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A La Izquierda: The Puerto Rican Movements Collection

 Collection — Multiple Containers
Identifier: artificial-LEFT

Scope and Contents

A La Izquierda: The Puerto Rican Movement, 1923-2002 is an artifical microfilm collection documenting left-wing social movements for justice, independence and human rights in Puerto Rico and the United States during the twentieth century. The collection consists of twenty microfilm reels that include periodicals, newsletters, pamphlets and other documents representing multiple organizations and individuals that advocated for Puerto Rican independence and around issues of labor, feminism and human rights on the island and in the United States. Represented in this collection are documents originating in Puerto Rico as well as from communities in New York, Chicago, Hartford and California.

This collection provides rich material for researchers and can serve as an introduction into the complex history of the organizations and movements that composed the Puerto Rican left-independence struggle. In many cases, there is no other source of documentation for these groups.

The microfilm reels are arranged by title in alphabetical order from reels 1-16. Reels 1719 include pamphlets that are arranged chronologically by decade and reel 20 is devoted solely to the writings of prominent political activist and poet Juan Antonio Corretjer (1908-1985) and the organization he helped found, the Liga Socialista Puertorriqueña (LSP). This is a unique collection and a valuable source of information on a topic that continues to be relevant for researchers, scholars and activists alike.

Dates

  • 1923-2002

Conditions Governing Access

The collection is available to researchers as a microfilm collection only. Original material is not accessible.

Conditions Governing Use

Marc Zeitschik of Praxess Associates donated all rights from the A La Izquierda microfilm collection to CENTRO.

Extent

20 Reels

12 Cubic Feet

Language of Materials

Spanish; Castilian

English

Metadata Rights Declarations

  • License: This record is made available under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Creative Commons license.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Most of these resources documenting the Puerto Rican left movements were journals and periodicals from other collections in Centro Archives or Hunter College Archives.

Existence and Location of Originals

Most of the original material is currently held in the CENTRO Archives, some material was loaned for microfilming by the owners.

Related Materials

Jesús Colón Papers and Ruth M Reynolds Papers in the CENTRO Archives.

Title
A La Izquierda Collection
Subtitle
The Puerto Rican Movements
Status
Completed
Author
Librarian Jorge Matos Valldejuli, Archivist Nélida Pérez and Assistant Andy García. Special thanks to Luis Garden Acosta for lending us the periodical Palante for microfilming. Sol Salazar, Hunter College Spanish Major Concentration in Translation, translated this Finding aid into the Spanish language.
Date
2002
Description rules
Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Language of description
English
Script of description
Latin
Sponsor
The project is a collaborative effort between Marc Zeitschik of Praxess Associates and Centro. Project participants from Centro were Jorge Matos Valldejuli, Nélida Pérez and Andy García. Special thanks to Luis Garden Acosta for lending us the periodical Palante for microfilming.

Revision Statements

  • January 2021: Notes revised by Pedro Juan Hernández.
  • October 2022: Notes revised and additional processing of physical collection by Herbert Duran

Repository Details

Part of the Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora Repository

Contact:
Silberman Building, Hunter College
2180 Third Ave. Rm. 122
New York New York 10065




About the Collections

Our collections consist of personal papers from prominent Puerto Rican artists, elected officials, social activists, writers, as well as the records of community-based organizations. Our largest collection, the Offices of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United States (OGPRUS) Records, measures approximately 2,900 cubic feet and contains an extraordinary amount of information regarding Puerto Rican migrants and the government institutions established to assist them. The collections date from the 1890s to the present, and document Puerto Rican communities in the Northeast, Midwest, Florida, California and Hawaii.