Latin American & Caribbean Special Collections: Open Access

MIDAS, the Mexican Intelligence Digital Archives (los Archivos del Autoritarismo Mexicano), is a crowd-sourced, public access digital archive of historical documents from Mexican intelligence agencies. The collection is drawn from Mexico’s two principal security services, the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS) and the Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales (DGIPS) and covers the period c.1940 to c.1985.

The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean.

The Venezuela History Network created a pilot project to digitize the judicial section of the Afro-Venezuelan slaves collection held by the Academia Nacional de la Historia in Caracas.

The Chicano press was an important component of the Chicano Movement to disseminate Chicano history, literature, and current news. The press created a link between the core and the periphery to create a national Chicano identity and community. The Chicano Press Association, created in 1969, was significant to the development of this national ethos. The publications that make up the Latino series have been linked to the Movement and represent the Chicano voice on such key issues as voter rights, criminal justice and relations with the police, support for the anti-war movement, racism, and quality education.

Humanizing Deportation is a community based digital storytelling project that documents the human consequences of contemporary regimes of migration and border control in the United States and Mexico.

The Puerto Rico Citizenship Archives Project (PRCAP) is part of a larger project documenting the legal history of U.S. territorial citizenship law and policy. Charles R. Venator-Santiago, Associate Professor with a Joint Appointment in El Instituto and Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut, is the coordinator for these projects. The English version of the page is hosted by the University of Connecticut and the Spanish version by the Universidad del Este.

The Slave Societies Digital Archive (formerly Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies), directed by Jane Landers and hosted at Vanderbilt University, preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies. This Digital Archive currently holds 500,000 unique images, dating from the 16th to the 20th centuries, and documents the history of between 6 and 8 million individuals. They are the most extensive serial records for the history of Africans in the Atlantic World and also include valuable information on the indigenous, European, and Asian populations who lived alongside them.

On this website you will find areas dedicated to each geographic entity -- Angola, Benin, Brazil, Cape Verde, Colombia, Cuba, and Spanish Florida -- and additional resources to assist in your research. We welcome feedback and encourage researchers to share any work that they develop using the Slave Societies Digital Archive.

The SlaveVoyages website is a collaborative digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history.