New Digital Archive: Guatemala Atrocity Trials

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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Hundreds of Films Now Streaming

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Princeton University Library is now providing access to PRAGDA Stream, a platform containing hundreds of Latin American, Portuguese and Spanish documentary and feature films covering a wide array of the region’s most relevant topics, including the global economy, immigration and exile, feminism, education, international politics, indigenous peoples, the arts, history, and others.

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From indigenous insurrections in the Andes to the education of girls in 17th century Cuba: recent additions to the General Manuscripts Miscellaneous Collection

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The General Manuscripts Miscellaneous Collection contains thousands of items that are not part of provenance-based or topical collections. Featured below are nine recently acquired historic documents about topics as varied as indigenous insurrections against Spanish colonial authorities, plantations and slavery in the Caribbean, the education of girls in 17th century Cuba, and the expulsion of Jesuits from Paraguay in the 18th century, among others.

Ruedas, Jerónimo de, and Others, Report to King Charles III of Spain on Indigenous Revolutionary Movements in South America, 1781 June 15

Ninety-six page unpublished, confidential report written by seven Spanish colonial judges (oidores) of the Real Audiencia of Río de La Plata y Charcas to King Charles III of Spain, offering their analysis of the independence movements of Quechua, Aymara, and other indigenous peoples against colonial rule in South America and connecting the indigenous uprisings of the 1770s and 1780s led by Túpac Amaru II and Tomás Katari to the American Revolution.

The report recounts events leading up to Indigenous liberation movements in the 1770s and 1780s, including the abusive administration of the Corregidor of Chayanta, which led Tomás Katari to travel to Buenos Aires in 1778 to air his people’s grievances to the Spanish authorities, as well as Katari’s arrest and execution and the rebellion that followed. The authors also discuss at length the rebellion led by Túpac Amaru II and the violent Spanish attempts to suppress it. They also write about the circulation of revolutionary pamphlets by Indigenous organizers in the city of La Paz, Bolivia, as a means of building support for a revolution against Spanish colonizers.
Click to view finding aid and the digitized manuscript.

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Latin American Ephemera: Digitized Microfilm Sets

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Princeton University Library is pleased to announce that an early and vast subset of its renowned Latin American Ephemera Collection that until recently was only accessible in microfilm or in Special Collections is now digitally available on its Digital PUL site.

In time, Latin American Ephemera: Digitized Microfilm Sets will include approximately 350 thematically and geographically organized sub-collections, ranging in size from a handful of items to hundreds of them, that were assembled and microfilmed between the mid-1970s and the early 2000s. Among the topics most commonly addressed by the collections are politics, human and civil rights, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, environment and ecology, education, labor, health, and socioeconomic conditions.

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In partnership with PLAS

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Princeton University Library has been most fortunate to receive every year support from the Program in Latin American Studies to acquire items of special research, cultural and historic value. Recent acquisitions partially or completely funded by PLAS have ranged from 17th century rare books, to 19th and 20th century manuscripts and archives, to works by contemporary graphic artists from the region.

Showcased below are just a few of the many special items that are now available to the Princeton community and to visiting researchers thanks to the enduring partnership with PLAS.

Jorge Amado Letters, circa 1965-1985.

The collection consists of letters and postcards from Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado to the Portuguese journalist, essayist, translator, literary critic and teacher, Alvaro Salema. A complete collection description and finding aid are available here.  

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Puerto Rican Graphic Arts donation

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The following six pieces by graphic artists Luis Alonso, Lorenzo Homar, Antonio Martorell and Rafael Tufiño were recently donated to the Graphic Arts Collection by Alma Concepción and Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones. Their generous gift is a most welcomed addition to the Library’s superb holdings of Puerto Rican graphic arts. Holdings which indeed originated with an initial donation by Concepción and Díaz-Quiñones of dozens of silkscreen posters and prints soon after they moved to Princeton in 1982.

Concurso de Tiples y Cuatros, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, silkscreen poster, 1960, by Rafael Tufiño.
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