12 Area Studies Collections

Peggy K. Pearlstein and Barbara A. Tenenbaum

From its very beginnings, the Library of Congress has collected works in foreign languages. Today the Library's book collections number more than eighteen million volumes. Half of these are works written in languages other than English, representing about 450 different languages and 35 scripts. In many instances, the Library is considered to be the best repository outside the country of origin for Western-language books, periodicals, and other materials about a particular culture. Its non-roman-script-language collections are generally the largest and most extensive in the world outside of the countries where those languages are spoken. Foreign-language items published in the United States form yet another substantial segment of the Library's collections.

The Library's foreign-language collections and adjunct sources on different cultural groups are an important and often untapped resource for study of the origins and development of women's history in the United States. This chapter suggests ways for researchers to avail themselves of the many opportunities afforded by these materials throughout the Library of Congress.

The African and Middle Eastern Reading Room (AMED), the Asian Reading Room (AD), the European Reading Room (EurRR), and the Hispanic Reading Room (HISP), collectively known as the “Area Studies” reading rooms, provide the primary gateways to the Library's foreign language materials and culture groups. Each contains a specialized reference collection that is open to researchers. Each reading room is staffed with its own area specialists and reference librarians. Their linguistic proficiency and subject expertise enable them to provide valuable assistance to scholars and to the general public concerning a great variety of cultural communities. Because of their broad knowledge about a culture, the area specialists and reference librarians can also guide researchers to other reading rooms that contain special format material, such as films or sound recordings, on certain groups and individuals. The accompanying charts shows how to access items that are in both roman-and non-roman-script languages and in different formats.

It should be noted that research on particular cultural groups can be enriched by knowledge of their places of settlement, prevalent occupations, and forms of cultural expression. This is particularly relevant in searching special-format collections where materials may not have been indexed consistently by the ethnic group represented in them.

The experiences of women from several different cultures, regions, and time periods can be highlighted by the following examples from the Library's collections. Those described below are not limited to custodial items in Area Studies, but represent the myriad print and nonprint media found throughout the Library. Our hope is to suggest previously unexplored channels that can enlarge our understanding of United States women's history similar to the approach taken in two topical resource guides already published by the Library of Congress, Many Nations: A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Indian and Alaska Native Peoples of the United States and The African-American Mosaic: A Library of Con-Vais broit . . . azoyfil vayse penitslekh frish broit far alemen. Mayne oygen tsinden zikh on mit hunger. White bread, so many small slices of fresh, white bread for all of us. My eyes lit up with hunger.1 gress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History and Culture.2

The Library's abundant collections of memoir literature, autobiographies, interviews, and oral histories in several languages and formats provide a corpus of firsthand information for learning about women's experiences and lives. Among those who did not have to emigrate to become American was Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert. In her memoir of her family and community, We Fed Them Cactus (1954; 1994), she chronicles the evolution of Hispanics in New Mexico at the end of the nineteenth century. A half-century later, an oral history interview titled “Yoshi Mary Tashima: Evacuation to Santa Anita Assembly Center” discusses a woman's ordeal in an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. More recently, Monique Ugbaja, a newly arrived immigrant, records in In the Secret Place: The Ordeal of an African First Wife in America (1996) the contemporary difficulties of broken homes and divorce.3

The Library's comprehensive collection of foreign-language newspapers and periodicals published abroad constitutes a useful tool for understanding how other peoples view and interpret events in this country bearing on women's history. For instance, on September 20, 1920, the Tokyo-based Japanese newspaper Asahi Shinbun (uncataloged, Orien Japan) spotlighted the success of the women's suffrage movement when it reported that Tennessee, the last state necessary, had ratified the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote in the United States. Fu nü tsa chih/Fu nü za zhi (The ladies journal, 6: 3) (HQ1104.F8 Orien China), a monthly periodical published in Shanghai, China, similarly announced to its readers in 1920 that the Nineteenth Amendment granting suffrage to women in the United States had become a law.

Immigrant and ethnic newspapers issued in this country are a fertile source for discerning the varieties of women's experiences and endeavors. Al-Hudá (Guidance) (1898-, microfilm 2351 Arab, Near East), a New York Arabic-language newspaper, recorded in its pages the activities of the Syrian Ladies Aid Society of Boston during the 1910s. The New York Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts (Jewish daily forward) (1897-; microfilm, Hebr) and the Italian-language newspaper Il Progresso Italo-Americano (1880-1989; News MF 2297, N&CPR) headlined on each of their front pages the names of the 146 young Jewish and Italian female garment workers who died tragically in the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company sweatshop in New York City on March 25, 1911.

Rich sources for the study of women in the United States are the publications of women themselves. Gi os Polek (The Polish women's voice) (1902-; LC has vols. 12-14, 1921-23, and vols. 72-75, 1977-80, incomplete; HQ1104.G5 fol, GenColl), the important Polish-American women's journal that began in Chicago at the turn of the century, and Zarja (The dawn) (1928-; LC has vol. 14, 1942-vol. 59, 1987, incomplete; AP58 .S55 Z3 GenColl), the twentieth-century official publication of the Slovenian Women's Union of America, printed in Joliet, Illinois, are two examples of this genre. One of the most recent periodicals for newcomers is Rah-e-Zendegi (The way of life) (1979-; LC has 1981-; uncataloged, Near East), a Farsi-language monthly published in Los Angeles, California, home for a large group of Iranian Americans. Rah-e-Zendegi, whose publisher is female, is devoted to preserving Iranian culture and identity, especially through the use of Farsi. Yet it describes, filters, and even promotes customs of modern American women. Here, full-color advertisements bring the newest commercial enticements of America both to recent arrivals and to more established members of the Iranian community in the United States.

HOW TO ACCESS FOREIGN-LANGUAGE MATERIAL

AREA STUDIES READING ROOMS

The Library's special-format divisions also provide numerous opportunities to research the lives of women from different backgrounds, some of whom are current immigrants and others of whom are fourth-and fifth-generation Americans. For example, With Silk Wings—Asian American Women at Work: Four Women (Lone Ding Vox Productions, 1983, VBC 3836, MBRS), a series of four films that focus on the challenges and conflicts of adjusting to a new culture, is available for viewing in the Motion Picture and Television Reading Room (chapter 10). Polish-born American actress Helena Modjeska appears in photographs in the Prints and Photographs Division, and several letters from her can be read in the Manuscript Division. Lastly, the Thomas Čapek Collection of Material Relating to Czechoslovakia and Czech Americans, also located in the Manuscript Division, has a photograph, bibliography, and sketch of the life of Čapek's wife and collaborator, Anne Vostroveský Čapek.

USING AREA STUDIES COLLECTIONS

To maximize your opportunities to mine the riches of the Library's foreign-language materials, you should consult the reference librarians and area specialists in the Area Studies reading rooms. Refer frequently to the chart at the beginning of this chapter to clarify the sometimes confusing custodial assignment of s throughout the Library. You will also find the chapters “Using the Library of Congress” and “The General Collections,” especially the sections on Library of Congress Subject Headings, very helpful for understanding how the Library is structured so that you can locate source material in all of the collections. Specific search strategies are discussed more thoroughly in the two case studies on Jewish women and Latinas below.

A SELECTED FOCUS

This chapter will highlight materials and how to access them for just two of the many cultural communities covered by Area Studies collections: American Jewish women and Latina women. Previously, the Library has published guides to its collections for the study of Indian and Alaska native peoples of the United States and for the study of African American history and culture (see above). American Jewish women and Latina women highlight the religious and ethnic pluralism of the United States. The Hispanic community constitutes the largest and the fastest growing minority cohort of the population today. In addition, a focus on these two groups of women demonstrates how doing research at the Library in a non-roman vernacular-script language such as Yiddish, spoken by the majority of Eastern European Jewish women immigrants in the latter part of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, or in a Western foreign language such as Spanish, spoken by Latinas, can enrich research through the use of multiple language sources. Since location of s in the Library is determined by format as well as by subject and language, examples of resources concerning these two groups of women come from several collections and can be found in various specialized reading rooms. Appearing as they do in the final chapter of this guide, the examples that follow reemphasize the interdisciplinary nature of research on women in general and emphasize in particular the importance of looking at the Library's collections across all of the reading rooms in order to plumb most thoroughly the depths of resources available. Keep in mind that the two groups selected are only examples; you can use the methods described below to research women from other backgrounds. In doing so, it is very likely that you will uncover unexpected aspects of women's history in the United States.

AMERICAN JEWISH WOMEN

Jewish women first arrived in North America in 1654 when a boatload of refugees—four women, six men, and thirteen children—fleeing Dutch Brazil after its reconquest by the Portuguese, landed in New Amsterdam, now New York City. Most of the refugees, known as Sephardim, the descendants of Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492 and 1497, respectively, returned to Holland or sailed for the West Indies or Surinam when they were unable to maintain a viable community of their own in New Amsterdam. Nevertheless, by the eve of the American Revolution, about twenty-five hundred Jews were in the American colonies, many of them merchant families clustered in six eastern port cities. It was another two generations, and with a steady infusion of immigrants, before Jewish communal life in New York and the other cities became firmly established.

In this period, the typical Jewish woman, sometimes herself a seamstress, was the wife of a craftsman or storekeeper. Perhaps involved in the family business, she most likely kept a home where the dietary laws were observed. Almost always literate, an important skill in helping in a family enterprise, these women were barely visible in early American Jewish communal and religious life and publications. Public Judaism was reserved for males. Women expressed their religion in the home as the keepers of the spiritual legacy and then publicly as the founders of associations like the first Female Hebrew Benevolent Society established in 1819 or the first Hebrew Sunday School dating from 1838, both in Philadelphia.

An exception—like poet Emma Lazarus—was writer Penina Moise, who lived in Charleston, South Carolina, her entire life. Moise wrote 180 of the 210 hymns that appear in Hymns Written for the Use of Hebrew Congregations ([n.p.] [1856] BM679.E5 H8 1856 GenColl).

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, middle-class women played an increasingly active role in philanthropic life, both Jewish and gentile, while upholding the “cult of true womanhood.” They embodied the role of pure and pious homemakers who stressed the ethical, rather than the ritual and ceremonial. In the twentieth century, the new American Jewish woman, primarily of German descent, sought higher education, other ways to express her Judaism, and solutions to the challenges of the progressive era. The National Council of Jewish Women, founded by Hannah G. Solomon (1858-1942) at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, created mission schools and settlement houses and provided aid for newly arrived Jewish immigrant women and children (see chapter 5). Between 1881 and 1921 more than two million Jewish immigrants came to the United States, most often in family units.

By 1920, Jewish women of Eastern European heritage and their American-born children outnumbered Central European Jewish immigrants and their native American Jewish children by five to one. Concentrated in the large urban centers, hundreds of thousands of these female immigrants made a living in the garment industry and sweatshops, as reflected in the photographs and field reports of reformer Lewis Hines (see chapter 6). Among their daughters who took advantage of public schools and higher education, many became teachers and others be-came physicians, dentists, or lawyers. Other first-generation Jewish women became union leaders and political radicals. Five playscripts written by Socialist reformer, lecturer, and labor agitator Rose Pastor Stokes (1879-1933), who was on the staff of the New York Yidishes tageblatt (Jewish daily news) (1888-1929, title varies; microfilm, Hebr) are in the Manuscript Division as well as a collection of sixteen s from social worker Pauline Goldmark (1874-1962), who was an executive of the New York office of the National Consumers' League. Rose Schneiderman (1882-1972), Jewish labor organizer, socialist, and suffragist, became president of the National Women's Trade Union League of America from 1927 to 1947 and went on to serve in government positions for the cause of labor. Emma Goldman (1869-1940), the outstanding woman radical in the Jewish community who spoke out against social injustice for half a century, helped edit an anarchist journal. She is the best-known Jewish woman represented in the Anarchism Collection and in the anarchism materials in the Paul Avrich Collection (RBSC). Deported to Russia with others during the 1919 Red Scare in America, she fled the Soviet regime and lived in exile in Canada. Upon her death, however, the United States government allowed her to be buried in Chicago, close to the graves of the men executed in 1886 for the Haymarket killings (see chapter 4).4 Political activist Mollie Steimer (1897-1980) is represented in the Paul Avrich Collection as well. The stage and screen also attracted Jewish women to the spotlight, first as stars of the Yiddish theater and film and then on the national scene.

Still, marriage was all-important to most American Jewish women, and careers outside the home for middle-class women were not the norm. The lives of Jewish homemakers were filled with child rearing, local female mutual aid societies, and involvement in religious life, primarily through synagogue auxiliaries and national Jewish women's groups like Hadassah, a Zionist organization, or the National Council of Jewish Women.

American Jewish women began to find new voices at the same time that Americans responded to Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, which appeared in 1963. Some participated in campus upheavals, civil rights marches, and protests against the war in Vietnam. The women's liberation movement also appealed to many American Jewish women. They entered the Reform and Conservative rabbinate and sought parity with men in religious life, while Orthodox women began to learn traditional texts generally reserved for men. Today Jewish women are academic scholars, politicians, Nobel Prize-winners, and astronauts. The Manuscript Division, for example (see chapter 5), holds the papers of political philosopher, writer, and lecturer Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), who wrote widely on Jewish affairs and totalitarianism and on the Jewish response to the Holocaust, and of current Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (b. 1933). The Manuscript Division also has in its custody the original transcripts of interviews carried out in the last years of the Depression, which included interviews with Jewish women. Some of these can be read on the Library's American Memory Web site under the title American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940.

Currently, the Jewish population of the United States numbers close to six million individuals. Jewish women in this cohort continue to adapt to change and challenge even as they seek new ways to maintain their Jewish identities. Sources on these women are abundant throughout the Library of Congress and may be found as part of collections discussed in this and other chapters, through catalog searches by individual name or organization, and through the use of selected reference tools that yield relevant information. In all cases, the immensity and range of the Library's resources can be used, as perhaps nowhere else, to synthesize an understanding of American Jewish women within the broader society.

Search Strategies

The following section contains strategies for use of the catalogs, provides a brief list of reference sources and tools, and suggests types of materials found in selected reading rooms that will yield information on the history and lifestyles of American Jewish women. Similar sources exist in the Library of Congress for research about women of other groups.

There is no single catalog that lists all of the Hebrew-language material in the Library of Congress. Most titles, including all of those cataloged since 1981, are represented in the Library's online catalog as transliterations, and the lack of vernacular script can make it difficult to locate authors and titles because of spelling changes. Researchers can check Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino (the spoken and written language of Jews of Spanish origin) script titles and also romanized authors' names and subject headings (current only to 1981) in the card catalogs in the African and Middle Eastern Division Reading Room to determine if the Library holds an . These card catalogs also contain entries, by short title only, for s that remain uncataloged and do not appear in the online database.

Records for all Judaica subject books in non-Hebrew script are in the Library's online catalog, and these materials are part of the General Collections, except for classes K (Law) and M (Music). Judaica materials in distinctive formats such as Yiddish film or Ladino sound recordings can be accessed in the Library's special-format reading rooms. Not all of these s appear in the online catalog, but they can be located through the use of local files in those reading rooms.

The varying levels of bibliographic access and the array of catalogs that represent the Hebraic and Judaic holdings of the Library of Congress often make it difficult to grasp the Library's complete holdings on a particular subject. It is important to consult with an area specialist or a reference librarian in the Hebraic Section for assistance.

A good place to begin research is with two biographical titles, based on earlier biographical sources, that provide sweeping and comprehensive information on individual American Jews.

The Concise Dictionary of American Jewish Biography, edited by Jacob Rader Marcus, in two volumes (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing, 1994; E184.J5 C653 1994, Hebr Ref), alphabetically lists twenty-four thousand brief biographies of American Jews, including those of more than two thousand women. Each entry lists the sources used in researching it. Readers should check this reference work first to determine which earlier general and special American Jewish biographical works and Jewish encyclopedias to search.

Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Paula Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore, also two volumes (New York: Routledge, 1998; DS115.2.J49 1997, MRR Biog, Hebr Ref), is an award-winning reference work, indispensable to anyone interested in the history of American Jewish women. It contains eight hundred individual biographies and one hundred topical essays integrated into one alphabetical sequence. Complete bibliographic citations are provided for all entries. Essay topics range from assessments of immigration and assimilation in specific time periods to histories of individual women's organizations to surveys of the role of women in Jewish and American culture. “A Classified List of Biographical Entries” at the end of volume 2 provides an index to Jewish women's participation in specific fields of endeavor such as art, education, and politics. The second volume also includes a broad bibliographic essay, “An Annotated Bibliographic Guide to Archival Resources on the History of Jewish Women in America.” An online version is available through the Women's Studies Library at the University of Wisconsin. The annotated bibliography cites other useful bibliographies, including Ann Masnik's The Jewish Woman: An Annotated Selected Bibliography, 1986-1993: With 1994-1995 Recent Titles List (New York: Biblio Press, 1996; Z7963.J4 C36 1987 Suppl.; MRR Alc).

Selected Sources

This section will cover several groups of material—newspapers and periodicals, community publications, and cookbooks that include Yiddish and English sources. A fourth category focuses on Yiddish material.

Newspapers and Periodicals

The Jewish press in the United States has appeared primarily in English and Yiddish but has also sustained publications in Hebrew, German, Ladino, and Russian. No single catalog or list represents the Library's holdings of the Jewish press. Readers must consult both the online catalogs and the Hebraic section catalogs located in the African and Middle Eastern Reading Room. In addition, readers should consult with the appropriate area specialist and reference librarians in order to definitively ascertain the status of specific titles (see chapter 2 for more information about newspapers and how to locate them).

The major nineteenth-century American Jewish newspaper was the Israelite (later known as American Israelite) founded by Reform rabbi Isaac M. Wise (1854-; AP92.A55 fol GenColl, LC has 1854-1945 and current issues in hard copy, incomplete; News MF 3131, N&CPR). Characteristic of the Anglo-Jewish press, it offered local, national, and international news, editorials, feature articles, and general serialized fiction. Ellen Price Wood's Lady Adelaide's Oath (1877) and Amelia Edward's Debenham's Vow (1879) were two fictional works presented in serialized form. In the twentieth century, Jewish communal weeklies such as the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent (1887-; AP92.J5 fol GenColl; LC has 1917-44 and current issues in hard copy, incomplete; microfilm [0] 94/4593 MicRR) added more local news. Their reports on synagogues, their auxiliary sisterhoods and religious schools, and their coverage of benevolent organizations and local chapters of national Jewish women's groups have provided an important source for the study of women and culture. Deborah (1855-1903, title varies; AP93.D5 fol GenColl; LC has 1876-1900 in hard copy; News MF 3131, N&CPR), the German-language weekly (and then monthly) supplement to the Israelite, was the most notable publication created to serve the German-Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States in increasing numbers in the mid-nineteenth century. Its focus was on a female readership interested in the home, school, and community.

Yiddish-language newspapers have been the largest and most influential arm of the Jewish press. The golden age of Yiddish journalism peaked in 1915-16 when five dailies in New York City alone boasted a circulation of 500,000 readers—many of whom were women. The Hebraic Section holds microform of the major American Yiddish newspapers that expressed the new immigrants' idealistic yearnings even as they moved headlong into full citizenship. In addition to national and international news, the papers devoted considerable space to labor issues—especially strikes in the garment industry, which employed a great number of women—and to efforts to improve the conditions of all workers. From 1923 to 1927, during a period of rivalry with communists, the anarchist group within the International Ladies'Gar mentWorkers'Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America published the Yiddish-language newspaper Der Yunyon arbayter (The union worker) (1925-27, HD6515.C6 Y86, RBSC). Di Fraye arbeter shtime (The free voice of labor) (1890-1977, HX821.F65 Avrich Coll RBSC; microfilm, Hebr), the Yiddish-language anarchist monthly, provided a forum for female writers and poets. Archival materials about it, as well as the records of the anarchist farm colonies in New Jersey, comprising mostly Jews, a number of them women, can be found in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

Among the New York Yiddish dailies, the foremost newspaper that supported both social activism and Americanization was the Forverts (Jewish daily forward) (1897-; AMED retains current issues in hard copy; microfilm, Hebr), published for more than a century in New York City. The most widely read feature, the “Bintel Brief” (Bundle of letters), was a daily personal advice column that began in 1906 to give immigrants the opportunity to pour out their hearts about their problems with husbands, wives, in-laws, children, poverty, and work, responding with advice. One newly wed American-born woman wrote to ask if she should leave her Russian-born husband because her friends scoffed at his being a “greenhorn” and she was beginning to think like them. The editor assured her that her bridegroom would learn American history and literature as well as her friends and be a better American than they.5 Today, Yiddish readers in New York, many of them survivors of the Holocaust and observant Orthodox, can subscribe to Di Tsaytung (1988-; LC retains current issues in hard copy; microfilm, Hebr) and Der Algemeyner zshurnal [Algemeiner Journal] (1972-; LC retains current issues in hard copy; microfilm, Hebr).

Owing to a fresh readership, the small Hebrew press in the United States, most notable for ha-Do'ar (1922-; DS101.D6 Hebr), a weekly that first appeared in 1922, has generated new publications in recent decades. The Hebrew-language New York newspaper Yisrael Shelanu (1979-; DS101 .Y48, LC retains current issues in hard copy; micro film, Hebr) is geared to the 200,000 Israelis who now live in this country. Its “Ezrat Nashim” (the term for the women's gallery in the synagogue) section offers recipes, shopping tips, and biblical commentary. A newspaper that appeals mainly to traditional Jews, Yated Ne'eman (1989-; LC retains current issues in hard copy; microfilm, Hebr), began publication in Monsey, New York, in 1989. Among its features in the “Home and Family” section are “Mother to Mother” and “Letters to Bubby” (or letters to grandmother) columns.

The first independent Jewish women's journal in the United States was the American Jewess (1895-99; AP92.A6 GenColl; microfilm 51565), an outgrowth of the activism generated by late nineteenth-century middle-class German-Jewish club women, particularly those associated with the newly founded National Council of Jewish Women. This organization created the Jewish Woman (1921-31; E184.J5 J65 GenColl), and regional sections of the group published their own monthly and annual publications. Organs of other Jewish women's groups in the Library's collections, although holdings for them are not complete, include those of Hadassah, Na'amat (formerly Pioneer Women), and Jewish Women International (formerly B'nai B'rith Women). Additional independent journals include Der Idisher froyen zshurnal (Jewish woman's home journal) (1922-23; HQ1172.I35 Hebr), Di Idishe heym [Di Yiddishe Heim] (The Jewish home) (1958-; BM198.I33 Hebr), Lilith: The Independent Jewish Women's Magazine (1976-; BM729.W6 L54 Gen-Coll), and Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends (1990-; WMLC 91/933 GenColl, N&CPR), a twice-yearly anthology that seeks to make connections among lesbian, gay, antiracist, and working class Jewish women's movements.

Various specialized published indexes provide some access to articles, book reviews, obituaries, and bibliographies in select Jewish journals. Online databases, available on-site in the Library's reading rooms, are a newer source for indexes. The Periodical Contents Index (PCI) provides the tables of contents for several dozen Jewish periodicals. The Project Muse database makes full-text available for many current journals, including American Jewish History.

Community, Institutional, and Synagogue Publications

A variety of Jewish organizations, such as mutual aid societies, synagogues, educational institutions, and community organizations, have produced publications that can be used to document the activities of women. These publications, often with illustrations and lists of workers, are also helpful to genealogists working on family histories. Jewish women enthusiastically volunteered their services to organizations whose goals centered around home, community, and education.

Landsmanshaftn, Jewish beneficent societies that were formed by immigrants who came to the United States from the same village, town, or city of Eastern Europe, aided indigent, sick, and bereaved fellow Jews. Such a society would also support literary clubs, hold fund-raising galas, and issue annual and commemorative reports and journals. These publications contain information on women or women's activities and serve to illustrate ways in which women participated in both acculturation and maintenance of cultural ties. The Yiddish-and English-language Byalistoker leben (an added title page notes that it celebrates the “Fortieth Anniversary of the Bialystoker Bikur Cholim of Brooklyn”) edited by Luis Palter ([Brooklyn]: Byalistoker biker hoylim fun Bruklin, 1937; F128.9.J5 B95 1937 Hebr), for example, contains a report and photographs on the ladies' auxiliary of this organization to aid the sick. Poylish Idn/Poilisher Yid (Polish Jews), an annual edited by Z. Tygel (1870-1947) and later Abraham Goldberg (1933-42; New York: American Federation of Polish Jews; title varies, E184.J5 P6 Hebr), contains brief reports about Ezra, the network of women's auxiliaries of the Federation of Polish Jews in America.

Synagogue histories are a helpful source for information on women's activities in an organization's sisterhood, its religious school, and the eventual governance of the institution itself. There are more than 1,200 monographs, pamphlets, and articles that give histories of synagogues and Jewish communities in the United States, of which at least 300 are in the Library's collections. New histories continually appear, and women are increasingly credited as authors. Gerry Cristol's A Light in the Prairie: Temple Emanu-El of Dallas, 1872-1997 (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University, 1998; BM225.D35 E49 1998 GenColl) is representative. The Ladies Hebrew Benevolent Association of newly formed Dallas Temple Emanu-El sprang up in 1875 to ensure regular services and a religious education for children. The proceeds from a series of fund-raisers and “entertainments” permitted women to purchase a lot to build a future synagogue building.

A community history such as Carolyn Gray LeMaster's A Corner of the Tapestry: A History of the Jewish Experience in Arkansas, 1820s-1990s (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994; F420.J5 L46 1994 GenColl) presents a broad sweep of the Jewish life of the entire state, including even the smallest towns. “The distaff side” is a section discussing organizational activity and giving brief personal biographies of women. From North Little Rock, we learn, for example, about Gertrude Green (1884-1970), who served with the Volunteer Services of the American Red Cross in France during World War I and became a national representative of the Women's Overseas Service League, traveling nationwide on the organization's behalf.

Cookbooks

Jewish cookery offers readers a variety of ways to study Jewish traditions and home life, especially as they are shaped by women through their culinary efforts. Cooking was women's domain in a Jewish household and most cookbooks were intended for women and written by them. The Library's collection of several hundred Jewish cookbooks includes the first one known to have been published in the United States, Mrs. Esther Levy's Jewish Cookery Book, on Principles of Economy, Adapted for Jewish Housekeepers, with the Addition of Many Useful Medicinal Recipes, and Other Valuable Information, Relative to Housekeeping and Domestic Management (Garden Grove, Calif.: Pholiota Press, 1982, TX724.L4 GenColl; Philadelphia: W.S. Turner, 1871; RBSC). A Jewish calendar listing feasts and the special instructions for preparing for the Passover holiday document literacy among middle-and upper-middle-class Jewish women of that period to whom the cookbook was addressed and the attempt to impart to them a basic knowledge of Jewish customs. Hinde Amchanitzki's Lehrbukh vi azoy tsu kokhen un baken (Textbook on how to cook and bake) (New York: S. Druckerman, 1901; TX724.A47 Hebr) is the first Yiddish cookbook published in this country. Like most, but not all, other Jewish cookbooks, both of these books contain recipes that are kosher, a Hebrew word meaning ritually proper or fit to be used. Jewish cookbooks usually contain sections that specify what foods can be used in cooking and instructions on setting up and keeping a kosher kitchen. Food columns that appear in the Anglo-Jewish, Yiddish, and Hebrew press and in specialty periodicals discuss keeping kosher, provide recipes, and include advertisements that give a picture of Jewish foodways. An early example of this genre is the Organized Kashruth Company's Kosher Food Guide (New York, n.d.; BM710.K67 GenColl). Its stated purpose was to be a “guide to the observant Jewish woman desiring to uphold the traditional dietary laws.” Some 48,000 Jewish homes received its inaugural issue in 1935.

A generation later, food-writer Joan Nathan expanded her award-winning book Jewish Cooking in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998; TX724.N368 1998 GenColl) into twenty-six halfhour programs by the same name televised by Public Broadcasting Service stations (uncataloged, MBRS). Nathan's book and television series, both replete with interviews, early photographs, and advertisements, document the authentic culinary and cultural practices of Jews past and present in which women have played such a prominent role.

Yiddish Materials Documenting Artistic Expression

In tandem with the large influx of Eastern European immigrants to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, Yiddish theater in America blossomed and flourished. The audiences that packed the theaters—the majority of whom were women—mainly on New York City's Lower East Side, thrilled to the operettas, melodramas, comedies, and musicals written, produced, and emotionally portrayed by their fellow Yiddish-speaking immigrants.

The Hebraic Section has custody of about 1,200 Yiddish American play manuscripts that were deposited for copyright at the Library in the first half of the twentieth century. Among more than two dozen women playwrights represented is Sara Adler (1858-1953), whose husband Jacob Adler was the foremost actor of the Yiddish stage at the beginning of the twentieth century. Lucy Lang (1884-1962) and sisters Rose Shomer Bachelis (1882-1966) and Miriam Shomer Zunser (1882-1951) are also represented. Many of the plays they (and some of the men) wrote concern love, marriage, divorce, family life, and the struggles to balance the options of becoming an assimilated American versus retaining one's tradition. The inquiring and persistent researcher of the history of women's health issues in this country will be rewarded upon finding that two of these Yiddish plays, Harry Kalmanowitz's “Geburth Kontrol, oder, Rassen zelbstmord (Birth Control or Race Sucide [sic])” and Chicagoan S. Grossman's “Di Flikhten fun a froy in geburt kontrol) (A woman's duty in birth control)” were written in 1916, the year that Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic, which was located on the Lower East Side of New York City (see chapter 5). Seventy-seven of these Yiddish plays can be found on the Library's American Memory Web site; two of the plays were written by women. In 1913, Dr. Ida Badenes-Rovinsky, a physician, journalist, and playwright, wrote the comedy-drama “Dem Doktors refue: a drama in 4 akten (The doctor's remedy).” In 1919, Lizzie Schreiman completed the drama “Di Mekhutonim fin gan heydn [!] (Relatives of the Garden of Eden).”

First active in Yiddish vaudeville and theater, many American Jewish women went on to appear in motion pictures and on television or behind the scenes in both these media. The vast scope of the Library's film collections enables the researcher to examine the phenomenon of female Jewish cinema and television stars in the industry, their experiences as Jews, and the ways in which Jewish women have been portrayed and by whom. One subset of the Library's collection in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division (MBRS) consists of more than a dozen Yiddish films, including for example, Vu iz mayn kind (Where is my child) (FPC 0292-0299 MBRS), starring Celia Adler, Anna Lillien, and Blanche Bernstein, in 1937. A brivele der mamen (A letter to mother) (VAF 1760 M/B/RS) is a video reproduction of an early Yiddish film set in Polish Ukraine and New York City that traces the breakup of a family owing to the stresses of the First World War, poverty, and the immense challenges of immigrant life. A combination of comedy and drama, the work focuses on the efforts of one Jewish mother to keep her family together.

Also deposited for copyright at the Library of Congress in the first half of the twentieth century were some 3,400 Yiddish song sheets. Housed in the Music Division, some of these are kept in duplicate copies in the Hebraic Section as well. More than eighty-five women have been credited as publishers, composers, arrangers, and lyricists of these songs. They include Mary Adler, Friede Belov (Weber), Celia Boodkin (Drobkin), Nellie Casman, Pauline Fellman, Ida Gittleman, Jennie Goldstein, Aliza Greenblatt, Molly Picon, and Esther Zweig. Many of the songs are about the home, love, marriage, children, and work. “Di fayer korbunes” (The fire victims) (Copr. no. E265489; Aug. 24/28, 1911 MUS) expresses the anguish felt by the Jewish community after the deaths of 146 young women, most of whom were Jewish, in the fire at the non-union Triangle Shirtwaist Company on New York City's Lower East Side on March 25, 1911. The sheet music cover shows a building in flames, with women at the windows or jumping to the ground. In examples such as this, the iconography of the Yiddish sheet music offers a special visual dimension to the understanding of the history of American Jewish women.

The Ruth Rubin collection, held in the Archive of Folk Song in the American Folklife Center, consists of field recordings of Jewish folklore made by the New York folklorist from the 1940s to the 1960s. Ruth Rubin interviewed female as well as male performers in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Israel. Yiddish art songs that reflected immigrant life and songs created by Soviet Jews in the 1920s and the 1930s form part of the collection. A concordance lists the 126 tapes.

Jewish female performers ably crossed over from the stage to the media of recorded sound and broadcasting beginning in the second decade of the twentieth century. The Library holds, for example, several test pressings of “Eili, Eili” (NC26B 00413, NCPB 00302, NCPB 00224), a Yiddish ballad originally written in 1896 for Sophie Karp, star of Yiddish revues and Bowery theaters on the Lower East Side of New York City, and made more popular by Yiddish actress Bertha Kalisch. When Cantor Yosele Rosenblatt began to include it in his concerts and recordings, the hymn then became synonymous with male singers.

Researchers can also locate in the Recorded Sound Reference Center Yiddish actress Stella Adler's 1944 appeal to voters on NBC radio (Adler, who energized the study of acting inAmerica, lived from 1901 to 1992), as well as NBC radio shows of actresses Gertrude Berg (1899-1966) (of Mollie Goldberg fame) and Fanny Brice (1891-1951) (in Baby Snooks). Brice also appears on the Mail Call show of the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service transcription disc collection.

Most of the nearly fourteen hundred commercial phonograph discs in the Benedict Stambler Archive of Recorded Jewish Music in the Recorded Sound Reference Center are recordings of well-known American and European cantors of the first four decades of the twentieth century. A sampling of performances by Yiddish comedians, singers, and popular musicians is available in the archive as well. Among these are recordings by diva and folksinger Isa Kremer (1887-1956) and by singer Miriam Kressyn (1911-1996), who was also a songwriter, translator, radio announcer, news analyst, and teacher.

Since their first arrival in this country more than three hundred and fifty years ago, Jewish women have given voice to their words and actions. In every area of life, from the literary to the artistic to the political, they have at times both acculturated to the society around them and actively maintained their cultural heritage. The next section of this chapter describes some of the varied collections, again scattered throughout the Library of Congress, that reflect the experience of Latinas as they have moved through the social, political, and economic realms of the United States and made their imprint on its climate and culture beginning with their arrival a century earlier than Jewish women. These back-to-back case studies demonstrate the Library's different collection strengths and the variety of special materials for both groups of women. Research on women from other backgrounds can benefit by applying all of the methods described in both case studies.

LATINAS

Although many believe that Latinas, women of Latin American heritage in the United States, only recently arrived, thousands trace their ancestry in territories that became part of the United States back to the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, well before the great waves of European and Asian immigrants. Indeed, the first Latinas were born in Saint Augustine, Florida, after its settlement by Spaniards in 1565. When missionaries founded the Nombre de Dios Mission there in 1566, female members of the Timucua-speaking Indian nobility like Chief Doña María were converted to Christianity and married Spanish soldiers, in her case Clemente Bernal. On April 2, 1606, the mission held a service of confirmation for 200 Indians, 200 Spaniards, and Doña María and her children in the church in Saint Augustine.

Since then, the extent of Latina settlement in the United States has broadened considerably. From 1598 to 1810, Spanish explorers, missionaries, and settlers built communities in present-day Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and California and explored all the way up to Alaska. These areas became part of the Provincias Internas, the northern frontier of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. For example, Spanish-born María Feliciana Arballo and her mestizo husband were scheduled to make the trek from Tubac in present-day Arizona to Southern California with Juan Bautista de Anza in 1775. When her husband died before the trip began, Arballo won the right to travel with her two daughters. She eventually left the Anza party in San Gabriel, California, where she married a soldier. (For more on Arballo, see the essay “Women on the Move” in this volume.)

It is difficult to find direct evidence of women from the sources for this period, even in a culture whose members retain their mother's lineage as a second last name. Nevertheless, historians know that countless women among the descendants of the original settlers, the Indians who lived with them, and others who had joined them were indispensable in the establishment and maintenance of their communities. Women labored under often difficult circumstances, particularly when other colonizing powers or indigenous peoples like the Comanches and the Apaches attacked their homes. Some evidence of the influence of Latinas during these times can be gleaned from such manuscript and microfilm collections in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress as the Spanish Archives of New Mexico (1621-1821), the Santa Barbara Mission Collection (1768-1844), and the East Florida Papers (1737-1858). In 1820, the United States absorbed Spanish Florida; the following year, when Mexico gained its independence from Spain, the communities of the Provincias Internas chose to stay with Mexico rather than become independent themselves.

These communities continued to develop during the years between Mexican independence in 1821 and the Mexican-American War in 1846-48. As soon as Mexico became independent from Spain, settlers from the United States (Anglos) emigrated to Texas, still part of Mexico, to settle on large tracts of rich land the government offered at bargain prices to populate the territory. The most famous woman of the period, María Gertrudis Barceló (known as “La Tules”), started her first gambling casino in the Ortiz Mountains of New Mexico in 1825. In 1836 the Anglos living in Texas defeated the Mexican army and proclaimed themselves independent. Meanwhile, La Tules opened a casino in Santa Fe under the protection of Governor Manuel Armijo, catering to Anglo traders on the Santa Fe Trail and local residents alike. Over time she became a folkloric heroine and was mentioned in Federal Writers' Project interviews (see chapter 5) nearly a century later. In 1845 the Lone Star Republic, as the Anglos in Texas called their state, decided to join the United States, setting the stage for the Mexican-American War, which broke out the following year. When the fighting began, the other areas of the Provincias Internas became fair game, so that following the victory of the United States in 1848, the northern nation had conquered not just Texas, but California, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado, Utah, and Oklahoma.

U.S. control soon led to alterations in legal systems, official language, education, and a constellation of social and economic mores. James McHall Jones, delegate to the California Constitutional Convention of 1849 and later judge of Southern California, confided to his mother in the first of his Two Letters . . . ., dated August 26, 1849 (San Francisco: Grabhorn Press, 1948, p. 8; F865.J75 Rare Book), that his knowledge of Spanish in the now-Anglo territory would give him a real advantage when “There will be titles annulled, judgments reversed, property seized (and) I'll have a whole fist in the pie.” Women who lived under Spanish and then Mexican sovereignty owned property in their own name even after marriage, held a 50 percent stake in whatever the spouses managed to accumulate during their life together, and had the right to make wills, a privilege that had only begun to be granted during the 1840s in the rest of the United States (see chapter 3). Although law codes in the new territories appeared to reflect Spanish practice, historians must look at other evidence to see what happened when justice was administered in English to people who knew only Spanish. These new Latinas suffered in other ways as well. In the 1850s, the pregnant Josefa Segovia became the first woman hanged in California for having killed an Anglo who had assaulted her. In 1862 Chipita Rodríguez, convicted for murdering an Anglo horse trader, became the only woman hanged in the state of Texas, despite the lack of any direct evidence linking her to the crime. Some Latinas spoke up about the two-fold discrimination they suffered as women and as people of Latin American descent. María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1832-1895) published anonymously (although a Library of Congress cataloger penciled in her name on the catalog card) the first novel written and published in English by a Latina. Her book Who Would Have Thought It? (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1872; PZ3.B9545 W GenColl) offered a bitter critique of U.S. racism while supporting women's suffrage.

Latinas played an important role in fostering the Cuban and Puerto Rican independence movements. In New York, Emilia Casanova de Villaverde (1832-1897) established the Liga de Hijas de Cuba (League of Daughters of Cuba) in the 1870s. Descriptions of the league's sessions can be found in the anonymously written Apuntes biográficos de Emilia Casanova de Villaverde (New York, 1874; F1785.C33 GenColl). After Cubans were defeated in their first war of independence against Spain (1868-78), more than one hundred thousand emigrated to the United States. According to the Memoirs of Bernardo Vega (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984; F128.9.P85 V4313 1984 GenColl), before the next war, Cuban and Puerto Rican women founded additional clubs such as Mercedes de Verona at 235 East 75th Street in Manhattan and Hijas de la Libertad (Daughters of Liberty) at 1115 Herkimer Street in Brooklyn. In 1895 Cubans began their second war of liberation, which sparked the Spanish-American War. Following the U.S. victory in 1898, the island of Puerto Rico, first explored by the Spanish in 1503, became a commonwealth of the United States, and in 1917 Puerto Ricans became U.S. citizens. Cuba, too, became increasingly aligned with the U.S. economy and social customs during this period.

From 1910 to 1930, more than a million Mexicans came to the United States to escape from the Mexican Revolution, or to join neighbors and other family members who had already made the trek northward, and settled where plentiful and financially rewarding jobs in mines, railroads, and farms held the promise of a better life. Some of these women and their descendants were pictured in the 1930s and 1940s by the photographers of the Farm Security Administration whose work is found in the Prints and Photographs Division (see chapter 6), and others spoke to interviewers from the Federal Writers' Project whose texts are housed in the Manuscript Division (see chapter 5). At the same time, Puerto Rican and Cuban women worked long hours for extremely poor pay in the tobacco industry in Tampa and New York. Under the leadership of Luisa Capetillo (1879-1922) and others, women demanded that the males-only Unión de Tabaqueros (Union of Tobacco Workers) represent them as well. Capetillo once ran a boardinghouse on 22nd Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, where she regaled her lodgers with revolutionary and anarchist speeches. Some of her collected writings appear in Amor y anarquía: Los escritos de Luisa Capetillo, edited by Julio Ramos (Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracán, 1992; HQ1523.C372 1992 GenColl Overflow).

By 1926 Latinas in Los Angeles had founded La Sociedad de Madres Mexicanas (the Society of Mexican Mothers), a civil rights group that raised money to pay for the defense of Latinos charged with crimes. In 1929 Alonso Perales organized what would become the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) in South Texas, the first national Mexican American group to fight for civil rights. That same year, María and Pedro Hernández, also activists in the region, left the new group because it focused almost exclusively on improving men's lives and founded the Orden de Caballeros de América (Order of the Knights of America), the first to espouse a feminist perspective. Condemnations of LULAC's sexist stance written by Alice Dickerson Montemayor (always known to LULAC as Mrs. F. I. Montemayor) of Laredo, Texas, appear in the LULAC News in the 1930s.

On April 28-30, 1939, Luisa Moreno (1907-1992), whose long experience with labor struggles had given her contacts throughout the Latino community, founded El Congreso de Pueblos que Hablan Española (the Spanish-Speaking Peoples Congress), the first national organization of all Latinos.

Many immigrants who came to the United States throughout the twentieth century experienced great dislocation and loneliness. The Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos (1914-1953) wrote three volumes of poetic reflections on the inherent tension between an island upbringing and exile in the Nuyorican (New York) setting. Others, like the folklorist Pura Belpré (1899-1982), considered the first Puerto Rican librarian in the New York public library system, and Lillian López (b. 1925), also a pioneering librarian, founded many organizations dedicated to preserving the island's heritage for children growing up on the mainland. Their life in the New York of the 1930s and 1940s is vividly remembered in “Reminiscences of Two Turned-On Librarians” by López and Belpré in Puerto Rican Perspectives, edited by Edward Mapp (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1974; E184.P85 M36 GenColl). During the late 1940s and 1950s, Puerto Ricans relocated to the United States in much greater numbers. In 1961 teacher and activist Antonia Pantoja (b. 1922) created a new group, ASPIRA (Aspire), to assist Puerto Rican children to go on to higher education.

During the 1960s hundreds of thousands of Cubans emigrated to Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland, settling mostly in Florida and the East Coast, to escape from the Cuban Revolution. That same decade witnessed the growth of the civil rights movement when many Mexican American women activists who wanted to emphasize their dual Indian and Spanish heritage began calling themselves Chicanas to demonstrate their commitment to the struggle for racial, ethnic, and gender equality. This identity is brilliantly represented in the screenprints of Ester Hernández (b. 1944), ten of which are held in the Prints and Photographs Division. Many members of that group still identify themselves as Chicanas, while others continue to prefer the term “Mexican American” or “Mexicana.” Similarly, Puerto Rican women committed to similar causes used the term “Boricua,” derived from the Native American name for the island. Women of Hispanic heritage in New Mexico use the term “Hispana,” whereas those in Texas describe themselves as “Tejanas.”

According to the 1999 U.S. Census, by the last decade of the twentieth century some 180,000 Mexicans were arriving in the United States each year, forming the largest single group of immigrants. Mexican American women were the most significant Latina population in the country by far, numbering, according to census estimates, 10,058,000, making up 7.24 percent of the total number of women in the United States. According to the census, living in the United States at that time were 712,000 Cuban American women, or 0.51 percent of all women counted, and 1,602,000 Puerto Rican women, or 1.3 percent of all U.S. women. The three-volume Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America, edited by Robert von Dassanowsky and Jeffrey Lehman, 2nd ed. (Gale Group: Detroit, Michigan, 2000; E184 .A1 G14 2000), further subdivides Latinas into groups ranging from Argentine Americans to Salvadoran Americans, and it includes both Portuguese and Spanish Americans from the Iberian peninsula.6

Using the Collections

The Hispanic Division, with its excellent staff of reference librarians and subject specialists, is the first stop for researchers interested in finding both primary and secondary sources concerning Latinas in English and in foreign languages. The division has a useful collection of general reference works in several languages. The staff can also advise new researchers about specialists in other divisions, some of whose materials will be described below.

Another cluster of sources can be found by accessing the Hispanic Division's Web site at <http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic>. There you can find links to American Memory's Puerto Rico at the Modern Age; Spain, the United States, and the American Frontier: Historias paralelas; The World of 1898: The Spanish American War; and many more sites.

One unique source, The Handbook of Latin American Studies (HLAS), is produced in the Hispanic Division. Beginning in 1935, HLAS contains annotations of works in the humanities and the social sciences published in a variety of languages. Although its main focus is on Latin America per se, its annotations include material on migration to the United States, historical information from 1492 to the present, and comparisons between Latinas and populations still residing in the home country. Its database can be found at <http://lcweb2.loc.gov/hlas>.

Selected Collections

The Hispanic Division itself does not have custody of any materials except for the Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape, described more fully below, and substantial pamphlet files on Latin America and Iberia. (Almost 15,000 such pamphlets, dated 1802-1992, are available on micro-film, MicRR.) The search strategies for the breadth of topics about Latinas (or any other subject) in the General Collections at the Library of Congress often involves visits to the reading rooms of other divisions.

Audiotapes

In 1943 the Hispanic Division established the Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape (AHLOT). The archive contains the recordings of more than 640 authors from Spain and Portugal, as well as Latin America, the Caribbean, and those who live in the United States. These authors usually read from their works and often comment on their lives and the sources for their writings. The Hispanic Division is the only place where researchers can consult these recordings. The basic finding aid for recordings from 1943 to 1972 is The Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape: A Descriptive Guide by Francisco Aguilera and Georgette Magassy Dorn (Washington: Library of Congress, 1974; Z1609.L7 U54 1974). The researcher seeking information about more recent readings can find it by accessing the Hispanic Division's home page. The archive includes recordings of such Latinas as Chilean-born novelist Isabel Allende (b. 1942), playwright and novelist Denise Chávez (b. 1948), and poet and novelist Ana Castillo (b. 1954). Among Cuban American women recorded are the historian and sociologist Lydia Cabrera (1899-1991), novelist and playwright Julieta Campos (b. 1932), psychologist Lourdes Casal (1938-1981), literary magazine editor Belkis Cuza Malé (b. 1942), biographer and children's writer Hilda Perera Díaz (b. 1926), poet Juana Rosa Pita (b. 1939), and feminist poet and critic Eliana Rivero (b. 1940). Prominent women from Puerto Rico include novelist Rosario Ferré (b. 1938), professor and writer of children's literature Ester Feliciano Mendoza (b. 1917), poet and essayist Laura Gallego (b. 1924), poet Violeta López Suria (b. 1926), scholar and poet Concha Meléndez (1895-1983), folklorist and poet Marigloria Palma (pseudonym of Gloria María Pagan Ferrer, b. 1921), lawyer and literary critic Nilita Vientós Gastón (1903-1989), and short story writer and poet Carmelina Vizcarrondo de Quiñones (1906-1983). On October 16, 1995, Chicana poet Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954) recorded her work for the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, maintained by the Library's Poetry Office (RWD 6205 <Rec Sound>).

Manuscripts

The Manuscript Division holds microfilm and photocopies of archival and manuscript collections held in archives throughout the United States and abroad. For example, “Spanish Archives of New Mexico (1621-1821)” on twenty-two reels of microfilm includes the official documents of the central and local government then under Spanish control. The East Florida Papers (65,000 s; 1737-1858) has marriage licenses for 1785-1803 as well as proceedings from the town council of Saint Augustine from 1812 to 1821. In 1905, the Library established a Foreign Copying Program that brought together many types of reproductions—hand-copied, photostats and photocopies, and microform—from the millions of pages found in archives from around the world. The copies and films from the Archivo General de la Nación of Mexico are excellent sources for the Latina past. Manuscripts filmed at the Archivo Histórico Nacional and the Archivo General de Indias in Spain are also fruitful sources for researchers interested in searching for the context of women's lives during the period of Spanish colonial rule in what has become the United States. An excellent guide to these materials is found in The Hispanic World, 1492-1898/El Mundo Hispánico, 1492-1898: A Guide to the Photoreproduced Manuscripts from Spain in the Collections of the United States, Guam, and Puerto Rico, edited by Guadalupe Jiménez Codinach (Washington: Library of Congress, 1994; Z663.32.H54 1994 MRR Alc). See also chapter 5.

Film Materials

Images of Latinas in films can be seen in the Motion Picture and Television Reading Room. Eighteen viewable films of Dolores Del Río (1905-1983), from What Price Glory (1926; FDA 7809-7811) to More Than a Miracle (1967; FGC 398-403), are found in the Library's collections, including works that were produced and filmed in Mexico, Spain, and Argentina. The collections also contain more than twenty films of Lupe Vélez (1908-1944), “the Mexican Spitfire,” filmed in the United States, ranging from Wolf Song (1929; FBA 9216-9219) to Mexican Spitfire at Sea (1942; FDB 0545-0546). Researchers who wish to consult Mexican researcher Angel Miquel's unpublished finding aid in Spanish to silent movies and other films starring Latinas in the Library's collections should ask the reference staff in the Motion Picture and Television Reading Room or in the Hispanic Division Reading Room.

Films made by Latinos themselves include those films scholars might expect to find, such as Selena (1997, CGC6715-6721), the biographical motion picture of the Tejana singing sensation, Selena Pérez, who had a massive following in the Spanish language community before her untimely death. The much rarer film, A Tribute to Selena (1995, VAE 7536), produced by Robert Rodríguez Rodd, is also in the collections. Several episodes of the mainstream television program Wonder Woman, starring Lynda Carter (Lynda Jean Cordoba Carter) (FDA 4887-4889), and Public Television's A Mexican-American Family (FBB 1779) represent television programming that casts more light on our subject.

The Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division (chapter 10) also contains rare scrapbooks maintained by Dorothy Blum of popular actresses in the 1930s and 1940s. One of these examples from the Dorothy Blum Scrapbook Collection is a tribute to Dolores Del Río and contains clippings showing how her studio publicist attempted to present the Mexican-born actress. According to one article, she had become so American that she could no longer eat Mexican food. Blum also kept a scrapbook with articles and pictures relating to Lupe Vélez's career. When Vélez appeared in the film Wolf Song with Gary Cooper, the publicity featured questions about their real life romance. Later a feature article talked about her trading kisses for cash and preferring older men. Although typical of the fodder prepared by studio publicists, such publicity served to reinforce stereotypes.

The MBRS vertical files contain some additional material about such stars. In the AFI-Des Moines Still Collection, the researcher can find to have won an Academy Award, a Tony Award, a Grammy Award, and two Emmy Awards. 12-L1661 10/25/01 6:08 PM Page 363 photographs of Rita Hayworth (Margarita Carmen Cansino) dancing in Des Moines, Iowa, in December 1940 or selling war bonds in 1944.

Copyright

When authors apply for copyright of their creative efforts by filing an application, paying a fee, and supplying the Library with two copies of the specified work, these materials enrich the Library's collections in many areas, including books, maps, films, recorded sound, television broadcasting, and sheet music. The copyright deposit records are interesting in themselves and researchers need only go to room 459 of the Madison Building to consult them firsthand. From 1978, all copyrights have been recorded online, but for earlier submissions, the researcher needs to search a specific author in the card files that are arranged by years, specifically 1898-1937, 1938-45, 1946-54, 1955-70, 1971-77, as well as the online entries. Although historically copyrights have been held mostly by large companies, still the catalog cards are full of useful information. It takes just a few moments to locate Vikki Carr's first recording in Spanish in 1972 or to see that Linda Ronstadt started writing songs in Spanish as early as July 1976, with “Lo siento mi vida” (I'm sorry my love/darling). Copyright also applies to performances. The Cuban American salsa goddess Celia Cruz (b. 1924) has thirty recordings listed online and the co-creator of the Miami Sound Machine, Gloria Estefan (b. 1957), has well over one hundred, in addition to the songs she has written.

Newspapers

The Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room (see chapter 2) holds many current and historic Latino newspapers. The collection includes El Diario/La Prensa (New York City, 1963-; News MF2396) with its “La Reina de Reinas” (The queen of queens) beauty contests sponsored by the newspaper; its ads for secretarial schools complete with blond images; and its horoscope column “Es Hoy su Cumpleaños?” (Is today your birthday?) by Stella. The newspaper also features the column “Marginalia” by Luisa Quintero; clothing patterns pictured on a blonde little girl; and articles with pictures of such notable Latinas as Irma Vidal Santaella, president of the Comisión Nacional Hispánica de Asesoramiento Económico (National Hispanic Commission of Business Consultants). La Opinión (Los Angeles, 1981 News MF2240) includes features on child development, recipes from Mexican states, paper dolls for children, a “Conozca Sus Derechos” (Know your rights) column, and an unsubtle juxtaposition of the “Belleza total” (Total beauty) column by Yolanda Aguilar side by side with the wedding announcements section. The Library also holds a complete run of Diario las Américas (Miami, 1953-; News MF 1026), and El Latino (Washington, D.C., News MF 3111). Twenty more titles are indexed in the subscription database Ethnic NewsWatch.

Research on Latinas, however, should hardly be limited to the Spanish-language press. The Library's extensive holdings of major newspapers include the journal of record of most state capitals, as well as vehicles of national scope such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald, and Los Angeles Times. These newspapers provide important information on the interaction between the Latino community and the general community, including local news, classified advertisements, and feature sections.

Journals and Newsletters

The Library holds a substantial array of Latino publications for both the general public and for scholars. Current issues can be consulted in the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room (chapter 2), but back issues are usually found bound in the General Collections (chapter 1). Nuestro: The Magazine for Latinos (E184.S75 N83 GenColl), La Luz (E184.S75 L88 GenColl), LATINA Style (E184.S75 L39 GenColl), La Herencia del Norte (uncataloged), Hispanic Business (HF3000.H57 GenColl), and Hispanic Review of Business (HD2346.U5 H57 GenColl) all contain articles that reflect Latinas' interests in themselves and in their quest for a better life. You will find in the Library's collections an excellent group of journals, including Linden Lane ([o] 87/723 MicRR), El Fortín de la Trocha (E184.C77 F67 GenColl), Revista Chicano-Riqueña (PS508.M4 R47 GenColl), De Colores: Journal of Chicano Expression and Thought (PS508.M4 D4 GenColl), Aztlán: International Journal of Chicano Studies Research (E184.M5 A98 GenColl), and La Palabra: Revista de Literatura Chicana (1979-85; PQ7070.A27a GenColl), to list just a few.

For researchers seeking to track women's issues and their impact through the years, a good source is the wide range of newsletters issued by Hispanic American volunteer organizations. Many are found in the Chicano Studies Library Serial Collection (uncataloged), a group of periodicals of all sorts dating from 1855, available on 426 reels of microfilm. The Library also holds various newsletters, ranging from Legislative Update (KF4757.5 .L38 L34 Law), prepared by the National Council of La Raza, to Somos Primos (uncataloged), the organ of the Society of Hispanic Historical and Ancestral Research.

Maps

Latinas can show up in many places where perhaps they might not be expected. Researchers with imagination and ingenuity are sometimes rewarded by finding them on historical maps. An excellent guide to these maps is The Luso-Hispanic World in Maps: A Selective Guide to the Manuscript Maps to 1900 in the Collections of the Library of Congress, edited by John R. Hébert and Anthony P. Mullan (Washington: Library of Congress, 1999; Z6027.S72 L43 1999 GenColl; also online at <www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/activ.html>. For example, when Vicente Sebastián Pintado fashioned his official map of Spanish New Orleans and vicinity in 1795-96, a map in continuous use until at least 1873, he designated who owned property within the city limits and Bayou Saint John. On this map (Map of New Orleans and Vicinity, by Pintado and Carlos Trudeau, Havana, 1819 [1804]; G4014.N5 G46 1819 .P Vault G&M), Pintado noted a sizeable parcel belonging to “La Negra Rachon,” perhaps an Afro-Latina of means.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps supply a wealth of detail about the locations of important structures within numerous U.S. towns and cities. If you look at the maps produced for New Mexico, you will discover that in 1886 the Sisters of Loredo in Santa Fe had a wooden convent and academy. By 1898 the convent had become known as the Loretto Convent and Academy and included a girls' dormitory. At the same time, Saint Vincent's Academy also had a girls' school dormitory. In Albuquerque, you can locate a Spanish Seventh Day Adventist Church made of concrete in 1950, as well as one wooden structure housing the Catholic Teachers College, and another used by the Saint Therese Roman Catholic Church and Sisters' Home.

The Geography and Map Division (see chapter 7) also houses more general maps, such as the United States Bureau of the Census map Spanish Origin Persons as a Percent of Total Population by Counties of the United States, 1970 (G3701.E1 1970 .U55) and American Geographic approved mapa del mexicano americano (G4051.S1 1976 .A5).

Photographs

If you are researching specific Latinas, you may be tempted to make a beeline to the Biographical File in the Prints and Photographs Division (see chapter 6), believing it to be a quick way to find illustrations for monographs or articles. Other collections, however, hold rich caches of material depicting Latinas. The New York World-Telegram and Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, for example, contains images of Latinas listed by name, from the singer and activist Joan Baez (b. 1941) to tennis champ Rosemary Casals (b. 1948), as well as the actress and comedienne Imogene Coca (b. 1908) and ballerina Lupe Serrano (b. 1930). The division's other photojournalism collections offer pictorial information about general movements of Latinas. For instance, the card index for the U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection features listings for “Cuba, refugees,” “Cubans in Miami,” and “Cuban Exiles.” Searching under areas of the country where many Latinas have settled points to a few additional groups of photo documentation. For example, the heading “United States—Florida—Miami” provides a listing for the “Cuba Raid Ban Story,” which includes images taken in chain stores that catered to Cubanas, in Cubano neighborhoods in Miami, and scenes of refugees in relief lines in April 1963 (see LC-U9-9524, frame 35). Searching for records in the Look Magazine Photograph Collection in the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) (<http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html>) using the term “Mexican Americans” locates Maurice Terrell's 1958 images depicting the daily life of Mona Silva and her family in Torrence, California (LOOK-Job 58-4323 and LOOK-Job 58-7810).

In the 1930s and 1940s, photographers working for the Farm Security Administration and later the Office of War Information documented many aspects of daily life in the United States. Included in the group of 164,000 negatives and 75,000 prints are wonderful clues to Latina life, particularly in the Southwest. Many of the photographs document small towns like Las Trampas in Taos County, New Mexico, in 1943. The photographer concentrated on the mayor of the town, Juan López, and his family, providing warm details of everyday activities as he, his wife, and their children went about their chores on the farm (LOT 869). A wealth of information emerges from photographs of San Antonio, Texas, including images of housing and cemeteries. Good times were not neglected and photographs show Charro Days, a celebration of horsemanship, in Brownsville, Texas (LOT 36).

Researchers will find clues to more pictorial resources by searching the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog and referring to chapter 6. Your search will suggest the variety of visual formats in which Latinas have been represented, from fine screenprints by Ester Hernández and Carmen Lomas Garza (b. 1948) to turn-of-the-century stereographs showing women hoeing sugar cane.

Folk Songs and Folklife

The Archive of Folk Culture within the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress (see also chapter 11) has field recordings of songs, music, and narratives that open windows upon selected images and contributions of Latinas. In April 1999, the American Folklife Center put Hispano Music and Culture of the Northern Rio Grande: The Juan B. Rael Collection online as part of the American Memory Web site at <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/rghtml/rghome.html>. Recorded in 1940 by Juan Bautista Rael of Stanford University, the collection contains examples of the religious and secular music of Hispanic Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado including a march performed by Ernestina Anaya of Rio Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, and “Voy para Belén” (I go to Bethlehem) sung by Rosabel Espinosa of Antonito, Colorado.

Complementing the Rael collection are four volumes of the J.D. Robb Collection of Folk Music Texts (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972; PQ7078.N4 R6 1972 AFC) located in the center's reading room containing transcriptions of the texts of folk songs from New Mexico. Some of the songs present women as symbolic figures, objects of desire, wives, mothers, victims, and saints. Sixty-five tapes of Hispanic Southwestern music (AFS 15459-15523) join another twenty-two records of Spanish American folk songs that Robb recorded in New Mexico in 1944 and 1948 (AFS 6144-6151 and 9610-9628 respectively). The Folklife Center documented the personal devotions of Latinas when it conducted a field documentary project in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1987 and found Puerto Ricans there preparing for religious festivals. “Puerto Rico Recordings in the Archive of Folk Culture” (finding aid no. 12, LCFA, August 1993) details recordings of Puerto Ricans on the island and in the continental United States held by the Archive of Folk Culture. The center also can make available film of a live concert of Tejana singing sensation Lydia Mendoza (b. 1918), “the Lark of the Border,” who recorded more than two hundred singles during her career. Mendoza has become an iconic figure among Chicanas as seen in the screenprint portrait by Ester Hernández in the Fine Prints Collection in the Prints and Photographs Division.

As part of the Bicentennial celebration of the Library of Congress in 2000, the Folklife Center, together with members of Congress, created the Local Legacies project to collect new materials on folkways in the United States. Descriptions of these materials, which can be accessed at <http://www.loc.gov/bicentennial/legacies.html>, include such folkways as Paula Rodríguez demonstrating her straw applique techniques in New Mexico.

The Federal Writers' Project papers, 1936-39, held in the Manuscript Division provide an interesting documentary record of folklore in both rural and urban areas. s from New Mexico, for example, discuss Christmas customs and fiestas, the growing disuse of the typical Spanish shawl, el tapalo, observations of wedding feasts, and even mention the legendary figure of “La Tules,” also known as María Gertrudis Barceló (see above).

Federal Writers' Project writers Genevieve Chapin and Lorin W. Brown collected and translated proverbs and folktales (see container A641) with earthy advice, such as “En casa de muger [sic] rica ella manda y ella grita” (In the house where the wife has brought the money, she is the chief and wears the breeches) or “Más vale fea con gracia que linda sin ella” (The homely girl possessed of grace [graciousness] is better than the beauty lacking it). Here too, the researcher can find the first in a series of reports on witchcraft and the occult among the Latino population (container A645). For example, in the legend of Tia Toña in 1895 or the Witch of Arroyo Hondo as related by Marcos Váldez to project writer Reyes N. Martinez, members of the community saw a ball of fire rising out of Tia Toña's chimney, a sure sign of a witch, and followed it to a coven of dancing witches. On other nights she ran a gambling operation and prepared food. Balls of light also appear in an account of witchery among Mexican Americans in Hall City, Nebraska, written by Wilbur Cummings (see container A749). A woman named “Bruja” (witch) supposedly had the powers to become invisible and to remove her eyes and replace them with cat's eyes. She could see at night and fly about like a firefly, invisible except for a tiny light field, as she sucked the blood of infants for sustenance.

Cookbooks

The Katherine Golden Bitting Collection on Gastronomy in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division (see chapter 4) contains approximately forty-five hundred volumes devoted to food handling, preparation, and cooking. In terms of literature featuring Latina cooking, the collection holds books written by Latinas and non-Latinas that purportedly represented their food. Quite a few of these were sponsored by the Gebhardt Chili Powder Company of San Antonio, Texas, as a way to teach potential customers how to use their spices. Among them are Mexican Cookery for American Homes (San Antonio: Gebhardt Chili Powder Company, 1923; TX716.M4 M494 1923) and Frances P. Belle's A California Cookbook: An Unusual Collection of Spanish Dishes and Tropical California Foods (Chicago: Regan Publishing, 1925; TX715.B45). In these volumes the word “Spanish” is used interchangeably with “Mexican,” but either way a recipe for a Spanish omelet without potatoes sheds doubt on their authenticity.

In her cookbook Early California Hospitality: The Cookery Customs of Spanish California with Authentic Recipes and Menus of the Period (Glendale: Arthur H. Clark, 1938; TX715P127), Ana Bégué de Packman, secretary of the Historical Society of Southern California and custodian of the Casa Figueroa, tried to compensate for these travesties with recipes for corn and wheat tortillas, burritos, and two separate ways of making pozole (stew with meat and hominy). She dedicated her book to “my hardy and illustrious ancestors: Don Francisco Reyes, soldado de cuera (founder of Spanish frontier forts), who first trod the soil of Alta California with Padre Junípero Serra; and Don Maximo Alanis, who assisted in founding the pueblo of Los Angeles and was the original grantee of Rancho San José de Buenos Aires now known as Westwood Hills.”

Genealogical Research

When Latinas want to search for ancestors both in the United States and abroad, they should first turn to the finding aid Hispanic Migration and Genealogy: Selected Titles at the Library of Congress by Lee Douglas (forthcoming), a compilation of over three hundred works that facilitate the construction of a family tree. Another very important source is the Diccionario Heráldico y Genealógico de Apellidos Españoles y Americanos by Alberto and Arturo García Carraffa (Madrid: Impr. de A. Marzo, 1919-<1963>; CR2142.G3). The eighty-eight volumes of this work contain a list of over 15,000 names and genealogical histories for Spanish and Spanish American families. An automated list of names for each volume can be found in the section of the Hispanic Division's Web site devoted to “Other Reading Rooms” at “Genealogy” or directly at <www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/hbrowse/geneal/index_gc.html>. Additional works on Latina genealogy include Fernando R. de Castro y de Cárdenas, Genealogía, Heráldica e Historia de Nuestras Familias (Miami, Florida: Ediciones Universal, 1989; CS222.C37 1989), an excellent source for Cubanas wanting to trace their families back to the island. If you visit the Local History and Genealogy Reading Room, you will be able to access the genealogical database Ancestry <www.ancestry.com> free of charge. Within the Library, researchers can log onto the Biography and Genealogy Master Index under “Electronic Research Tools.”

Latinas have continuously contributed to the making of what became the United States. Nevertheless important figures have yet to be identified as Latinas, and still others remain anonymous even today. As this listing of selected collections demonstrates, the Library of Congress offers many opportunities for researchers to uncover the lives of Latinas and give voice to their deeds and dreams.

From their very earliest settlements in territory that would ultimately become the United States, Latinas, Jewish women, and many more helped weave the fabric of American society. Their steady infiux in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries continued to add color and texture to the nation's evolving design. Uncovering the words and actions of women and their families through the assistance of the staff of the Area Studies divisions and using the foreign-language collections and the special-format collections at the Library of Congress will help you tap into some of the origins of women's history across the land. Such broad-based research enhances our understanding of the multilayered and gendered dimensions of American culture.

At the same time, foreign-language materials test common wisdom about the nature of colonization, the interplay of the dominant society with the “other,” and generalizations concerning the factors that serve to construct culture. Continuing research usually reveals that women cannot be reduced to any single set of characteristics or fully described by any one image. The experiences of individual women in each generation add additional layers to their basic identities, as shaped by race, class, genes, and gender. Perhaps what is most remarkable is women's strength in the face of new and persistent challenges. Although not every answer can be found in the Library's foreign-language collections, its documents are certain to lead us in new directions and prompt different insightful responses. In doing so, they will undoubtedly help create a new vision of our past.

Individuals who helped in writing this chapter include Helen Fedor (EUR), Judy Liu (AD), Yoko Akiba (Japanese), Hoa Nguyen (Vietnamese), Ibrahim Pourhadi (Farsi), George Kovtun (Czech), Fentahun Tiruneh (Amharic), John Topping (Greek), and Fawzi Tadros and Mary Jane Deeb (Arabic). Helpful in all ways were Georgette Dorn, chief of the Hispanic Division, Beverly Gray, chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division, and Michael Grunberger, head of the Hebraic Section.Thanks also to Vicki Ruiz, Arizona State University, Pamela Nadell, American University, and Shuly Rubin Schwartz, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, who read earlier drafts.