The Arhoolie Foundation's Strachwitz Frontera Collection of commercially produced Mexican and Mexican-American recordings (the Frontera Collection) is the largest repository of Mexican and Mexican-American vernacular recordings in existence. With funding from Los Tigres del Norte Foundation the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center has sponsored the digitization of the first section of the collection by the Arhoolie Foundation. These performances were recorded primarily in the United States and Mexico and issued on 78 rpm phonograph recordings during the first half of the twentieth century. This vast digitized collection of approximately 30,000 recordings is now available to researchers and the general public.

In 2006 the Arhoolie Foundation received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize an additional 20,000 performances from the collection of 45 rpm phonograph recordings. Approximately half of these additional recordings are available (as of April 2009) with the remainder to be added to the web site with the next few months. This represents less than half of the 45 rpm discs in the collection and further funding will be required to complete the project.

By gathering these rare and very fragile recordings together in an easily accessible form, and providing direct and full access to these primary source materials, the archive will enable wide-ranging research in Mexican and Mexican-American culture. The lyrics, music, and tales in the Frontera digital archive are accessible via the World Wide Web.