In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, I’m featuring the Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera—a repository hosted by Princeton University Library featuring nearly 30,000 items. “Ephemera” is defined broadly: while roughly two-thirds of the collection is comprised of pamphlets, flyers, and posters, it also includes items like calendars, stickers, and bookmarks. While it features items in a variety of languages dating back to the early 20th century, the bulk of the collection is Spanish-language material from the 1990s to the present.

While this archive is full of material that would be valuable to anyone studying Latin American/Caribbean history or culture, I find myself particularly impressed with its user interface and detailed metadata—that is, the fields that describe and categorize the individual objects. The archive permits users to filter searches by genre (e.g., flyers, posters, leaflets, etc.), date, subjects, language, geographic subject, and geographic origin. The distinction between the latter two categories could be especially useful for studies of international relations—and in particular, for exploring critiques of U.S. imperialism in Latin America. For example, by setting the geographic origin to “Argentina” and the geographic subject to “United States,” I was able to uncover some fascinating ephemera, like this hundred-dollar U.S. bill which—ostensibly critiquing the IMF and neoliberal market policy—features images of former Argentinian President Mauricio Macri and Christine Lagarde, former Chairman and Managing Director of the IMF:

The “subject” filters make for a very browsing-friendly interface, and the categories—which cover everything from “protest movements,” to “cattle trade,” to “ecotourism”—make it easy to discover interesting artifacts. Instructors in Latin American- focused fields might consider designing assignments around this archive: while it would be of obvious utility in a course on Latin American history or culture, the proliferation of ephemera with pithy slogans (there’s a whole category devoted to picket signs!) could be an effective learning tool in introductory Spanish courses.

While this database is great for browsing, what if we want to perform a targeted search? One limitation of this archive is that it’s not able to search the text that actually appears on the ephemera; rather, it combs through the metadata fields (i.e., the item’s title, the subject, etc.). So while keyword searching has some utility, it needs to be performed in conjunction with other strategies. For example, I wanted to find ephemera relating to protests against Pinochet’s dictatorial regime in Chile. Simply searching “Pinochet” as a keyword returned 18 results; while many of the items were interesting, they were clearly appearing in the search because “Pinochet” was in either the item’s title or its description. However, I was able to obtain a different set of results by strategically using search filters: I set the date range to the years of Pinochet’s dictatorship, 1973-1990; I set the geographic origin to “Chile”; and I set the subject to “State-sponsored terrorism.” This yielded some interesting results that didn’t necessarily mention Pinochet by name, but were nonetheless very relevant to my search, such as this pamphlet distributed by an advocacy group for family members of individuals who were detained or disappeared under Pinochet’s rule. If I were to experiment more with the subject field—because not all items relating to Pinochet are necessarily tagged with “State-sponsored terrorism”—it would invariably yield a variety of other relevant results.

While it requires a bit of experimentation to find what you need, this archive contains a vast, diverse array of materials, and I recommend it to anyone doing research that engages with Latin American or Caribbean history, culture, or politics. Give it a try! And if you want more research help, stop by Walk-In Reference in Olin or sign up for a consultation with a subject librarian.