variety of language they speak. Challenging these notions is a decolonizing practice in education that has a long-lasting impact. Digital projects that keep record of our challenges and achievements are also emancipatory for communities that hear negative rhetoric about immigration not only through social media but in everyday conversation. 

As Latinos in the United States, we face many challenges, but through projects that promote togetherness and affection, we can certainly find solutions. Voces y Caras has had an evolution that has required a lot of reflection and partnerships. It aims to sentipensar humanity, an approach that is not always common in digital communities. Now in its fourteenth year, the project has thrived through a lot of intuition and love and has been sustainable thanks to the participation of a new cohort of students every spring, as well as the community members who give so generously of themselves. Voces y Caras serves as a counter space for Latinx students at UNF who unlearn by learning about empathy, dignity, and the power of community.