Brooklyn College Library LibGuides Home: Puerto Rican and Latino Studies: Primary Sources

Freely Accessible Repositories - require no login

BIBLIOTECA DIGITAL HISPÁNICA
Find manuscripts, maps, recordings, images and other original content.
Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera (Princeton University)
Includes Pamphlets, Flyers, Posters, Leaflets, Brochures, Serials, Postcards, Stickers, Reports, Pedagogical materials,
Electoral paraphernalia, Calendars and more.
Digital Library of the Caribbean
dLOC works with partners around the world to preserve and provide access to cultural, historical, legal, and governmental research materials. dLOC currently hosts 41,000 items including newspapers, archives of Caribbean leaders and governments, official documents, documentation and numeric data for ecosystems, scientific scholarship, historic and contemporary maps, oral and popular histories, travel accounts, literature and poetry, musical expressions, and artifacts.
International Center for the Arts of The Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Explore over 8,000 Documents of 20th and 21st⁠-⁠century art in Latin America, the Caribbean, and among US Latino communities.

Library of Congress Digital Collections This link opens in a new window
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with millions of books, films and video, audio recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office.
The digital collections comprise millions of items including books, newspapers, manuscripts, prints and photos, maps, musical scores, films, sound recordings and more.
New York City Municipal Archives Online Gallery This link opens in a new window
The New York City Municipal Archives Online Gallery provides free and open research access to over 870,000 items digitized from the Municipal Archives collections, including photographs, maps, motion-pictures and audio recordings. The holdings are arranged by collection; or you may search All Collections by keyword or any of the advanced search criteria.

LACLI (Latin American, Caribbean, U.S. Latinx, and Iberian Free Online Resources)
Explore collections by subject, country, language, time period and more to support original research projects.
Tulane University Digital Library
Collections include Early Images of Latin America, French Colonial, Spanish Colonial, and Nineteenth-Century Louisiana Documents, The Louis J. Boeri and Minín Bujones Boeri Collection of Cuban-American Radionovelas, 1963-1970, Mesoamerican Painted Manuscripts at the Latin American Library and Mexican Incunabula (1559-1600) at the Latin American Library.

Oral History

Oral history provides some of the best primary material you can use for your research. First hand accounts by the people who were there when significant events happened, or who were the event makers themselves, give an important glimpse into a time and place. Sample some of the oral histories below which highlight events shaping PRLS, or try a search in Google with a person's name or the name of an event along with the term "oral history" and see what you find.

Proyecto historias orales cayeyanas: Vivencias y resistencias ( Cayey Oral Histories Project: Experiences and Resistances)
A virtual interactive exhibit created by the Colectivo Casco Urbano de Cayey that maps oral histories with women about the urban hub of Cayey, Puerto Rico.

Speeches and Interviews

Like oral history, speeches and interviews give us a chance to hear from people in their own words, unedited. Listen to the important words of these Latinx history makers and search for others on your own using Google. You can also go straight into YouTube and find many examples of speakers addressing issues of the day.

Comedy as Social Justice Reporting

Comedians are often the spokes people of their time, bringing to the surface important social issues that reflect their own experiences or the experiences of their people. Although a good comedian will work hard on the material, testing it and perfecting it, what they say will give the listener a first hand look at a life as it has been lived, exaggerated, or not, for the cause of humor.

Subscription Resources - links below require login

Selected Historic Newspapers

Manuscripts and Documents

Gale Primary Sources: Archives Unbound This link opens in a new window
Archives Unbound includes digital collections of historical documents.
Gale Primary Sources This link opens in a new window
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Search for primary sources in Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) and the Making of the Modern World.
CUNY Digital History Archive - Puerto Rican Studies at Brooklyn College This link opens in a new window
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This Puerto Rican Studies at Brooklyn College Collection (PRSBC) focuses on a mostly Puerto Rican led student movement at CUNY during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The collection includes oral history interviews with pioneering student-activists, photographs of participants and important events, and archival materials.
U.S. History (Gale in Context) This link opens in a new window
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U.S. History In Context is for those seeking contextual information on hundreds of the most significant people, events and topics in U.S. History. Content includes reference works, millions of news and periodical articles, and more than 5,000 rare and vital primary source documents that range from slave journals to presidential papers.
World History (Gale in Context) This link opens in a new window
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World History In Context delivers a chronicle of the great cultures and societies that have formed the history of the human race. Rare primary sources, reliable reference and multi-media content put this vast topic into context for students. Content is aligned with state and national curriculum standards and is cross searchable with U.S. History In Context.
Harper's Weekly This link opens in a new window
This database enables you to directly experience the richness and historical significance of Harper's Weekly, America's leading 19th century illustrated newspaper. Harper's Weekly is an important primary resource for examining 19th-century America: it is a comprehensive, week-to-week chronological record of what happened worldwide in the last half of the nineteenth century. Dates range from 1857-1912, and cover the Civil War era through the end of the Gilded Age. Users can browse by volume/issue, can search full-text with the help of the databases thesaurus, and can use one of the indexed finding aids.
Gale Primary Sources: Making of the Modern World This link opens in a new window
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This database provides digital facsimile images of every page of over 61,000 works of literature on the history of economics, business, and trade published from 1450 through 1914. Full-text searching on more than 11 million pages provides researchers unparalleled access to this vast collection of material on commerce, finance, social conditions, politics, trade and transport, as these issues relate to the development of the modern, Western world. Titles are in English, as well as in languages other than English. Users can also find a helpful chronology, as well as brief, encyclopedic-style historical essays for issues important to this field.
Gale Primary Sources: Meriam Report on Indian Administration and the Survey of Conditions of the Indians in the U.S. This link opens in a new window
This collection comprises two sets of documents that helped the response to 40 years of failed Native American policies. The first is the full text of the report entitled The Problem of Indian Administration, better known as the Meriam Report.
New York Amsterdam News: 1922-2010 (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
This historical newspaper provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of the politics, society and events of the time.
Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window
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Nineteenth Century Collections Online is a multi-year global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the long nineteenth century. It consists of monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, photographs, statistics, and other kinds of documents in both Western and non-Western languages.
Gale Primary Sources: Ralph J Bunche Oral Histories Collection on Civil Rights Movement (formerly Civil Rights Doc Project (CRDP)) This link opens in a new window
The Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection from the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center is a unique resource for the study of the era of the American civil rights movement. Included here are transcriptions of close to 700 interviews with those who made history in the struggles for voting rights, against discrimination in housing, for the desegregation of the schools, to expose racism in hiring, in defiance of police brutality, and to address poverty in the African American communities.

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Puerto Rican and Latino Studies: Primary Sources

Primary Resources