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The project grew out of the work developed over the past twenty years by Nicolás Kanellos and the scholars on the Recovery Project Advisory Board who recognized that a vast corpus of writing by U.S. Hispanics prior to 1960 remained virtually unknown and scattered across the country. In 1990, they brought together leading scholars of U.S. Hispanic literary history for a conference to develop strategic plans for the recovery of that legacy. The Rockefeller Foundation sponsored the conference, the design of the project, and donated base funding for ten years. Soon thereafter, AT&T Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The Meadows Foundation, and The National Endowment for the Humanities also joined in support of the project.

Nicolás Kanellos is the Brown Foundation Professor of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of Houston and founder-director of Arte Público Press, the oldest and most accomplished publisher of U.S. Hispanic literature. He is a fellow of the Ford, Lilly and Gulbenkian Foundations and of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1988, he was awarded the White House Hispanic Heritage Award, and in 1989 the American Book Award in the publisher/editor category. Author of numerous books on U.S. Hispanic literature and theatre, Dr. Kanellos was appointed in 1994 by President Bill Clinton and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve on the National Council on the Humanities.