Latin American Studies 330: Undocumented Immigration: Oral Histories

This guide showcases archival and library resources related to oral history best practices.

The Bracero History Archive collects and 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 states in America.

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.

A subsection of StoryCorps, provides the recorded stories of Latinos around the country.

Topics include Central Americans in California, Latinos in film, music, politics, Mexican American Civil Rights and the Sleepy Lagoon Case.

This is a digital archive that contains the oral histories of Latin American migrants in North Carolina and the experiences of North Carolinians that have worked for the integration of new settlers into this southern state.

The Latino Oral History Project of RI (Nuestras Raíces) was started in 1991 and is managed by Rhode Island Latino Arts. It is a collection of the stories and lives of Rhode Island’s Spanish-speaking pioneers.

Undocumented Voices is an oral history project that seeks to document the lives of undocumented students, known as dreamers, who have, and are currently, pursuing a more inclusive U.S. immigration policy. These students have captured the public attention for the extensive social and political movement that they have built on college campuses around the U.S. The Undocumented Voices project aims to create a public conversation about what it means to be an immigrant and an American. Through the compelling narrative of Undocumented Voices, we find a lens through which we can engage the power of the humanities to promote understanding and respect for diverse histories, cultures, and perspectives. Undocumented Voices seeks to highlight the trajectory of the immigrant student movement over the last decade, and explore the history of American immigration, the process of storytelling, and what it means to be a citizen.

The Undocumented Organizing Collecting Initiative is a multi-year effort to preserve histories of undocumented organizing in the United States. Collecting oral histories and objects from undocumented organizers in Southern California, Chicago, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Carolina, Washington, D.C., and Mexico City, the Initiative was the first collective research initiative to provide a national perspective on the multi-focal, multi-vocal undocumented organizing movement.

The Center for Latino and Latin American Studies established the NIU Latinx Oral History Project in 2014 to document the lives and experiences of Latinxs in the Midwest. The collection contains over 150 audio and video interviews with NIU faculty, students, and staff, undocumented migrants, community activists and leaders, and other Latinxs in the region. Many of the interviews have focused on themes of family, identity formation, Latinx social and political organizing, and the difficulties faced by the undocumented in the United States. Interviews continue to be collected and processed by NIU undergraduate and graduate students. Some interviews have also been deposited in the Regional History Center at NIU’s Founders Memorial Library and are open to researchers for consultation.

A growing archive of personal stories of immigrants to the Pacific Coast from Angel Island Immigration Station detainees to those arriving today.

Watch filmed interviews with Japanese Americans and others about WWII incarceration and beyond. The Densho Digital Repository includes more than 900 oral histories, all of which are fully transcribed and segmented for ease of viewing.

The Samuel Proctor Oral History Program Digital Collection includes the digital holdings of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP) at the University of Florida. With over 8,000 interviews, of which over 3.600 are online, the SPOHP collection is one of the largest oral history archives in the South and one of the top collections in the country. The largest collection contains more than 900 interviews with Native Americans including Seminoles, Cherokees, and Creeks. Other major holdings include projects on African Americans in Florida in the Joel Buchanan Archive of African American Oral History, Civil Rights action in St. Augustine (1964), and the University of Florida. Over 100 oral histories from the Matheson Museum are included.