He’s attained fame as an award-winning actor and musician, founded a political party and run for President of his native Panama, and served as the Panamanian Minister of Tourism, but now Rubén Blades, LLM ’85, will add another credit to his résumé—Harvard College Library benefactor. Earlier this month, Blades agreed to give his personal papers, including rare recordings of rehearsals and concerts, interviews and films, books, and other material, to the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library. The gift “marks the opening of a whole new vein of intellectual pursuit and a new opportunity for study of Latin American popular culture,” said Virginia Danielson, Richard F. French Librarian of the Loeb Music Library.

The arrival of the archive at Loeb Music Library is largely the result of the work of two people: José Massó, host of the popular radio program ¡Con Salsa! at WBUR, and Alison Weinstock, a Blades fan, who created maestravida.com, an online discography and song reference guide dedicated to Blades’ career. “José and Alison approached the Latin American, Spanish, and Portuguese Division of Widener with the idea of giving the material they had amassed to Harvard,” Danielson said. “Rubén liked the idea, and agreed to give his own material as well. . . . Although it isn’t all music, a lot of it is, so we decided to bring it to the Music Library.”

Though she is not an archivist or librarian, the first hands the material will pass through as it comes in will be Weinstock’s. As part of the gift, she was named by Blades as the coordinator of the Rubén Blades Archive at Harvard University, and she will work with Danielson and other library staff to guide the collection to Harvard.

“This collection will come to us gradually, over a period of years,” Danielson said. “Right now, the material that’s come in is mostly commercial productions, but the next things we’ll get are unique video and audio recordings. That’ll be the really interesting phase. It would be fair to say we expect the archive to entail hundreds of recordings.”

The collection is also a sign of HCL’s growing interest in popular culture, particularly in Spanish-speaking America. “Associate Librarian of Harvard College for Collection Development Dan Hazen and Lynn Shirey, the librarian for Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, have led a really aggressive acquisitions program in the Spanish-speaking world in recent years,” Danielson said. “It’s not just normal books and serious journals, but newspapers and popular media. The Music Library very much wants to be part of the development of a good Hispanic collection.”