Latin American Studies in Library Special Collections

LSC is committed to remediating harmful description by creating and implementing an anti-oppressive approach to discovery and access. We aim to:

• Be clear about what we know, how we know it, and what we don't know
• Embrace baseline description as a tool to improve the discoverability of all our materials
• Demonstrate an understanding that description is a continuous and necessarily iterative endeavor

Read more about our past and current approaches to description in Toward Ethical and Inclusive Descriptive Practices in UCLA Library Special Collections.

UCLA Library Special Collections has a large collection of material on Latin America, and actively collects in the area. The collection is particularly strong on Brazil and Mexico, but also has significant holdings from Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Central America, as well as other countries. There is an excellent collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Latin American photographs, with a concentration on Mexico and Brazil, but also representing much of the rest of the area. There are collections on Latin American social and cultural history including colonial period manuscripts in Spanish and Nahuatl, popular cultural documents from Brazil (literatura de cordel chapbooks, caricature magazines, and Positivist Church tracts), labor and radical newspapers, and facsimiles of Aztec and Mayan codices. There are examples of early printing, polemical ephemera of the Mexican independence period, and nineteenth-century lithography.

Search tips

• For archival collections search the Online Archive of California
• For photograph collections search the Online Archive of California (OAC) or use UC Search. Searches can be made by country for an overall view on what we have on each country, or by specific town or city, or photographer, or subject, or photographic process
• Search the Online Archive of California (OAC) for finding aids and container lists for the numbered collections listed below
• For books about, or published in, Latin America, use UC Library Search.