Photographs includes photographic images that were commissioned as part of the Hispanic Communities Documentation Project, as well as photographs that were donated to the project by members of Brooklyn's Hispanic communities. A substantial portion of this series is made up of photographs taken by photographer Tony Velez in the late 1980s, which were commissioned as part of the project. These include images documenting events in Brooklyn's Hispanic Communities, including religious festivals, parades, and other community gatherings. Also included are individual and group portraits of various community members. The rest of the series is comprised of photographs donated by various individuals, including family photos, images documenting community life and events, and community organizations. Collectively, these photographs span the years 1924 through the late-1980s.

Other Hispanic communities contains a patchwork of material at times connected to a particular Hispanic group, at times general in nature. The series is comprised of business cards, newspaper clippings, miscellaneous periodicals, sample menus from Brooklyn-based restaurants, a music cassette tape, as well as fliers, programs and booklets disseminated in connection with cultural and recreational events. The bulk date for these items is 1986-1990. All the clippings (Box 4, Folders 10-11) are photocopies and most were culled from Spanish-language newspapers in Brooklyn and beyond. The music cassette tape (Box 4, Folder 17) is entitled Marc Rizo Plays Caribbean Danzas and was produced by the Manhattan-based South American Music Project. The periodicals folder (Box 4, Folder 8) consists of the July 11, 1988, issue of Time and the April 9, 1990, issue of Newsweek both of which feature articles on the Hispanic population in America.

Puerto Ricans are the Hispanic group most represented in this collection. For that reason relevant items are assembled in Puerto Rican Community and arranged alphabetically. The bulk of the material derives from 1986-1991 and is ephemeral in nature. There are fliers and programs commemorating Puerto Rican cultural festivals, informational brochures (some in Spanish) on receiving health care, and miscellaneous publications such as those found in “Puerto Rican Studies Materials” (Box 3, Folder 7). This is the most substantive folder in the series; it contains bibliographies, a published monograph, and three back issues of Centro, the Bulletin of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (New York, NY).

The materials in Transcripts constitute the heart of the collection. They are arranged using the system of notation created presumably by Morton Marks whereby the transcript of each interview was assigned a three-part character string: H.O.H. = the abbreviation for Hispanic Oral History; 1 = the transcript’s numerical position in the series of 35; and [PR] = the acronym for the interviewee’s nationality, in this case Puerto Rico. The nationalities represented in the transcripts also include Panama [PAN], Cuba [CU], Dominican Republic [DR], Mexico [MX], El Salvador [ELS], Nicaragua [NICA], Guatemala [G], Ecuador [EC], Colombia [COL], and Peru [PE]. In the container list names have been added to the preexisting folder headings for quick reference, but users are encouraged to consult the Abstracts of Transcripts in Box 1, Folder 1 for a brief biographical profile of each interviewee. The whereabouts of corresponding audio cassette tapes for each transcript are currently unknown.