Intern and Fellow Highlights: Hermán Luis Chávez

Hermán standing under the arches of Royce Hall at UCLA.

Courtesy of Steven Ruiz.

You may have heard of cultural resources, but what exactly does this work entail and what type of work do interns and fellows do? Find out through this intern and fellow highlight series that features the work of our interns and fellows service wide.

Everyone has a personal connection to cultural resources. Cultural resources help us define what makes us human through understanding the evidence we leave behind and continue to create today. This can include anything from archives, archaeological sites, museum collections, structures and cultural landscapes, and resources with significance to a group of people traditionally associated with them.

To learn more about cultural resources, visit the Cultural Resources, Partnerships, and Science Directorate page.

So... What exactly does a cultural resource internship look like?

Interns and fellows work with multiple offices, programs, and parks through partner organizations such as the American Conservation Experience (ACE) and National Council for Preservation Education (NCPE). They work on various projects that range from tribal consultation and policy to telling the stories of women in World War II and even to connecting local communities with public history.

Their work adds value to the National Park Service and supports our mission to preserve for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.

Meet Hermán Luis Chávez (they/elle), who is the National Council for Preservation Education Latino Heritage Cultural Resources intern at the NPS Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education (CROIE).

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

Hola! I’m a queer Latinx student and scholar passionate about music, sound, queerness, Bolivia, and U.S. Latinx issues in historiography, performance, and storytelling. I am currently a Master’s student at King’s College London studying Musicology and Ethnomusicology, having recently graduated from UCLA where I studied music, literature, and ethnic studies. My road to working in cultural heritage is a winding one: I began my university studies in the field of music education in Colorado, and my first experiences in public work were with my local library district and a literary arts non-profit, where I helped to expand resources and services to Latinx and youth communities. These early internship experiences lit a passion in me for project-based public humanities work while I simultaneously found my scholarly interest in the field of ethnomusicology. During the pandemic, I transferred to UCLA to pursue ethnomusicology and began working for the Hispanic Reading Room at the Library of Congress, where I was able to collaborate on many projects including A Latinx Resource Guide: Civil Rights Cases and Events in the United States and La Biblioteca Season 2. Creating a libguide and a podcast season were not only fun experiences, but they also solidified my conviction to pursue public and accessible work in my career. Beyond my digital public work, I’ve kept on teaching, including bilingual art museum facilitation, English composition tutoring, and an undergraduate course on the term Latinx. I enjoy exploring London, playing cello in various symphonies, reading poetry, taste-testing coffeeshops, and sharing my life with my friends and family.

Hermán standing under arches decorated with pink flowers and leaves in London.

Courtesy of Yui Washizu.

Can you tell us a little bit about what you do in your position?

Here at the Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation of Education, I collaborate with the spectacular Heritage Education Fellow Melissa Hurtado on content for the upcoming new Latino Heritage Subject Site. Primarily, I am working on Oíste? Listening to the Salsa Stories of Afro Latin Music, a series of projects that highlight the importance of salsa music in American history. These include articles, exhibit-style resources on people and objects, and a podcast, among others. Through these projects, we hope to share how salsa is tied to the story of American Latinos across the country—various spaces and places have been sites of expression and transformation for people who use salsa to connect with one another, share who they are, and speak to community history. I’ll also be supporting with other Latino heritage content, such as exploring the various identity terms used to refer to those who have Spanish or Latin American heritage and live in the United States. From Hispanic to Latino to Latinx, we can understand how our community has named themselves and been named by others, and what effects this has on understanding American history and the role of the Park Service. Although my position is fully remote, I’m happy to be working with the amazing folks at CROIE!

If you met a younger version of yourself, what would you tell them about your current career trajectory?

It is all about the slipperiness of interdisciplinarity. It is too much to wrestle with belonging to just one field. I am not committing only to education, or only to music, or only to literature, or only to cultural studies, or only to anything. There are ways to combine passions and methods and fields in ways that are still interesting and useful for yourself and for others. The younger version of me would be surprised to find out that someone who thought they would be a high school orchestra teacher is now a graduate student working on salsa music and Latino heritage for the Park Service—I would tell them that it’s exciting and useful to explore many types of educational engagement, and that it will make them better in the end. This is just the beginning of what is hopefully a long and fruitful career in combining scholarship, storytelling, and education.

How do you see the field of cultural resources changing in the coming years?

I hope that the field of cultural resources heads in a direction that honors communities that have been historically excluded through engaged storytelling, archival repatriation/rematriation, and focused funding. Projects like the one I’m working on are what we need more of: accessible, funded, and community-oriented. Though they are tough, I would love for us to work together to answer questions like: What does it mean to present tangible and intangible heritage jointly in exhibits and programs? How can we reduce barriers to access to learning not only about our own communities, but also about other Americans and cultures across the globe? How can we honor heritage while also materially respecting and affirming the lineages and trajectories of the cultures to which those heritages belong? Of course, there are no easy answers, but I think if we keep concepts like these in mind, our work will be all the more conscious. I also hope that we think about complicating the qualifications of who gets to talk about history and how. It is my dream that in the future, we’ll be closer to a synergy of access, presentation, and community in the work that we in cultural resources accomplish.

The brick building where the Department of Music is located on the Strand campus of King’s College London.

Courtesy of Hermán Luis Chavez.

Where do you hope to see yourself in the future?

The future I envision for myself is informed by my current set of values and experiences. At the moment, my strongest alliances are to research within cultural studies and to educational projects. My dream is to hold a career where I can explore ethnographic, historical, and discursive curiosities while working with students and creating educational content. I’m really interested in doing work that is, on the one hand, rigorously intellectual, and, on the other, accessible and understandable. In the immediate future I am interested in pursuing a PhD to engage in a long-term individual research project and continue developing my pedagogical skills. Beyond that, I aspire for a dynamic career of research, teaching, and creativity. I’m not sure where exactly that will take me—perhaps a university, a museum, or even the Park Service! Regardless of where I end up, I do know that I dream of one day opening and developing an archive of Bolivian music, art, literature, and culture for everyone to learn about the country I hold so close to heart.

Hermán's Previous Digital Work

Chavez, Herman. 2022. “Composing Bolivia: The Politics and Perspectives of Mestizaje and Indigenismo in Atiliano Auza León’s Historia de la Música Boliviana.” Aleph, UCLA Undergraduate Research Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences 19. https://doi.org/10.5070/L619158737

2021 “Season 2: A Latinx Resource Guide: Civil Rights Cases and Events,” La Biblioteca Podcast, Hispanic Reading Room, United States Library of Congress. Washington, DC. With Maria Guadalupe Partida.

2021“A Latinx Resource Guide: Civil Rights Cases and Events in the United States,” Hispanic Reading Room, United States Library of Congress. Washington, DC. With Maria Guadalupe Partida.