Princeton’s Latin American Ephemera Collection

A conversation with Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez about the collection's use within and beyond academia and its impact on perspectives of contemporary Latin America.

Posted on December 19, 2024 in Ask an Archivist

In this Ask an Archivist, Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez, Librarian for Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Studies at the Princeton University Library, provides an overview of the Latin American Ephemera Collection. Fernando details how the collection acquires thousands of ephemera and explains its work to provide digital access to these materials. Fernando also covers examples of the collection’s use in teaching and beyond the classroom. He further reveals how the Latin American Ephemera Collection informs current understandings of Latin America and reflects the interdisciplinarity of Latin American Studies.

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Many of the materials in the collection are “rare, hard-to-find primary sources.” How are they acquired?

Over the years, most of the items have been gathered by local activists who are well acquainted with the political and cultural landscape of their home city and country. We have asked these individuals to do so with the understanding that Princeton will purchase the materials from them in order to make them available for research and to be preserved for future generations. Lots of items have also been received as gifts from scholars, alumni, and students who have utilized the collection, appreciate it, and wish to contribute to its growth. A relatively small amount of materials is purchased from established book dealers across Latin America. In recent years, we have also received numerous items from other libraries who recognize the Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera as an optimal outlet for this type of resource. We are now actively trying to promote this type of collaboration.

Given the collection’s inclusion of thousands of ephemera, do you have any guidelines regarding which works are selected?

After years assisting researchers and students, it is very clear to me that my ability as a librarian to predict both current and future interests is rather limited, and that what one researcher deems as worthless could be another one’s treasure. Since research interests and the types of primary sources sought by students and scholars are so broad and unpredictable, I prefer to err on the side of inclusiveness in developing the collection.

One of the few categories of ephemera that we exclude are commercial advertisements (and even in this case we make some exceptions). A number of researchers have lamented that exclusion. I sympathize with them but have to draw the line somewhere.

How do you see the collection being used in academia and beyond? Have collection materials been referenced in curricula and/or research?

Several articles, book chapters, and theses, as well as numerous undergraduate papers, have referenced materials from the collection. My favorite one is a book chapter titled “Cacerolazos y bibliotecas: Solidarity, Reading, and Public Space after the Argentine Economic Crisis (2001-2002)” by Professor Marcy Schwartz, a big fan of the collection who has collected and donated many pieces of ephemera.[1]

The collection has also served over the years as a fantastic teaching tool. Every semester, dozens of students participate in class sessions that examine components of the collection closely. For example, last semester students enrolled in the language seminar Ways of Reading and Writing in Spanish, and visited the library to analyze the multiple voices that powered the massive social and political uprisings that took place in Chile, Colombia, and Puerto Rico in 2019 through a gripping selection of leaflets, posters, and protest signs. Another group of students in a History seminar titled Politics and Social Change in Latin America, 1968-Present, spent weeks digging into the collection and selecting dozens of items to enrich their understanding of social movements in the region and to train in the use and analysis of primary sources. I could give many other good examples of how the collection has been integrated into the curriculum.

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[1] Schwartz, Marcy. “Cacerolazos y bibliotecas: Solidarity, Reading, and Public Space after the Argentine Economic Crisis (2001-2002).” Public Pages: Reading along the Latin American Streetscape, University of Texas Press, 2018, pp. 122-48.

As mentioned on the collection’s homepage, prior to the development of the Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera and later, the Latin American Ephemera: Digitized Microfilm Sets, “access to the material was provided by developing thematic sub-collections, cataloging and microfilming them, and, in many instances, creating corresponding finding aids.” Could you describe the process behind developing these digital collections and how workflows have since changed? How has this process influenced use of the collection?

The transition to a digital access model represented a complete departure from the archival organization model that we used before. The current workflow is much more efficient in different ways. A key one is that we no longer have to review, sort, and arrange materials into topical groupings or create finding aids. Each item is now rapidly described according to basic metadata categories that we consider adequate for this type of material. Subjects are assigned based on a time-tested internal controlled vocabulary. The work is done by dedicated support staff and student assistants. Catalogers are not required for the day-to-day work.

In the previous model, materials were made accessible as microfilm reproductions years after receipt while hundreds of items remained undiscoverable for indefinite periods of time because they did not fit into thematic collections. Now we are able to make digitized materials available in a much timelier manner. We also have the flexibility to prioritize items according to research interest, teaching needs, or any other criteria. Most importantly, researchers no longer have to visit Princeton or borrow microfilm reproductions in order to gain access to the collection. The Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera makes the collection freely available to users worldwide.

I should make clear though that the Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera does not include any of the thematic sub-collections that were microfilmed in previous decades. We are in the process of making the thousands of ephemeral items found in them available by digitizing the microfilm sets, adding collection level and finding aid metadata when available, and loading them on a separate platform called Latin American Ephemera: Digitized Microfilm Sets.

We would of course have preferred to fully integrate both components of the collection but, unfortunately, that is not feasible at the moment. Nonetheless, it is very gratifying to be able to make all of the collections freely available online in one way or another. 

How does the Latin America Ephemera Collection complement and inform Princeton’s other archival collections?

Another one of Princeton’s great strengths is its holdings of Latin American literary archives. They contain thousands of manuscripts, letters, diaries, and other types of documents. One could say that these literary archives represent the voices of intellectual elites. The Latin American Ephemera Collection, on the other hand, privileges the voices of popular sectors of society.

Developing these two different types of collections is part of a longstanding, conscious effort to document broad aspects of Latin American history, society, and culture from a diversity of angles and perspectives that at least attempts to make justice to the richness and complexity of the region. In this regard, I would like to acknowledge the legacy and the vision of Barbara Hadley Stein, Princeton’s first Bibliographer for Latin America, Spain, and Portugal (1966-1977) and of her successor, Peter T. Johnson (1977-2003). It is important for me to protect and honor their legacy. This in no small part means advancing it by being responsive to technological changes in the library world and to evolving research needs.

Because the Latin American Ephemera Collection was so valuable and popular among students and scholars, Princeton University Library made the decision to dedicate substantial resources to the development of tools that allowed us to efficiently manage ephemera and to make it available online (with crucial financial support from a CLIR Hidden Collections grant and from the Latin Americanist Research Resources Project (LARRP)). The success of this initiative opened the door to the development by other Princeton curators (sometimes with collaborators from other institutions in the U.S. or abroad) of collections of ephemera originating in South Asia, the Near East, and other parts of the world. In time, we think that this will make new comparative studies and analysis across different regions of the world increasingly possible. 

I understand that materials in the Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera are in a variety of languages including English, Spanish, and Portuguese. How important was it to include ephemera in multiple languages and from a wide range of geographies in the collection, and how does this expand the perspectives featured?

The collection deliberately seeks to include as many voices and perspectives as possible. This is reflected in the wide range of languages and geographies represented. Materials in Spanish are by far the most abundant. Portuguese language content has been rapidly growing thanks to a partnership established five years ago with the Library of Congress in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where they gather the ephemeral materials created across all of Brazil and then send them to Princeton to be digitized, described, and added to the Digital Archive. Materials in English, the third most abundant language, come from places such as Barbados and Trinidad & Tobago, as well as from Latin American Studies organizations and solidarity groups based in the United States and the United Kingdom. The collection also has a small though quite remarkable number of materials in indigenous languages such as Quechua, Aymara, Mapundungun, and Guarani, among others. This is an area that we would really like to expand.

What outreach efforts or events does the Latin American Ephemera Collection engage in?

Most of my outreach activities related to the collection are aimed at new undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and visiting scholars through tours, presentations, and workshops. I also promote the collection through presentations at professional gatherings such as at the annual conference of the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM) and, sometimes, when I travel to the region. Last May, for example, I discussed multiple aspects of the collection during a symposium hosted by the Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita e José Mindlin of the University of São Paulo. The central theme was how institutions responsible for the preservation of memory are dealing with new topics and social actors that require a redrawing of the national, regional, collective, and personal categories that have traditionally guided the formation of archives. 

Exhibitions have been another vehicle for promoting the collection. We mounted an exhibit in 2007 to celebrate 40 years of Latin American Studies at Princeton and another one in 2017 to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the Program in Latin American Studies. More recently, in 2022, we displayed a visually engaging selection of posters and pamphlets created by protesters taking to the streets of Santiago de Chile in 2019. This was part of a very well received broader exhibition called Records of Resistance in Firestone Library’s Milberg Gallery. All of these exhibits, I would like to mention, were assembled in collaboration with Gabrielle Winkler, the Library Collections Specialist who has managed the day-to-day processing and activities of the collection since the early days of the Digital Archive.

Could you speak to the interdisciplinarity of Latin American Studies? How does the collection illustrate this through expansive subject categories and thematic sub-collections of ephemera like HIV/AIDs in Latin America and agrarian and rural issues?

Latin American Studies is an interdisciplinary field that brings together students and scholars from a very wide variety of disciplines. At Princeton, even though most of the students that use the Latin American Ephemera Collection come from departments in the humanities and social sciences or from the School of Public and International Affairs, students in the natural and applied sciences have also often found valuable materials in the collection that speak to social or policy related aspects of their research topics.

As I mentioned before, the collection errs on the side on inclusiveness in terms of subject coverage. Broadly speaking, we have materials dealing with countless aspects of politics and government, human and civil rights, socioeconomic conditions and development, gender and sexuality, ethnic and racial groups, ecology and the environment, education, public health, arts and culture, religion, and other topics. This thematic broadness reflects the interdisciplinarity of the field. It also exemplifies Princeton University Library’s commitment to supporting research, teaching, and learning in the field by providing access to a very wide and diverse array of resources.

Among a very substantial part of the ephemeral materials that comprise the collection, researchers can find the voices, views, postures, visions, values, ideologies, aesthetics, and other dimensions of individuals and organizations representing sectors of society that historically have had limited access, if any at all, to mass media and scholarly venues.

The Latin American Ephemera Collection focuses heavily on Latin Americans’ perspectives on political, social, and cultural movements. How does learning about these events and public sentiment toward them inform understandings of contemporary Latin America?

Among a very substantial part of the ephemeral materials that comprise the collection, researchers can find the voices, views, postures, visions, values, ideologies, aesthetics, and other dimensions of individuals and organizations representing sectors of society that historically have had limited access, if any at all, to mass media and scholarly venues. Having unfiltered access to those points of view is essential for the study and understanding of a vastly heterogeneous and complex region. That, in my view, is the fundamental reason why the Latin American Ephemera Collection is such an invaluable resource.

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About the interviewee:

Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez has been the Librarian for Latin American, Iberian and Latino Studies at the Princeton University Library since 2003.  Before that, he was the Latin American Bibliographer at The New York Public Library (1997-2003).  At Princeton, in addition to being responsible for the development of its general library collections, he manages the Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera and collaborates closely with the Department of Special Collections in the development of its extensive collections of Latin American literary archives. He served as president of the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials in 2009/2010. 

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Learn more about the Latin American Ephemera Collection.

This interview was conducted by Ashley Roy. She is the digital media assistant at Choice.

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