Recovering the U.S. hispanic literary heritage is a program that works with an international board of scholars, librarians, and archivists to constitute and make accessible an archive of cultural productions by Hispanic or Latino peoples who have existed since the sixteenth century in the areas that eventually became part of the United States. Founded in 1992 with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and subsequently funded by many other organizations, the project brought together scholars who wanted to make accessible to any interested person, with any level of education, the full range of texts generated by Hispanic peoples and to reform the concept of American nationhood. Depending on available funds, the program underwrites scholarly research, creates virtual and paper archives, microfilms for preservation, digitizes for accessibility, publishes material in conventional and digital form, organizes conferences, and maintains communications with some five thousand associates. The program has found, accessioned, and made accessible tens of thousands of books and documents that were heretofore unknown. It has digitized more than 500,000 items, ranging from published books and newspapers to manuscripts of varying lengths from the first encounters between Hispanic and indigenous peoples in North America to broadsides and photographs from the twentieth century—in short, all the materials that a literate community generates over centuries.