Juan Antonio Cuellar - Frontera Collection Curator at Arhoolie Foundation

Juan Antonio Cuéllar has been responsible for digitizing the most extensive collection of Mexican and Mexican American recordings in the world known as The Strachwitz Frontera Collection. Since February 2002, Cuéllar has personally digitized, listened to, and archived over 130k songs, which are currently available through the UCLA Digital Library.  Born in Los Caños, Aguascalientes, he immigrated with his family to Northern California to start a new life.  He was raised in Santa Cruz and eventually moved to San Francisco to attend the California Culinary Academy where he worked the hotel circuit in and around San Francisco until he took another creative outlet, and that was playing trombone for San Francisco-based bilingual Punk band, La Plebe.  Cuellar is in the finishing stages of digitizing the collection and will start on the next phase which is to disseminate the knowledge he has acquired over the last 20 years of digitizing and is transitioning into a new position as the Frontera Collection Curator at the Arhoolie Foundation.  This past September marked the first of what will be many exhibitions curated by Cuellar called "Rumo A California."  The exhibit looks at California record labels and how they documented and promoted Mexican music in the state over the last 100 years. Frontera YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@fronteracollection4016 Frontera Collection at UCLA: https://frontera.library.ucla.edu/ Rumbo a California Online Exhibition: https://rumboacalifornia.org/ Lydia Mendoza song: Canta, Pajarito Canta https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqVj0uhcIJI&ab_channel=FronteraCollection Lydia Mendoza Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJv1UYhNlyyA0KEjbJNHztPZLCirum1vZ