 It's my pleasure to introduce my friend, Salemota Casper of Latinos in Heritage Conservation or LHC. As a Mexican-American, I believe LHC is a crucial advocate for the preservation of Latino places, sites, and cultural heritage. All of us are fortunate that it has now been kicked into high gear thanks to a Mellon Foundation grant announced at LHC's Congreso last April. With that funding, LHC has been able to hire Salem as its first executive director. I cannot be more thrilled at her appointment and I am extremely honored to introduce her today. Salem is a first-generation Mexican-American who has long been passionate about bringing underrepresented histories to light. Some of you might have encountered Salem during her time at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, where she served for five years as a senior field officer. Among other projects, she helped save the Lulac Council 60 Clubhouse in my hometown of Houston. Thank you, Salem. But she has also done so much more. She has raised millions of dollars for the rehabilitation of historic sites. She helped to lead the Where Women Made History campaign. She most recently worked in municipal government, serving on a team to create the country's first Mexican-American Cultural Heritage Corridor, while also managing arts and culture ARPA funding during COVID-19. Salem also contributes to the preservation community beyond her day jobs. She currently serves on multiple boards, including Preservation Texas, the Friends of the Texas Historical Commission, the National Collaborative for Women's History sites, and my personal favorite, Texas Dance Hall Preservation. Salem has an MFA in Historic Preservation from the Savannah College of Art and Design. She also has a BA in Art History. Please join me in welcoming one of the true estrellas or stars of the preservation movement. Salem, take it away. Gracias, Sara. Y muchísimas gracias al National Trust for Historic Preservation por esta invitación. My interest in life has always been around history, places, storytelling, and whose stories being told. So I'm gonna share with you a piece of my own history and research that has deeply influenced my preservation approach. I'm also going to share the incredible work ahead for our new nonprofit, Latinos and Heritage Conservation, and the work that we're doing to elevate community voice and offset systemic inequities as we push for equity and inclusion and to practice that value's Latinx heritage. In 2013, I was attending Savannah College of Art and Design studying to get my Masters of Fine Arts in Historic Preservation. I was so excited to have been awarded the coveted Texas Historical Commissions Diversity Internship that summer. Not only would I be working with the National Trust, the State Historic Preservation Office, but I would also be in Austin and working on the very first Hispanic Tourism Guidebook. On my first day, I walk up to the Historic Paint Building and I was greeted by my boss, April Gardner. Along with my colleague, Joes Apata, we reviewed the project and our work ahead of us. We'd be doing site identification and travel writing. So I reached out to the 18 Latinx content experts which were advising us on the handbook. After hearing that I was extremely fascinated by the borderlands and women, one of them pointed me to Laredo, a small town in South Texas. Early on, I became obsessed with the social movements coming out of Laredo. I learned about an extraordinary individual named Leonor Villegas de Mecnón, also known as La Rebelle. She was born in 1876 and became a Spanish newspaper journalist and a feminist. She was a political activist who also worked as a teacher. Her work and fearlessness took over my research. I tell my husband about how in March, 1913, she heard gunfire and battle. The Mexican Revolution had made its way on the other side of the border in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Knowing that there'd be much bloodshed, she took to action and organized to help the revolutionary cause and Granza's army. She and a handful of other women crossed the Rio Grande, ran straight into gunfire to sneak wounded men back to safety in Laredo, Texas. Leonor's home had always been a social sanctuary for Mexican expats and political organizing, and now she converted it to a makeshift wartime hospital to nurse and heal the wounded. This all-volunteer brigade was called La Cruz Blanca or the White Cross. After the war, Leonor received five medals from the Mexican government for her valor and role in supporting the revolutionary effort. I was going to pursue this site so that I could add it to the guidebook, but then I learned that her home, La Cruz Blanca, which was located on Flores Street, no longer existed. How is it possible that this house owned by the significant figure not be considered important enough to save? This dead end of not finding extant buildings kept coming up for me. As a kid growing up in Great Line, Texas, I was fascinated with the history of my hometown and its people. As many of you know, Great Line is a thriving Main Street community, and Main Street was the backyard and the playground of my childhood. Our historic buildings, their mysteries, stories, always piqued my interest. My parents had moved here in 1971 from Sabina, Escuela, Mexico to make North Texas their new home. My father is a huge sports fanatic and started the first Latinx soccer league soon after moving here. As a kid, I attended Sunday soccer games and loved riding my bike up and down Main. I was a budding historian and never missed the opportunity to duck into the public library and to learn more about historical figures, my Mexican and indigenous roots. So I was in the third grade when I first set foot in the Great Line Historical Museum. Beyond excited, we walked a heritage park to our yellow wooden building. The docent welcomes us and I enter the dimly lip room. I see exhibits. I see the first doctor, our first mayor, agricultural exhibits like cotton which boosted my hometown. I see Confederate veterans and train conductors. What I notice is that it's mostly white men and white people and it's the telling of the pioneer and settler story of Great Line. I didn't see Tejas. I didn't see Mexican history. I didn't see indigenous history and I didn't see myself. I was frustrated and confused and I felt like an outsider within my own hometown. So flashback to my summer in Austin which began with me chasing the story of Leonor and it continued with me chasing after several other important figures whose lives were not deemed worthy enough of preserving. This roadblock and realization ended up shaping my master of fine arts thesis work. I wanted to examine why and how is it that this practice shapes and affects the local community and their US history. And more importantly, how do we change this? I assessed the national landscape of Latinx preservation, examined how our field has traditionally disregarded the Latinx narrative and experience. My thesis work concluded with proposals for a new and inclusive methodology with a framework that values and actively preserves Latinx heritage. The following summer in 2014, I received the Mildred Coladney Scholarship and interned with the National Trust to help find threatened and endangered Latinx heritage sites throughout the country. I was connected with other like-minded individuals who were also asking these questions. This included LHC co-founders and early co-chairs like Desiree Randa, Laura Dominguez, Dr. Sara Zanada-Gould, along with a dozen other practitioners. And we began deliberating how we as a collective could take action. We're a group of professionals and advocates working in historic preservation and allied fields such as academia, conservation, museum, the arts and planning. We started to create this synergy and we met for the first time at the National Trust Pass Forward Conference in Savannah, Georgia in 2014. For this first gathering, we had 30 other individuals for this lively one-hour session. It was exhilarating to discuss the need to support the Latinx preservation movement within our own field. We held many breakouts and brainstormed and by the end of 60 minutes, we knew that we needed a national network. That evening, a dozen of us had a very well-deserved celebration. Eddie Torres, architect and trust advisor from Chicago, proposed this ambitious idea that we host our own national conference in just six months in Tucson, Arizona. So we got to work. In May 2015, our emerging group, Latinos and Heritage Conservation, held our very first convening and it was in partnership with Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation. The support was more that we anticipated and we ended up having to change venues a few times. Over a period of two days, we met and walked Tucson to learn more about Latinx preservation strategies. We had a shared interest in preserving historic Latinx sites and sustaining the living cultural heritage of Latinx communities. We also wanted to promote Latinx leadership and participation within the profession. Overall, our goals were to define a governance structure for LHC, consider roles, responsibilities, programs and advocacy. We also solidified our mission and vision which would affirm our work moving forward. With nearly 100 Latinx elders, practitioners, advisors, leaders, scholars, the room resonated with a feeling of community. And for all of us, we felt like we finally found our hente. In 2018, we had our third national convening in Providence, Rhode Island, marking our first conference in New England. We partnered with Rhode Island, Latino Arts and the SHPO and held a gathering of over 200 individuals. There we elevated the histories and preservation work of individuals from Columbia, Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Puerto Rico. As we reflected on the 50 year anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act, we examined how national trends and urgent issues and heritage conservation within Latinx communities and underrepresented work was affecting our own worlds and our communities locally. We asked, who is this act serving and who is it not? We celebrated how new and recent arrivals were preserving their own heritage. During the Corazon the Providence tour, we explored La Brua Street or Broad Street and we heard about Josefina Rosario known as Doña Cefa, a Dominican who migrated to Providence and opened her first Cefas market in 1959. This was Rhode Island's first Latinx bodega in the state. Doña Cefa and her husband's store served Latinx foods and sold Spanish newspapers from Doña Cefa's motherland. The bodega and Doña Cefa acted as a community hub. This was where they welcomed and advised new immigrants by helping with housing, registering them to vote and sharing the ins and outs of getting settled in Rhode Island. This past April, we held LHC's fourth national conference which we're now calling Congreso in Denver, Colorado. With over 230 people, we've met in the beautiful History Colorado Museum with our partner Historic Denver. We highlighted Latinx heritage work in the inner mountain region, its diverse geography, cultures, ecological zones, histories and traditions. It was also a milestone moment as we celebrated our new chapter. For the past eight years, we've been a passionate all volunteer group and we recently became a nonprofit. In Denver, LHC announced that with support from the Mellon Foundation, we'd be hiring our organization's inaugural staff with me as the new executive director. Collectively, we reflected on democratizing historic preservation and shared innovative strategies to preserve Latinx heritage in rural and urban communities and within public lands. We ended the conference with walking tours in Denver's historic west side. And there we learned about the history and evolution of the land from indigenous to the Chicano-Chicana movement and Yudla Alma Lincoln Park Historic Cultural District and Chicano-Chicana murals which still tells the story today. Latinos and Heritage Conservation is the leading national nonprofit organization that works for the preservation of Latinx places, stories and cultural heritage in the United States. We are preserving historic Latinx sites, sustaining the living cultural heritage of Latinx communities and promoting Latinx leadership and participation within communities and the profession. We envision a just world that values Latinx heritage, people and places. Rooted in social justice, LHC strives to transform the preservation movement at a national scale through creative projects and intergenerational collaborations that will amplify Latinx voices and perspectives. And here's how we're going about it. The Abuelas Project is a digital humanities, multi-year project that will identify, collect, share stories about places that matter most to Latinx communities in the United States and Puerto Rico. It will be something accessible at all levels to community and something that even my mother can use. Recognizing that our own sites have historically been excluded from historic designations and that we all have abuelas or grandmothers or strong matriarchs in our families, this project pays homage to those leaders that have shared our family histories across dinner tables and at family gatherings to help keep our own history alive. Our final product will be a story-driven, map-based online platform that functions as a grassroots historical registry for significant Latinx places. Our Latinx preservation toolkit will be the first of its kind. It will be a free community resource revolving around a print and digital handbook and short bilingual videos that will weigh the advantages of historic preservation and help to demystify the formal processes and languages that we use. It will highlight Latinx heritage conservation success stories and it'll share best practices for place-based advocacy. For example, this toolkit can help be an aid for community leaders in our vessel and help guide them on protecting their sacred cultural body oils from arena footprints over eager developers and in its domain or from the wrecking ball. Our goal is to produce an accessible educational resource in both English and in Spanish. And it's going to help Latinx community and organizations and urban and rural areas to help advocate for the protection of Latinx historic sites and other tangible and intangible resources. We're so excited to share that in 2024, Congreso will be in Miami. Though it's not lost on us that the state of Florida and Puerto Rico has sustained devastating losses from multiple hurricanes over the past few months. This of course includes tragic loss of life, infrastructure, housing, but also irreplaceable heritage. It makes our mission even more profound as we focus and study on regional methodologies, share impressive work that's rooted in community. We'll discuss on strategies against commercial gentrification, environmental health, resilience, disaster relief such as sea level rise for historic communities in zonas like in Little Havana, Gaia Ocho, Miami Day and the broader Southeast as well as Puerto Rico. This biennial conference of Latinx community leaders, advocates, allies and historic preservation is the only national event dedicated to the Latinx preservation movement. So I want you to imagine the Heritage and Pioneer Museum in Midtown America but today it's just now called a museum. There's a Dominican girl with her lunchbox and perfect jungles ready to go to her school trip. She walks into a museum. Instead of seeing the town's first white doctor, mayor, war heroes or settlers, she sees her own heritage being represented. She sees Doña Fejas Bodega, the Guatemalan restaurant located on Gaia Ocho. She connects Neurals and my father's soccer league. She sees her own heritage and she knows that she belongs. Latinx stories have been excluded from the narrative and mainstream preservation practices. That's why we invite you to support Latinos and Heritage Conservation, join our movement and help push for transformative change. Start with your local community. Ask them to lead you by sharing the places that matter most to them. Some may be known and some may be unknown and let those stories and sites be the ones that you help to preserve. Everyone in this room knows that the histories we uplift help us understand ourselves as human beings and influence who we are within our spaces. I'm asking you to integrate Latinx Heritage into your daily practice and commit to decolonizing this work. Tell the stories of Latinx individuals and celebrate our contributions to this country by preserving our history. Thank you for listening today.