Latin American and Caribbean Studies

A growing collection of over 300 cardboark press publications from various countries in Latin American and in Spain. Libros cartoneros are books made from salvaged cardboard with a hand-painted or collage cover. Produced in limited editions and sold for a fraction of the cost of a professionally produced book, cartonera have become popular across Latin America since the founding of Eloísa Cartonera in Buenos Aires in 2003.

Rutas y Leyendas is a cardboard publisher in the O'Higgins region of Chile. Access the finding aid for this collection through RIAMCO.

A collection of 544 zines created 1982-2021 covering a wide variety of subjects including feminism, LGBTQ+ counterculture, sexuality, labor movements and literature. Access the finding aid for this collection through RIAMCO.

Ediciones Vigia is an independent publishing house located in Matanzas, Cuba. It was founded in 1985 by Rolando Estévez Jordán (1953-2023), who was its chief designer and draftsman, and Alfredo Zaldívar, a Cuban poet. Handmade using collaged, repurposed materials, these books are created by artisans who volunteer at the press. These uniquely produced publications, often featuring dried flowers, shards of glass, fistfuls of sand and other natural materials, are produced in editions of 200. Access the finding aid for this collection through RIAMCO.

Publications from an independent press in Mexico City, Mexico, 2016-2019. Access the finding aid for this collection through RIAMCO.

The Brasiliana Collection is comprised of various discrete collections on Brazil (literatura de cordel, catadora/cartonera books, archives, materials on espiritismo, pamphlets from the Igreja Positivista do Brasil, historical magazines, etc.) as well as individual items.

George Earl Church Collection is largely composed of 18th and early 19th century monographs on Latin American politics, history, and geography, with substantial attention to contemporary anthropological studies on the natives of South America. Materials on Amerindian languages are also well represented. The collection’s most unique item is perhaps the 18th century manuscript history of Potosi, a Bolivian mining town.

Film director and theoretician Fernando Birri (Santa Fe, Argentina, 1925), who Colombian novelist and Nobel Prize recipient Gabriel García Márquez called Gran papá del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, was one of the founders of the new Latin American film movement, often described as a form of revolutionary or Third Cinema. The collection holds films, videos, film scripts, diaries, writings, art work, correspondence, poems, photographs, posters, audio recordings, and objects. His writings relate to his books of poetry and prose as well as his work as an educator and theoretician in film studies. Birri was also a prolific artist and has created a wide variety of artwork using all types of media including pencil, watercolor, collage, photography, and computer graphics. His artwork ranges from simple and abstract pencil drawings to complex works full of color and mixed media.

This collection documents the career of Thomas E. Skidmore who was a professor in the Latin American Studies department at the University of Wisconsin (1967-1987) and then at Brown University (1988-1999). His area of focus was Brazil and he was the pre-eminent expert in the United States on the topic of its history and politics.

Documents including letters, certificates, and inventories relating to the institution of slavery, slaves, and indentured servants in Cuba during the 19th century. Many of the documents refer to Chinese people brought to Cuba as indentured servants or contract laborers (colonos).

This collection of approximately 175 items (pamphlets, books, and serial publications) focuses on Cuba under the regime of Fidel Castro. The pamphlets feature Castro’s speeches, while the books and serial publications document Cuban culture, social and economic conditions, as well as foreign relations policies. The majority of the collection concentrates on the latter half of the twentieth century (1959-1990), though some items address Cuba in the twenty-first century. The collection is comprised of, in large part, translations into English, or otherwise original works in English, published throughout the Anglophone world as well as in various sectors of Cuba’s Foreign Ministry and Cuban political presses.

This collection, assembled by Daniel Boone Schirmer, holds 964 titles dealing with the Anti-Imperialist movement of 1898 and its repercussions in United States, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Filipino history. It deals with the debate within the United States during and after the Spanish-American War over the appropriate relationship between the English-speaking and Spanish speaking Americas.

A collection of 340 titles that document the early decades of the Mexican Republic after it achieved independence in 1821.

BRASA, founded in 1992, is an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars who support and promote Brazilian studies in all fields, especially in the humanities and social sciences. BRASA is dedicated to the promotion of Brazilian studies around the world in general, and in the United States in particular. This collection contains the records of the organization.

The John Carter Brown Library is an independently administered and funded center for advanced research in history and the humanities, founded in 1846 and located at Brown University since 1901. Housed within the Library’s walls is an internationally renowned, constantly growing collection of primary historical sources pertaining to the Americas, both North and South, before ca. 1825. For 150 years the Library has served scholars from all over the United States and abroad. The Library offers fellowships, sponsors lectures and conferences, regularly mounts exhibitions for the public, and publishes catalogues, bibliographies, and other works that interpret its holdings to facilitate and encourage use of the collection.