Images & Maps

Jack Delano, photographer. *Vicinity of Corozal, Puerto Rico*. 1941. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Prints, photographs, and cartographic materials are rich sources of information when researching the topic of Hispanic Americans in business and entrepreneurship. At times, images can visually present information better than text, can be more interactive, and can improve comprehension by reinforcing information provided in text. The selected resources linked below provide a mix of digitized primary and secondary sources from both the Library of Congress as well as other libraries and organizations.

Images

The Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) includes descriptions of about 95% of the materials in the Division's collections and is the primary means of finding descriptions of images from the collections of the Prints & Photographs Reading Room. When searching the catalog, you will need to experiment with using the terms "Hispanic," "Mexican," or "Puerto Rican" or "Mexican American" or "Mexican American businesses" or related terms. Item descriptions often include direct transcriptions of original captions. The Library presents the historical captions because they can be important for understanding the context in which the images were created. The terms used to describe images related to the lives of Hispanic Americans in the 20th century were assigned by individuals sometimes from outside and sometimes from within Hispanic American communities. Please note that terminology in historical materials and in Library descriptions does not always match the language preferred by Hispanic Americans individually or as a community, and may include negative stereotypes. When you find an item related to your search, you may want to click on the subject heading to locate related images.

Artist Posters: Puerto Rico
The online Artist Posters consist of a small but growing proportion of the more than 85,000 posters in the Artist Poster filing series. This series highlights the work of poster artists, both identified and anonymous. It includes posters from the nineteenth century to the present day from the United States and other countries. Those from Puerto Rico address social and cultural life, agricultural workers, and other subjects.
Black-and-White Photographs depicting Puerto Rico, 1935-1944
This set of photographs come from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) Black-and-White Negatives Collection. These images from Puerto Rico focus on rural areas, farm labor, and World War II mobilization around factories, railroads, aviation training, and women working in these industries.
Color Photographs depicting Puerto Rico, 1939-1944
This set of photographs come from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) Color Photographs Collection. These images from Puerto Rico focus on rural areas, farm labor, and World War II mobilization around factories, railroads, aviation training, and women working in these industries.
Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives
The photographs of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) Photograph Collection form an extensive pictorial record of American life between 1935 and 1944. Included in this collection are images of Hispanic American soldiers, shipyard workers, tenant farmers, steelworkers, health care workers, professionals, as well as images of Hispanic American businesses and shopping centers. The collection includes photographs of signs enforcing racial discrimination.
Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record/Historic American Landscapes Survey
The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) collections are among the largest and most heavily used in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. The collections document achievements in architecture, engineering, and landscape design in the United States and its territories through a comprehensive range of building types, engineering technologies, and landscapes. This collection includes buildings of historic importance to the study of Hispanic American business and entrepreneurship.
Jack Delano Collection
More than 1,000 photographs by Jack Delano and his photographic experience in Puerto Rico are available online.
Latin America and the Caribbean in Photographs at the Library of Congress
This guide describes groups of photographs of Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, from 1840s-present, in the Prints & Photographs Division. It outlines helpful search strategies and highlights important collections and creators.
Mission Grafica/La Raza Graphics Collection
The collection consists of prints, posters, portfolios, zines, manuscripts, and ephemera produced between 1970 and 2010 at the Mission Gráfica and La Raza printmaking workshop collectives in San Francisco, California. The collection features screen prints, woodcuts, offset lithographs, and posters with content related to social, political, and cultural identity issues as well as community concerns and events; art, music, and performance; civil rights, women's rights, and war.
National Child Labor Committee Collection
Working as an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), Lewis Hine (1874-1940) documented working and living conditions of children in the United States between 1908 and 1924. The NCLC photos are useful for the study of labor, reform movements, children, working class families, education, public health, urban and rural housing conditions, industrial and agricultural sites, and other aspects of urban and rural life in America in the early twentieth century.
Puerto Rico's Plantation Economy: Snapshots from the Library of Congress
This research guide provides access to historic photographic and film documentation, as well as related print and electronic resources, illustrating the 20th century efforts to transform Puerto Rico from a plantation to an industrial economy.
U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection
The U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection depicts topics that were of interest for the magazine's coverage of U.S. business and political news topics, with particular emphasis on Washington, D.C., and the United States, featuring images depicting political and governmental activities, civil rights, business and economic developments, industry, education, domestic life, transportation, communication, health care, and housing.
Using Local and Family History Photographs to Tell the Stories of Your Ancestors
This guide offers research strategies to search the Library of Congress' print and digital collections for photographs that focus the lens on your family and strengthen your genealogical research, and can be applied to searching lesser known Hispanic American individuals associated with business and entrepreneurship, but can be applied to other groups of individuals.

Maps

Maps provide a visual representation, which can be useful in a variety of ways when studying geography, statistics or data.

Chicano/Latino Movements History and Geography, Mapping Social Movements Project (University of Washington) External
The University of Washington explores the historical geography of Chicano/Latino organizations in 32 maps and charts, including United Farm Workers 1965-1975, MEChA and Chicano Student organizations 1967-2012; Spring 2006 Immigrant Rights protests; Raza Unida Party 1970-1974; Brown Berets 1967-1972; Chicano Newspapers 1966-1979. Other maps track the activism of earlier generations: LULAC 1929-1977; American GI Forum 1948-1974.
Digitized Maps (Geography and Map Reading Room, Library of Congress)
The Library of Congress has digitized many of the maps in its collections which are freely available. You can search and refine by time period and place.
Fire Insurance Maps at the Library of Congress: A Resource Guide (Geography and Map Research Center, Library of Congress)
The Geography and Map Division holds extensive fire insurance map collections useful in genealogy research, environmental studies, urban planning, and more. This guide assists researchers in both discovering and navigating these primary source materials.
Geography & Map Division (Library of Congress)
The Geography and Map Division established in 1897, has custody of the bulk of the Library's cartographic materials and would be the staff at the Library that could answer questions about the digitized and undigitized map collections.
Mapping Inequity: Redlining in New Deal America (University of Richmond) External
This University of Richmond big data project is based on information from the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC). This federal agency was established in the US in response to the mortgage crisis of the Great Depression. In addition to granting loans and introducing standard lending practices, the HOLC also made assessments of major cities and urban areas around the country to determine safe and risky investment areas. HOLC created neighborhood-by-neighborhood maps and accompanying area descriptions describing threats to the “security” of a particular area. The maps categorized specific areas in cities according to categories based on racial, ethnic, and economic characteristics of residents and potential home buyers.
Not Even Past: Social Vulnerability and the Legacy of Redlining (University of Richmond) External
The University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab's "Legacy of Redlining" project shows lower-income and minority neighborhoods that experienced redlining — racially motivated lending discrimination — decades ago have a higher prevalence of chronic diseases, which are risk factors for COVID-19 by comparing maps from a 1930s federal agency, the Home Owners Loan Corporation with the Center for Disease Control's Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) scores for census tracts today.
Opportunity Atlas (Chetty, Raj, Nathaniel Hendren, John Friedman, and the Opportunity Insights Team) External
This comprehensive Census tract-level dataset of children’s outcomes in adulthood uses data covering nearly the entire U.S. population. For each tract, children’s outcomes in adulthood such as earnings distributions and incarceration rates by parental income, race, and gender are estimated. These estimates allow us to trace the roots of outcomes such as poverty and incarceration to the neighborhoods in which children grew up.
Relational Reconstruction Toolkit Now Available, October 12, 2023 (The Signal | Library of Congress)
For the past year, Innovator in Residence Jeffrey Yoo Warren worked with LC staff, collections and community members to develop an open source “relational reconstruction” toolkit to share his methodology and inspire the public to reconstruct other lost enclaves from Library collections and other sources. We are thrilled to announce that the toolkit is now available on Github and the video series featured on loc.gov and YouTube!!!
Renewing Inequity (University of Richmond) External
This University of Richmond mapping project examines American cities impacted by urban renewal projects in the 1950s and 60s.Urban renewal refers to programs of land redevelopment in cities and can include the relocation of businesses, the demolition of structures and the relocation of people. The process played an important role in the history and demographics of many cities.
Sanborn Maps (Geography and Map Reading Room, Library of Congress)
The Library of Congress' Sanborn map collection consists of a uniform series of large-scale maps, dating from 1867 to the present and depicting the commercial, industrial, and residential sections of some twelve thousand cities and towns in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Hispanic Americans in Business and Entrepreneurship: A Resource Guide

Images & Maps

Images

Maps