Latinx Diaspora in the Americas Project

The Latinx Diaspora in the Americas Project, founded in 2014, is a growing, award-winning archive of 100+ oral histories dedicated to creating space for Latina/os to share their historical experiences related to identity, immigration reform, labor conditions, education, and civil rights.

LDAP Familia Blog

LDAP Familia is a blog maintained by project coordinators of LDAP. It was first launched in Fall 2015 and continues to serve as a story-box to share experiences and reflections from our fieldwork and our lives. Keep up with our latest fieldwork and reflections here.

Oral history interviews for the Latinx Diaspora in the Americas Project are currently undergoing processing, and interview audio is available to access through the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program offices. Please contact us for more information.
Digital media resources including documentaries, student film projects, and podcasts are now online!
LDAP Listing including all collections and interviewees is available online.

Solidarity Sessions

Solidarity Sessions is a discussion series at IBC and La Casita where professors, grad students, and community organizers lead students in discussions on various issues concerning Black and Latinx communities. These sessions are open and welcoming of all to provide them with a structured opportunity to meet and engage with a diverse body of scholars and community members at and around UF. Additionally, our goal for this series is to have the institutes serve as spaces to conduct and share research as well as to bridge the gap between the Gainesville community and UF students and resources.

Learn more about Solidarity Sessions here.

The Latin American and Latinx Studies Symposium

Solidarity Sessions coordinators were accepted to present at the 2020 Latin American and Latinx Studies Symposium at Rollins College. The Latin American and Latinx Studies Symposium welcomes undergraduate students to share their research on themes related to current domestic and foreign issues in Latin America and the Latinx population in the United States. The Solidarity Sessions team was invited to present on the Education: Sovereignty and Solidarity panel on a paper titled Reclaiming Our Space: Solidarity Sessions at the Institute of Hispanic-Latino Cultures. This conference, which was originally scheduled for April 3, 2020, was sadly cancelled due to COVID-19.

Mini-Documentary Premieres at Jews in the Americas Conference, February 24-26, 2019

Samuel Proctor Oral History Program staffers Francesc Morales and Elaine Sponholtz attended the opening night events of the Jews in the Americas Conference at Library East, to celebrate the premiere of their 21 minute mini-documentary on The History of the Jewish Community in El Salvador in the Judaica Suite. The new mini-documentary weaves together excerpts of six representative interviews with Salvadorans, augmented by images of El Salvador. It includes the story of two WWII era Salvadoran diplomats, who provided fictional citizenship documents for Jews fleeing Europe. Working together from the Salvadoran consulate in Geneva, thousands of Jews were saved from transport to concentration camps due to the certificates issued by George Mandel-Montello and José Arturo Castellanos Contreras.

The History of the Jewish Community in El Salvador is one of the main projects we have in the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program. These valuable collection of documents are the product of research conducted by Fulbright Scholar Jessica Alpert, who spent a year collecting the oral histories of the approximately sixty Jewish families of El Salvador. The transcription and translation of the interviews are possible thanks to a collaboration with Rebecca Jefferson of the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica and funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The collection documents the community-building efforts of Jewish immigrants to El Salvador, some arriving in the 1920s and starting coffee plantations, and many more arriving after fleeing the Nazi occupation during World War II. Indeed, almost all of the families were from France or Tunisia and, after moving to El Salvador, became connected to the United States of America through their children, or through their escape from the war in the 1980s. In addition, a few members converted from Christianity to Judaism.

Link to SPOHP’s The History of the Jewish Community in El Salvador Project

2015 Diversity Award

LDAP was awarded the Society of American Archivists’ Diversity Award for 2015 for demonstrating significant achievement in archival activism, education, outreach, and service, based on long-term impacts improving and promoting diversity. Founding coordinator Génesis Lara accepted the award in August 2015 at the SAA conference in Cleveland, OH.

Ongoing Research

Research topics in Spring 2015 focused on Tucson, Arizona, home to 145,234 Mexican Americans, and the Mexican American Studies program in the Tucson Unified School District. LDAP Coordinator Génesis Lara led 11 undergraduate and graduate students to Tucson over spring break to record the voices of students, community leaders, parents, and educators who have been deeply affected by Arizona policymakers, in connection with Prescott College.

UF students and project coordinators were able to participate in this transformative experience at no cost because of generous contributions from Mark Proctor, the UF Spanish and Portuguese Studies Department, and SPOHP.

In 2015-2016, LDAP coordinated a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities/American Library Association for ‘Latino Americans: 500 Years of History’ to conduct history programming across the state of Florida. The grant is organized by Sarah McNamara, SPOHP alumna and current PhD candidate in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with LDAP.

Each semester, LDAP conducts new oral histories related to Latinos in the Global South on themes including identity, immigration reform, labor conditions, education and civil rights. Major topics of focus include immigration history in the Americas, Nuestras Historias with Hispanic-Latino UF alumni, and the Tucson Ethnic Studies program. Read about news and updates on the LDAP Familia blog.

The History Of The Jewish Community In El Salvador

Latino History Project Events and Research News