Research Guides: Latin American Studies: NYU Special Collections

Special Collections

Special collections encompass the university's rare and unique primary source materials that require specialized preservation and care. You are encouraged to use them to further your research. Below you will find a range of collections from the archival to the digital.

Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library

The Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL) is the first major digital video library of performance practices in the Americas. Created in 2005, HIDVL began as an effort to preserve political performance works from the Americas, making these cultural documents available worldwide. This growing repository guarantees historical preservation and free access to over 1000 hours of documentation. Working alongside artists, scholars, and activists, HIDVL creates trilingual Profiles (English, Spanish and Portuguese) for each Collection, contextualizing the videos with production information, synopses, image galleries, interviews, bibliographies and more. Creators retain the copyright to their contributions, and the original materials, which are returned after digitization. With documentation spanning the 1970’s to the present, HIDVL seeks Collections that promote dialogue and deeper understandings of performance and politics in the Americas.

Tamiment’s Latin American Collections

The Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, located on the library's second floor, collects material in all formats documenting the history of labor, the Left, political radicalism, and social movements in the United States, with particular strengths in communism, anarchism, and socialism. The following represents just a selection of this impressive collection that pertains to Latin America and the Caribbean.

Below you will find each collection's finding aid, a document that details the types of materials and scope of each collection. To view these materials, please make an appointment with Special Collections. Be sure to include the call number (ex: TAM 517) listed next to each collection's name in your email.

Make an appointment with NYU Special Collections

Philip Agee Papers (TAM.517)
Agee (1935–2008) was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case officer and writer, best known as the author of Inside the Company: CIA Diary (1975), which identifed about 250 CIA officers, front companies and foreign agents then or previously working for the United States. Agee joined the CIA in 1957, and over the following decade had postings in Washington, D.C., Ecuador, Uruguay, and Mexico. After resigning from the Agency in 1968, he became a leading opponent of CIA practices. The collection contains: biographical materials, correspondence, datebooks, documents obtained under the FOIA Act, notably CIA documents, as well as FBI and State Department documents; legal materials from various cases in which Agee was the plaintiff; lectures and university teaching files.
Estela and Ernesto Bravo Film and Video Collection (TAM.616)
Estela Bravo (1933-) is an American-born documentary filmmaker who has been creating films on Cuba and Latin America with her husband Ernesto Bravo since the 1980s. Estela and Ernesto moved to Cuba in the early-1960s and as a result, many of their films focus on political and cultural relations between the United States and Cuba. The collection contains over 1,300 video tapes and film reels recorded by Bravo throughout her career. In addition to full-length features and video footage, the collection contains a small number of ephemera, correspondence, home movies, and documentation related to the promotion of Bravo’s films. Footage in this collection consists of unedited interviews with political leaders and celebrities; scenes of historical events, marches, demonstrations, and performances; battle footage; clips from Cuba’s State Council archives; speeches by Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, and others; and background footage (b-roll) used in finished films.
Marvin Leiner Papers (TAM.607)
Marvin Leiner is a scholar of Cuban education and the author of several books on educational reforms in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. The collection primarily consists of research Leiner conducted while living in Cuba during the 1968-1969 school year and during his many return visits in the 1970s and 1980s. Collection materials consist of reel-to-reel audio tapes, audiocassette tapes, slides, photographs, film, reels, diaries, field notes, newspaper clippings, and early manuscript drafts.
Liberation News Service Photographs (Photos.022)
Liberation News Service (LNS) (1967-1981), a left-wing news agency, offered its subscribers, mostly college and underground newspapers, news packets, including photographs, twice a week. Journalists and photographers from the United States and around the world supplied the LNS with stories and images documenting the progressive movements and counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. International coverage focuses on national liberation movements, with emphasis on Vietnam and China. Includes images from Chile and Cuba from the 1960s and 1970s.
Daily Worker Photographs Collection (Photos.223)
The official organ of the Communist Party, USA, the Daily Worker's editorial positions reflected the policies of the Communist Party. At the same time the paper also attempted to speak to the broad left-wing community in the United States that included labor, civil rights, and peace activists, with stories covering a wide range of events, organizations and individuals in the United States and around the world.
North American Congress on Latin American Records (TAM.683)
The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) is a nonprofit organization that offers information and policy analysis on Latin America and its relationship with the United States, advocating for freedom from oppression and injustice in the region. Since its founding in 1966, NACLA's journalistic activism has brought English-language information to a variety of interested parties, including policy makers, students, and Latin Americanists. This collection consists of materials created and collected by NACLA that document the organization's policy and advocacy efforts, including memoranda, newspaper articles, photographs and other visual materials, publications produced and distributed by NACLA, and pamphlets and other ephemera collected by NACLA. Although most Latin American countries are represented, the majority of the materials concern El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua during the countries' respective civil war years.
Records of the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York (TAM.580)
The Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York (1985-2002), and its member organizations worked to support the Sandinista Revolution and to protest U.S. support of the counter-revolutionary military movement, aka the Contras, who also killed civilian supporters of the revolution, targeting medical and educational personnel in particular. The collection holds the records of the NSN and its member organizations, most notably the NY-Nicaragua Construction Brigade, and includes newsletters, event notices, fundraising letters, correspondence, reports, membership and financial information, grant applications, and reference material about Nicaragua and related issues.
Palante (Digitized Newspaper)
Palante (1970 - 1976) was a bilingual newspaper published by the Young Lords Party. The group was founded in July 1969 as the New York chapter of the Young Lords Organization and renamed itself in May 1970 after separating from the Chicago Young Lords. In July 1972, the Young Lords Party became the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization. Palante focused on the Puerto Rican independence movement, the oppression of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos in the United States, and global struggles for liberation.
Jesusa Rodriguez Papers (TAM.592)
Laura María de Jesús Rodríguez Ramírez, known as Jesusa Rodríguez (born 1955 in Mexico City) is a director, actress, playwright, performance artist, scenographer, social activist, and senator (Moreno Party) in Mexico's Congress. She and her partner, Argentine singer/actress Liliana Felipe, operated El Hábito and Teatro de la Capilla, alternative performances spaces in the Coyoacán municipality of Mexico City, until 2005. Rodríguez also contributes regularly to Mexico's most important feminist journal, Debate Feminista. This collection contains scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, magazines, photographs, contact sheets, programs and other ephemera, certificates, ID cards, diagrams, drafts and revisions of scripts, sketches, notes, sheet music, financial budgets, and correspondence from between 1977-2011 related to the creation and development of Rodríguez's works as a director, playwright, and performance artist. The collection also contains materials relating to her work as a political and social activist, as documented by flyers, handouts, printed PowerPoint slides, articles, and optical discs containing video. There are also empowerment workshop materials and participant letters.
Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives Collection of Latin America Serials (TAM.770)
This collection contains over 250 titles published in Latin America, the United States, and other countries on politics, social issues, and culture in Latin America in the 20th century. The collection dates between 1937 and 2008, with the bulk of the material dating from the 1960s through the 1990s. Topics include civil wars and revolutions in Central and South America between the 1960s and the 1990s.

Research Institute for the Study of Man (RISM)

The Research Institute for the Study of Man (RISM) was incorporated in 1955 to promote research on "human living throughout the world." This collection consists of publications and papers organized geographically and topically. Additionally, it houses survey data from the 1950s-1970s from across the Caribbean on education, public health, employment, public opinion, and family dynamics. Research with these materials may require approval from NYU's Institutional Review Board (IRB).