Velez, Tony

The Hispanic Communities Documentation Project was an archival initiative based at the Brooklyn Historical Society in the late 1980s and directed by Morton Marks. The project sought to capture the cultural ethos of the Hispanic community in Brooklyn through printed ephemera (e.g. handouts, fliers, clippings, restaurant menus) and through the voices of community members themselves. At the heart of this collection stands a series of oral histories in which men and women of varying nationalities (Puerto Rican, Mexican, Ecuadorian, etc.) rendered the stories of their lives from birth to their experience as immigrants in the United States.

Though an official administrative history of the project does not exist, it seems to have been carried out as an expansion of the Puerto Rican Oral History Project, which the Society (then the Long Island Historical Society) initiated in 1973 and completed in the mid-1970s. Like the Puerto Rican project before it, the Hispanic Communities Documentation Project provides a substantial body of source material on the immigrant experience in late 20th century America.

From the guide to the Hispanic Communities Documentation Project records and oral histories, Bulk, 1986-1991, 1924-1992, (Brooklyn Historical Society)