History, Latin America *

Makes available the oral histories and artifacts pertaining to the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative that spanned the years 1942-1964. Millions of Mexican agricultural workers crossed the border under the program to work in more than half of the U.S. states.

A project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Brown University, and The Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Over fifty interviews were conducted to document the experiences of Brooklyn residents who arrived from Puerto Rico, Panama, Ecuador, and several other Central and South American nations in the latter half of the twentieth century. This collection includes recordings and transcripts of interviews conducted between 1988 and 1989.

In the late 1960s, Sacramento State served as an important site for Chicana/o student organizers who sought to revolutionize academia from inside and make impactful changes in the community. In November 2012, a group of Chicana/o movement elders and allies came together and formed The Sacramento Movimiento Chicano and Mexican American Education Oral History Project. The purpose of the collective was to record Chicana/o movement activists/participants’ oral histories about their involvement and contributions in the Mexican American civil rights movement in Sacramento from 1965 through 1980.

The CSRC Oral Histories Series publishes the life narratives of prominent Chicano and Latino figures. The life narratives have been recorded and transcribed, and the interviewer and interviewee have reviewed and corrected the transcriptions prior to publication. These oral histories are often undertaken as part of a larger research project and in tandem with archival collections and library holdings.

The UCLA Center for Oral History Research (COHR) conducts in-depth, multi-session oral history interviews with individuals who have been a part of the history of Los Angeles and its many communities. COHR has particularly strong collections in the history of social movements, communities of color, the arts, Los Angeles politics and government, and the history of UCLA.

Voces del Teatro: An Oral History of Latinx Theatre in Modern Los Angeles (Late 1960s to Present) is a series of video and audio interviews with the key elder theatremakers who established and developed this genre over the past 50 years. This groundbreaking effort marks the first formal attempt to chronicle this important theatrical genre. Beginning with the Chicano Movement and the advent of the Civil Rights era, Voces del Teatro is not only a story of theatre, but a testament to the power of the arts to empower social and political change.

Working with the La Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala (FAFG), a Guatemalan forensics organization, USC Shoah Foundation has launched a project to collect video testimonies of witnesses to the Guatemalan Genocide of the early 1980s. About 150 video interviews from Guatemalan survivors and witnesses have been collected in Guatemala for the pilot program. All of these interviews are conducted in Spanish or K’iche,’ the indigenous language.