Mexican American and Latino Collections

Photograph: Scene from a Mexican Bakery, 1958 [Winston Reeves Photograph Collection].

The diverse Latino communities in the South Plains have a rich and robust history. The first settlers in the area were Latino, and since that time Latinos have continuously contributed to the economic and intellectual growth of the region. Newspapers such as El Editor and organizations like the Hispanic Association of Women speak to a legacy of dynamic and impactful Mexican American presence. However, the South Plains Latino community is also changing, with new waves of people coming from nations such as El Salvador and Honduras to shape the cultural landscape.

This page provides a snapshot of the Southwest Collection’s digitized collections, oral history interviews, and physical archival collections relating to the Latino history in Lubbock, the South Plains, and the Southwestern United States.

Digital Collections:

Oral Histories:

The Southwest Collection and Texas Tech's other special collections and archives have conducted numerous oral histories documenting Latino and Mexican American history. An ever-growing list of transcribed interviews may be found here. Transcripts of some interviews may be found in our Hispanic Oral History Project. Many more have been summarized and can be found among our oral history abstracts.

Archival Collections:

Several archives of Latino and Mexican American history are available for research at the Southwest Collection. A roster of those can be found here.

While not all of the Southwest Collection’s holdings have been digitized and made available online, their finding aids and inventories can be found on Texas Archival Resources Online (TARO) alongside finding aids from dozens of other archives throughout the state. In some cases, collections' contents have been summarized and made available in this guide.