 ¿Dónde está el agente secreto? ¿Para quién trabaja el agente secreto? ¿Quién es el agente secreto? Yo soy el agente secreto. Actually, I am not the agente secreto. My name is Christine Hernandez, and I'm the curator for Special Collections at Tulane University's Latin American Library. Whether you are a native Spanish speaker, a fluent non-native speaker, or just know enough to understand some basic words in Spanish, I bet you are familiar with the term telenovela. Yes, that genre of Spanish-language television soap operas known for the timeliness of their storylines and a healthy supply of melodrama. Well, before television became commonplace and telenovela is a staple of television programming, soap operas lived on the radio. In Spanish, they are called rodent novellas. And it was through daily and weekly radio programs that Spanish-speaking audiences throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, and the rest of the Spanish-speaking world would have listened to their favorite rodent novella shows as well as other news, informational, and entertainment programs as they went about their daily lives at home and at work in the cities and in the countryside. During the years between 1963 and 1970, America's Productions Incorporated, ACPE for short, founded by Luis J. Buery and based in Miami, Florida, produced, licensed, and distributed Spanish-language radio programming throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, and parts of Europe. Buery hired some of the best local technical writing and acting talent, most of whom were recent emigres from Cuba, the wider Caribbean, and from Mexico. ACPE's specialty was the rodent novella, though the company also produced comedies, suspense, informational, documentary, and journalistic programs for radio. According to Buery, some of ACPE's earliest contract work was to produce anti-communist programs for broadcast over the U.S. government's Voice of America radio. But the work that kept ACPE profitable and successful throughout the 1960s was entertainment. Original rodent novella stories and adapted popular works translated into Spanish that promoted democratic ideals like self-determination, free enterprise, and open expression. By the time ACPE closed its doors in 1970, audiences had long before begun to spend more time watching television and less time listening to radio. And ACPE's rodent novella soon disappeared from the airwaves replaced by the tele novella. But today the radio soaps are back thanks to generous support from the Latin American Research Resources Project, part of the Global Resources initiatives of the Center for Research Libraries, and a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources made possible by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Latin American Library has recently published 41 of ACPE's radio programs, most in their entirety and with titles like Agente Secreto 009, Secret Agent 009, Amarga Espera, A Bitter Awaiting, Odio en la Sangre, Hatred in the Blood, y Cuando Amor es Pecado, When Love is a Sin. These soaps and a selection of other ACPE programs are now available to listen to again via the online collection of Spanish language radio soaps in the Luis J. Buerri and Menin Bujones Buerri collection of Cuban American radio novellas hosted in the Tulane University Digital Library. Access the online collection to the Latin American Library's digital collections page at its website, lal.tulane.edu. The online collection currently hosts only a third of the almost 9,000 total audio recordings contained in the physical collection along with photograph images and API promotional materials and print. In the coming years, we will continue to digitize and publish additional programs to the online collection. But for now, we welcome everyone to enjoy again the listening pleasure of the Radio Novella.