Latin American and Caribbean Studies: Primary Sources

"The Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera is a steadily growing repository containing a previously unavailable subset of Princeton’s Latin American Ephemera Collection as well as newly acquired materials being digitized and added on an ongoing basis. The bulk of the materials currently found in the Digital Archive were originally created around the turn of the 20th century and after, with some originating as recently as within the last year."

"This site provides links to open access digitized collections of primary sources that relate to Latin America and the Caribbean. The materials listed are freely available to the public and were created or are hosted at an academic institution associated with SALALM (Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials), either through institutional membership or through the personal membership of a staff member. The sources linked below range from collections of Mexican incunabula (1559-1600), to Latin American posters. The site is organized by format “Historical Texts by Country“, “Historical Texts General“, “Statistics“, “Visual Material by Country“, “Visual Material General“, and “Miscellaneous.”"

This is the online catalog of the Biblioteca Pafoxiana in Puebla, Mexico, founded in 1646 from the personal library of the Bishop of Puebla Juan de Palafox y Mendoza. The collection includes material from the 16th through the 18th centuries.

This digital collection contains correspondence, manuscripts and journal articles published in Mexico that span the 16th through 19th centuries.

Impresos Mexicanos del Siglo XVI en las Bibliotecas del Mundo

This is a digital library of Latin American travel accounts written in the 16th through 19th centuries, drawn from several special collections at the John Hay Library at Brown University. Some of the works selected are linked to critical essays produced by undergraduate students who are enrolled in Latin American history courses at Brown University.

This portal searches the inventories of Spanish archives and provides links to digitized manuscripts when available. Searches are based on item descriptions, not full text of documents.

This database allows searching of a representative sample of the object and photographic holdings of the NMAI along with basic information related to the item.

The dLOC provides free access to digitized newspapers; photographs; government and historical documents; and literature of the English, French and Spanish speaking Caribbean from the 18th century to the present.

"The purpose of this web tool is to instruct users in how to decipher the handwriting styles prevalent in 16th and 17th century Spanish handwritten documents. The tool draws from archival documents of the Spanish colony of La Española (today’s Dominican Republic). Since the same dominant handwriting styles of the time were followed throughout the Spanish world, practicing the reading of these basic styles on early Dominican manuscript documents can familiarize users with the handwriting from all Spanish language countries during the period."

The archive contains over 10 million scanned images of documents from the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive.