Yolanda Pantin Papers Open for Research

Princeton University Library is pleased to announce that the papers of Yolanda Pantin, one of the most distinguished living poets of Venezuela and Latin America, are now available for research in Firestone Library’s Special Collections.

Photo by Lisbeth Salas, 1995. Documentos de Yolanda Pantin. Box 17, folder 1.

Born in Caracas in 1954, Pantin studied literature at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello. During that period, she joined the Calicanto literary workshop led by Antonia Palacios, a key formative space for many of the most influential writers of her generation. In 1981, she emerged as a powerful voice in Venezuelan and Latin American letters with the founding of Grupo Tráfico alongside poets Igor Barreto, Rafael Castillo Zapata, Alberto Márquez, and Armando Rojas Guardia. She later co-founded the poetry press Pequeña Venecia (1991), where she served as editorial coordinator until 1994. Pantin also co-founded the literary magazine El Puente and directed the Fundación Casa de la Poesía Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde.

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Class Visit: Exploring Central America’s Authoritarian Past and Feminist Organizing

On April 16, 2025, students from LAS 240 / ANT 242, Ethnographies of Authoritarianism: A Feminist Reading from Contemporary Central America, taught by Dr. Grazzia Grimaldi, Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer in the Program in Latin American Studies (PLAS), visited Special Collections at Firestone Library for a hands-on exploration of Central America’s complex sociopolitical history.

The visit was guided by Fernando Acosta Rodríguez, Librarian for Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Studies, who curated a special archival exhibition for the class. The display featured a range of rare and compelling materials drawn from the Latin American Ephemera Collection, the Women in Central America: 1960–2004 Collection (digitally available here), the Guatemala News and Information Bureau Archive (large portions digitally available here), and private collections of Salvadoran guerrilla movements.

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PUL launches the José Donoso Digital Archive

Princeton University Library (PUL) is proud to announce the launch of the José Donoso Digital Archive, making publicly accessible, for the first time online, dozens of personal diaries by renowned Chilean writer José Donoso, alongside rare photographs and materials from the Programa de Archivos at the Universidad Diego Portales (UDP) in Chile.

Photo credit: Gabriel Pérez Mardones.

José Donoso (1924–1996), a towering figure in 20th-century Latin American literature, is celebrated for his psychologically rich and symbolically charged narratives that probe the social tensions and cultural anxieties of his time. Among his landmark works are El lugar sin límites (1966), El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970), and Casa de campo (1978). He also explored metafiction and literary history in works such as Historia personal del boom (1972) and Conjeturas sobre la memoria de mi tribu (1996).

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New Arrivals

Each month, Princeton University Library receives hundreds of new books from across Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain, and Portugal, supporting research and learning across a wide range of disciplines and topics. This post features a small selection of recently received titles.

Click on a cover image to view the book in the Library Catalog — if it’s already listed on it — or on the publisher’s website if it’s not. All of these books will be ready to circulate and available to Princeton students, faculty, and staff, as well as to partner library patrons, within a few days or weeks.

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PUL mourns loss of Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa

Members of the Princeton University Library community join readers around the world in mourning the passing of renowned novelist and essayist Mario Vargas Llosa on Sunday, April 13, 2025.

Mario Vargas Llosa at Princeton in 2013. Photo credit Denise Applewhite.

Princeton University Library is deeply honored to be the home of the Mario Vargas Llosa Papers, an extraordinary archive that has drawn countless scholars from around the globe over the years. The collection features an extensive array of manuscripts and typescripts of his literary works, along with correspondence, articles, speeches, and other materials dating back to 1944.

First typewritten version of La tía Julia y el escribidor, with corrections. Mario Vargas Llosa Papers, Box 10.
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New Digital Archive: Guatemala Atrocity Trials

Princeton University Library (PUL) has published a new digital archive that documents the ground-breaking atrocity trials that occurred in Guatemala’s domestic courts after that country’s 36-year armed conflict (1960-1996). The court records in this archive were collected by Temple Law Professor Rachel López, formerly a fellow of Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Policy, curated by PUL’s Librarian for Law and Legal Studies David Hollander, and summarized by Guatemalan human rights attorney Astrid Escobedo.

In total, López identified 32 cases involving atrocities committed during the armed conflict that resulted in convictions starting from 1993 to the current day. This archive includes court records of the conviction and sentencing decisions in 24 of the cases, which López obtained from multiple sources, including the human rights lawyers and prosecutors who litigated them, the judges who oversaw them, or the judicial archives in municipalities across Guatemala. Under Guatemalan law, these judgments are technically public, but because of the extraordinary difficulty of obtaining them, this project was the first to pull them together into one collection.

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Dartmouth-Princeton Collaboration

An initial batch of nearly ninety digitized brochures and pamphlets on women’s rights and activism across Latin America and the Caribbean is now available in Princeton’s Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera as a result of a new collaborative initiative between Dartmouth Libraries and Princeton University Library. 

All of the original ephemeral pieces, originally printed between the 1980s and early 2000s, are part of the Marysa Navarro papers at Dartmouth’s Rauner Special Collections Library. They were digitized and added to the Digital Archive thanks to the initiative of Dartmouth librarian Jill Baron, who, while examining the archive, realized that it contained, dispersed across several boxes and folders, a wealth of primary sources in the form of brochures, flyers and pamphlets produced by social activists, labor organizers, health providers, and various types of non-governmental organizations. Baron saw an opportunity to make them more easily available by taking advantage of Princeton’s expertise in offering digital access to ephemeral materials. For Princeton, it is an invaluable opportunity to continue developing collaborative approaches to collecting and offering wide access to these types of primary resources. 

This post features a small selection of items from the initial digital batch. Click on the images to view all pages and a brief bibliographic description. The complete batch can be browsed here. More pieces will continue to be added in the coming months.

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The Making of a Language

On September 27th, Mariana Bono and students in her new course SPA 255 The Making of a Language. Spanish Then and Now visited Special Collections to engage in a critical lexicography exercise that taught them how to approach historic written records and to appreciate how Spanish served both as an instrument for national consolidation in Spain and a tool for imperial expansion in the Americas. The exercise involved examining first editions of bilingual dictionaries and grammars of Castilian and of various indigenous languages of the Americas (including Nahuatl, Huastec, Mapudungun, and Guaraní) dating back to the 16th century, as well as treatises and policy documents that center the role of language in the colonial enterprise.

Earliest among the items reviewed by students was Alonso de Molina’s Aqui Comiença vn Vocabulario en la Lengua Castellana y Mexicana (Mexico City, 1555), the first Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary and work of lexicography ​to be printed in America. Compiled to assist in the proselytization of indigenous populations, it shows how essential was the learning of indigenous languages during the early stages of the colonization.

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Salvador Novo Collection

One of the most recent additions to Princeton University Library’s (PUL) extensive holdings of Latin American literary archives is a collection containing hundreds of letters from the mid 1950s to the early 1970s between Salvador Novo and his longtime friend and patron Carlos I. Guajardo.

Sonnet/letter by Salvador Novo, 1970. Archivo de Salvador Novo. View collection Finding Aid.

Also part of the collection are manuscripts and typescripts of poems, theater scripts, translations, and lectures, as well as offprints, invitations, photographs, and other miscellaneous materials. All of them can be consulted by researchers in Firestone Library’s Special Collections.

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Ulises Carrión: Bookworks and Beyond

Princeton University Library (PUL) is delighted to present “Ulises Carrión: Bookworks and Beyond,” the spring exhibition in the Ellen and Leonard Milberg Gallery at Firestone Library. Curated by Sal Hamerman, Metadata Librarian for Special Collections at PUL, and Javier Rivero Ramos, a recent Ph.D graduate from the Department of Art & Archaeology, who is now Assistant Curator at Art Bridges Foundation in Arkansas, the exhibition runs through June 13, 2024.

Ulises Carrión Bogard was one of the most influential of all modern artists engaged in the book, and this new exhibition will be the largest United States retrospective exhibition of his work to date. It will explore Carrión’s pioneering reinvention of the book as a material and social platform, primarily featuring Princeton’s extensive holdings, drawn from the Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology and PUL’s Special Collections. PUL is steward to one of the most substantial collections of Carrión’s book and mail art in any American library. The exhibition will also incorporate key audio-visual, performative, and printed works on loan from the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (New York), and LIMA (Amsterdam).

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