Collection ID: ARC.032

Collection context

Summary

Creator:
Velez, Tony, Brooklyn Historical Society (Brooklyn, New York, N.Y.)., and Long Island Historical Society.
Extent:
2.0 Linear feet and in 5 manuscript boxes.
Language:
and Materials in English and Spanish.
Preferred citation:

Identification of item, date (if known); Hispanic Communities Documentation Project records and oral histories, ARC.032, Box and Folder number; Brooklyn Historical Society.

Background

Scope and Content:

The collection contains thirty-five oral history interview transcripts, photographs, a VHS videotape, and a variety of printed ephemera, including newspaper clippings, fliers, handouts, programs, business cards, brochures, booklets and restaurant menus. It is arranged thematically into four series: 1) Transcripts, 1988-1989, 2) Puerto Rican Community, 1973-1991, 3) Other Hispanic Communities, 1950-1992, and 4) Photographs.

Biographical / Historical:

The Hispanic Communities Documentation Project was an archival initiative based at the Brooklyn Historical Society in the late 1980s and directed by Morton Marks. The project sought to capture the cultural ethos of the Hispanic community in Brooklyn through printed ephemera (e.g. handouts, fliers, clippings, restaurant menus) and through the voices of community members themselves. At the heart of this collection stands a series of oral histories in which men and women of varying nationalities (Puerto Rican, Mexican, Ecuadorian, etc.) rendered the stories of their lives from birth to their experience as immigrants in the United States.

Though an official administrative history of the project does not exist, it seems to have been carried out as an expansion of the Puerto Rican Oral History Project, which the Society (then the Long Island Historical Society) initiated in 1973 and completed in the mid-1970s. Like the Puerto Rican project before it, the Hispanic Communities Documentation Project provides a substantial body of source material on the immigrant experience in late 20th century America.

Processing information:

Minimally processed to the series level.

Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Access

RESTRICTIONS:

Open to researchers without restriction.

PREFERRED CITATION:

Identification of item, date (if known); Hispanic Communities Documentation Project records and oral histories, ARC.032, Box and Folder number; Brooklyn Historical Society.

LOCATION OF THIS COLLECTION:
128 Pierrepont Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201, United States
CONTACT:
718-222-4111
library@brooklynhistory.org