Pontiac Hispanic History Preservation Project

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Pontiac Hispanic History Preservation Project is the result of a committee’s effort to gather and catalog the Latino history of the city of Pontiac, MI. The committee was begun by Martha Padilla and is co-chaired by her and Willie Martinez^[1].

Thus far the project has uncovered the earliest Puerto Ricans coming to Pontiac in the 1940s and Mexican's as early as the 1920s. It has gathered newspaper clippings, video and audio recordings, pictures, documents from the Pontiac Latin Affairs office (now closed), and even plan to absorb the archives of the Azteca Boxing Center, a local boxing training facility.

[edit] Origins

Martha says she was prompted to begin the project after trying to organize her husband’s old papers. Hector Padilla, a native Puerto Rican, had passed on and she felt that the history contained in papers from his tenure as the first Latino city commissioner, as well as lobbying for migrant worker conditions and his efforts in forming the Hispanic Congressional Caucus, were important to the community and needed to be put somewhere.

The effort of Martha was expanded as she realized that others in the Latino community deserve recognition. Fear that the records of who has done what would be lost spurred Willie Martinez and others to join Padilla in gathering stories and history of the Latino community at large.