During its 2008 annual meeting at mla headquarters, the committee on the literatures of people of color in the united states and Canada (CLPC) took up the question of archival work in the study of ethnic literatures. After much discussion of the various ways ethnic literatures are rendered “illiterate” or unreadable, the CLPC proposed a session titled “Practices of the Ethnic Archive” for the 2009 MLA Convention in Philadelphia. That session revealed, and for some of us confirmed, that scholarly discourse on the archive continues, for the most part, to ignore the ethnic archive as distinct from its white, European counterpart. Four of the five essays included here (Carr, Cruz, Kaufman, and Washburn) grew from the conversation the session engendered; the PMLA editorial board invited Nicolás Kanellos, founder and director of the project Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, to participate in the discussion as well. We are grateful to the contributors for their insights about what the ethnic archive reveals and about the unintended consequences of applying to its holdings the theoretical practices informing archival studies writ large.
