Subject Guide ~ Latin American Studies

Explore five centuries of journeys across the globe, scientific discoveries, the expansion of European colonialism, conflict over territories and trade routes, and decades-long search and rescue attempts in this multi-archive collection dedicated to the history of exploration.

This collection consists of the Confidential Print for Central and South America and the French- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Topics covered include slavery and the slave trade, immigration, relations with indigenous peoples, wars and territorial disputes, the fall of the Brazilian monarchy, British business and financial interests, industrial development, the building of the Panama Canal, and the rise to power of populist rulers such as Perón in Argentina and Vargas in Brazil.

Produced in collaboration with the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, the material in this collection includes thousands of audio field recordings and interviews, educational recordings, film footage, field notebooks, slides, correspondence and ephemera from over 60 fields of study.

The John Carter Brown Library's collection of books printed in Spanish America is among the finest in the world. In some areas, the collections are unmatched and include works found nowhere else. The Library has the largest collection in the world of books printed in Spanish America as a whole prior to ca. 1820, over 7,000 titles, encompassing the output of presses in Mexico, Peru, Central America, Argentina, Chile, and elsewhere. The remaining Spanish American presses represented in the JCB's collection include some of the rarest books printed in the Americas: those coming from the Jesuit missions of Paraguay in the early eighteenth century. Of the eight extant titles printed in the missions, the JCB owns six, more than any other library in the world. Of the 14 books in our Ecuador collection (as of 2012) all but two are unique copies, held nowhere else. Likewise of our collections of Ecuadorian, Puerto Rican, and Bolivian imprints, the majority can be found only at the JCB.

The Digital Florentine Codex gives access to a singular manuscript created by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a group of Nahua elders, authors, and artists. Written in parallel columns of Nahuatl and Spanish texts and hand painted with nearly 2,500 images, the encyclopedic codex is widely regarded as the most reliable source of information about Mexica culture, the Aztec Empire, and the conquest of Mexico. Upon completion in 1577 at the Imperial Colegio de la Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco (today Mexico City), the manuscript was sent to Europe where it entered the Medici family’s library in Florence—thus, the Florentine Codex. This digital edition unlocks the manuscript’s content by making the texts and images searchable.

A digital collection of Latin American travel accounts written in the 16th-19th centuries, selected from Brown University's Latin American special collections. Use the Browse feature in the left hand menu to access resources listed by country.

The Archivo General de Indias (General Archives of the Indies, also known as the AGI) is a major Spanish archive in Seville, Spain, that contains a vast quantity of records relating to the Spanish colonial period. Today, the Archivo General consists of 43,000 legajos, or document bundles, and 80 million pages of documents. Besides records from almost every Spanish colonial possession in the Americas and Asia, famous contents include an almanac consulted and annotated by Christopher Columbus, four paintings by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya, 17th century maps from almost every Spanish colony, and a bronze cannon from a Spanish galleon sunk near Cuba in 1622.

An international collaboration of more than 25 institutional partners throughout Mexico, Spain, Peru, and the United States that seeks to bring together digitally the first books printed in the Americas before 1601. The collection provides unique primary sources for a variety of academic fields studying Indigenous and Spanish American society during the sixteenth century.

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.
Also browsable by geographic area: South America, Andes, Central America, Amazonia, and Meso America

Francisco Hernández de Toledo (c. 1515 – 28 January 1587) was a naturalist and court physician to Philip II of Spain. In 1570, Hernández was ordered to embark on the first scientific mission in the New World, a study of the region's medicinal plants and animals. Hernández's work was published in 22 books in Latin, and was in the process of being translated to Spanish at the time of his death. These complete works have been digitized and are available in this archive maintained by la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

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 material.

A product of broad international collaboration, these digitized documents from the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive (AHPN) aim to facilitate scholarly and legal research into a vast cache of historical documentation. The discovery of the National Police Historical Archive in 2005 opened an extensive and timely resource for the study of Guatemalan history and human rights in the region, spanning a broad array of topics from Guatemala's armed conflict between 1960 and 1996 to the sexually transmitted disease experiments performed at the behest of the United States government in the 1940s. This site currently includes over 10 million scanned images of documents from the National Police Historical Archive. This digital archive mirrors and extends the physical archive that remains preserved in Guatemala as an important historical patrimony of the Guatemalan people.

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 Latin American Library has substantially expanded its holdings to include digital surrogates of primary source materials from is special collections. Current collections include: Cuban-American Radionovelas (1963-1970), Early Images of Latin America, Mesoamerican Painted Manuscripts, Mexican Incunabula (early printed books), and a collection of Mayan rubbings.

This online collection includes more than 18,000 pages of rare original plantation reports, correspondence, oil paintings and watercolors.

1500 items that can be viewed in Special Collections with prior arrangement.

More than 32,000 maps and images focusing on rare 18th and 19th century North and South America.

The Library of Congress has custody of the world's largest and most comprehensive cartographic collection, some of which have been converted to digital form.

More than 15,000 digital items from the library's map collection.

More than 11,000 maps scanned by the University of Texas Libraries. Most are in the public domain.

Maps have been produced under the auspices of the United Nations since the founding of the Organization in 1946. Maps can form the principal part of a United Nations document, be ancillary to other materials, or a part of proceedings of meetings in the Organization. Maps, whether traditional digital maps or web-maps, are the main medium to present and visualize geospatial information.