SPN 333/368 Defining Moments in the Hispanic World

BDPI is a project of the Asociación de Bibliotecas Nacionales de Iberoamérica (ABINIA). Its objective is the creation of a portal which provides access, from a single search point, to the digital resources of all the participating libraries. Highlighted digital collections in geography and travel, periodicals, music, and tales and legends.

Many hundreds of protest murals were created in Chile during the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). The photographer Andrés Romero Spethman worked alongside muralist brigades representing political parties such as the Partido Socialista and the Izquierda Cristiana. Created in and around Santiago between 1983 and 1990, the murals document the spirit, force, and iconography of political protest during an important period of Chilean history.

Classic Mexican Cinema Online contains a collection of popular movie periodicals from the archives of Filmoteca de la UNAM in Mexico City. It includes chief magazines such as Cinema Reporter (1943-1965) and Cine Mundial (1954-1955). It also features extremely rare copies of El Cine Grafico from 1935 and of the weekly El Mundo Ilustrado (1902-1910). The true extent of the popularity of Mexican film is illustrated by Cinelandia (1931-1947), which was published in Hollywood both in Spanish and in English. This collection also includes dozens of film flyers, which were distributed on the streets to lure people into the cinema. Finally, this collection gives access to the personal scrap books of Fernando de Fuentes (1894-1958), one of the leading Latin-American filmmakers to this day.

The bulk of the materials currently found in the Digital Archive were originally created around the turn of the 20th century and after, with some originating as recently as within the last year. The formats or genre most commonly included are pamphlets, flyers, leaflets, brochures, posters, stickers, and postcards. These items were originally created by a wide array of social activists, non-governmental organizations, government agencies, political parties, public policy think tanks, and other types of organizations in order to publicize their views, positions, agendas, policies, events, and activities. The vast majority are rare, hard-to-find primary sources unavailable elsewhere.

This collection of more than 5,000 titles contains main scarce and unique Latin American pamphlets published during the 19th and the early 20th centuries. One of the few institutions to have consistently collected Latin American pamphlets, Harvard has benefited from collections formed by Luis Montt (Chile), Nicolás Acosta (Bolivia), Manuel Segundo Sánchez (Venezuela), José Augusto Escoto (Cuba), Blas Garay (Paraguay), Charles Sumner, John B. Stetson and others. Chile, Cuba, Bolivia and Mexico are the countries most heavily represented in this collection.

The posters included in this collection were created by a wide variety of social activists, non-governmental organizations, government agencies, political parties, and other types of organizations across Latin America, in order to publicize their views, positions, agendas, policies, events, and services. Even though posters produced in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, and Venezuela are the most abundant among the more than two thousand currently available in the site, almost every country in the region is represented. In terms of topics, some of the best represented are human rights, elections, gender issues, indigenous issues, labor, ecology and environmental issues, development, public health, and education.

A digital collection of Latin American travel accounts written in the 16th-17th centuries. Arranged by country or area.

El Portal Manuscritos de América en las Colecciones Reales nace de la colaboración entre la Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes y la Real Biblioteca de Patrimonio Nacional.

A wide variety of objects and documents from Chile's Museum of Memory and Human Rights.