Research Guides: Latinx/e Studies: Primary Sources

Introduction

A primary source is an original source of information, written or created during the time period under study. Primary sources may include:

Memoirs, diaries, letters, interviews and other first-person accounts
Manuscripts
Speeches
Oral testimony
Official publications, government documents, court reports and police records
Newspaper and magazine articles from the period under study
Paintings or photographs
Film footage
Print and television advertising
Creative works such as music, poetry, art

Primary Sources Databases

Arte Público Hispanic Historical Collection 1 & 2 This link opens in a new window
Arte Público Hispanic Historical Collection is an archive of publications focused on U.S. Hispanic history, literature and culture from colonial times until 1960. Available in two series, Series 1 focuses on the creative life of U.S. Latinos and Hispanics. Series 2 focuses on Hispanic American civil rights, religion and women’s rights from the 18th through the 20th century. Content is written, indexed and searchable in Spanish and English.
Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980 This link opens in a new window
Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980 provides access to searchable digitized copies of newspapers printed in the U.S. during the 19th and 20th centuries for a Hispanic readership. It features hundreds of monolingual and bilingual newspapers in Spanish and English, including many obscure titles from the 19th century.
Hispanic Life in America This link opens in a new window
Hispanic Life in America is a comprehensive digital archive of primary source documents related to Hispanic American life. This collection provides access to global news sources, including Spanish-language or bilingual publications, dating from 1704 to today.
Latin American, Caribbean, U.S. Latinx, and Iberian Free E-Resources (LACLI) This link opens in a new window
Latin American, Caribbean, U.S. Latinx, and Iberian (LACLI) is an international collaboration to create a repository of free online resources for Latin American, Caribbean, Latinx, and Iberian studies. LACLI is an essential tool for finding websites that provide access to a great variety of resources, such as audiovisual materials, books, data, ephemera, government documents, oral histories, periodicals, reference works, visual materials, web archives and more.
History Vault: Latinx History This link opens in a new window
History Vault's coverage of issues of race and ethnicity expands in this category with coverage of Latino History. This category contains two modules, Latino Civil Rights during the Carter Administration: Records of the White House Office of Hispanic Affairs (1979-1981) and Bexar Archives: Colonial Archives of Texas during the Spanish and Mexican Periods, 1717-1836. The events documented in the Carter Administration collection that are noted in the timeline are general events from the presidency of Jimmy Carter such as the second round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, the 1980 presidential election. Events documented in the Bexar Archives include Gutierrez-Magee invasion of 1812-1813, the battle of Medina in 1813, the Champ D'Asile incident in 1818, Dr. Long's expedition in 1819, the coming of Moses Austin in 1820, the Mexican independent regime in 1821, the Fredonian Rebel lion in Nacogdoches in 1827, and, finally, the independence of Texas in 1836.
Latinx Thought and Culture: The NPR Archive, 1979-1990 This link opens in a new window
This collection showcases two radio programs: the weekly Spanish-language Enfoque Nacional (1979-1988) and the daily English-language Latin File (1988–1990), available for the first time in a searchable database as digitized audio with transcripts. They focus on Latinx issues related to politics, sociology, human rights, the arts and more with interviews of key figures and news reporting by a new generation of Latino/a journalists at the time.
Readex AllSearch This link opens in a new window
Readex AllSearch allows users to cross search primary sources: books, pamphlets, newspapers, government documents, and more.
WorldCat.org This link opens in a new window
Free version of WorldCat. Search for books and more in libraries in the U.S. and around the world.

External Primary Sources

California Digital Newspaper Collection
This collection contains 1,001,763 issues comprising 12,866,736 pages and 49,868,889 articles.
The California Digital Newspaper Collection is a project of the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research (CBSR) at the University of California, Riverside.
Calisphere
Calisphere is the University of California's gateway to digitized items. California Cultures has a Hispanic Cultures subsection.
Centro Archive Digital Collections (Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College)
Site provides access to photographs, documents, artifacts, art, maps, oral histories, moving image and audio clips, and other material pertaining to the Puerto Rican diaspora. Highlights include material from the Pura Belpre Papers, Justo A. Marti Photograph Collection, and interviews from Centro's Oral History Project. The Gallery section contains curated content on a variety of topics and people.
CUNY Dominican Studies Institute
The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute at The City College of New York has developed digital open-source resources featuring various educational platforms to enhance teaching and learning on Dominican topics. Below you will find links and respective descriptions for each one of these projects.
East of East
In 2012, South El Monte Arts Posse (SEMAP) used the city’s centennial as an opportunity to encourage new approaches to understanding and conveying the reality of Greater El Monte’s past and present.
Farmworker Movement: Documentation Project
Primary source accounts: photographs, oral histories, videos, essays and historical documents from the United Farm Worker Delano Grape Strikers and the UFW Volunteers who worked with Cesar Chavez to build his farmworker movement.
Hispanic Reading Room | Library of Congress
The Hispanic Reading Room is an important access point at the Library of Congress for researchers working on the Caribbean, Latin America, Spain and Portugal; the indigenous cultures of those areas; and peoples throughout the world historically influenced by Luso-Hispanic heritage, including the Latina/o/e/x community in the United States.
Historic Mexican & Mexican American Press
University of Arizona | The Historic Mexican and Mexican American Press collection documents and showcases historic Mexican and Mexican American publications published in Tucson, El Paso, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sonora, Mexico from the mid-1800s to the 1970s.
Historic Mexican and Mexican American Press
Historic Mexican and Mexican American publications published in Tucson, El Paso, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sonora, Mexico from the mid-1800s to the 1970s.
La TopoRadio
Offers an interactive map of publications and archives that examine the cultural and economic impact of Spanish-language radio in the U.S.
Mapping Indigenous LA
This story includes layered, sedimented cultural geographies of Indigenous Los Angeles that includes the Gabrielino/Tongva and Tataviam who struggle for recognition of their sacred spaces and recognition as a nations, American Indians who were removed from their lands and displaced through governmental policies of settler colonialism, and indigenous diasporas from Latin America and Oceania where people have been displaced by militarism, neoliberal economic policies, and overlapping colonial histories. When we consider Pacific Islander and Latin American Indigenous Diasporas, Los Angeles has the largest indigenous population of any city in the US.
Migration is Beautiful
University of Iowa | Migration is Beautiful developed from the Mujeres Latinas Project, which started in 2005 at the Iowa Women’s Archives to collect and preserve primary source materials about the history of Latinas and their families in Iowa.
Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings
Full access to these primary source materials is currently available to UCLA students, faculty, and staff; others may view the labels and listen to a portion of each recording. The digital archive enables wide-ranging research in Mexican and Mexican American culture and ensures that the lyrics, music, and tales in the Strachwitz Frontera Collection will be available to scholars and the public for generations to come.

Oral History

Bracero History Archive
The Bracero History Archive collects and makes available the oral histories and artifacts pertaining to the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative that spanned the years 1942-1964. Millions of Mexican agricultural workers crossed the border under the program to work in more than half of the states in America.
Bracero Oral History Project
A project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Brown University, and The Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Chicana por mi Raza
Chicana por mi Raza (CPMR) Digital Memory Collective is a group of researchers, educators, students, archivists and technologists dedicated to preserving imperiled Chicanx and Latinx histories of Civil Rights Era. Provides public access to oral histories, material culture, correspondence, and rare out‐of‐print publications for use in both scholarly research and the classroom.
Chicano Studies Research Center Library
Topics include Central Americans in California, Latinos in film, music, politics, Mexican American Civil Rights.
Hispanic Communities Documentation Project
Over fifty interviews were conducted to document the experiences of Brooklyn residents who arrived from Puerto Rico, Panama, Ecuador, and several other Central and South American nations in the latter half of the twentieth century. This collection includes recordings and transcripts of interviews conducted between 1988 and 1989.
The Immigrant Archive Project
The Immigrant Archive Project is an independent national initiative dedicated to preserving the life stories of America’s immigrant population.
Latino Arts and Culture Oral History Project ( Institute for Latino Studies, Notre Dame)
More than 100 interviews have been recorded with Latino leaders, writers, poets, artists, scholars, and Notre Dame Alumni, with a particular emphasis on the Midwestern United States.
Latino Oral History Collection
This collection of oral histories offers direct, first–person accounts of the lives and experiences of men and women from diverse Latino backgrounds who call New Jersey home. Their stories are a living testimony of 20th Century Latino experience in New Jersey.,
The Luis J. Botifoll Oral History Project
Includes videos, outlines, and selected transcripts of oral history interviews conducted principally with members of the first generations of Cubans to leave the island after the Cuban Revolution.
New Roots: Voices from Carolina del Norte
digital archive that contains the oral histories of Latin American migrants in North Carolina and the experiences of North Carolinians that have worked for the integration of new settlers into this southern state.
Onda Latina: The Mexican American Experience Collection of the Longhorn Network
This collection consists of 198 recordings for two series of radio programs: The Mexican American Experience, which first aired in October, 1976, and A esta hora conversamos, which first aired in October, 1981. Both programs were part of the Longhorn Radio Network, a distribution service and production center of public service content for radio stations across Texas and the greater Southwest.
Storycorps Historias Initiative
StoryCorps Historias is an initiative to record the diverse stories and life experiences of Latina/Latino people in the United States.
Voces Oral History Project
Latino oral history archive began in 1999 with a mission of capturing untold stories of Latinos and Latinas who served, in the military or on the home front, during World War II. Expanded to include the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and Political and Civic Engagement, focusing on the continuing fight for Latino civil rights.