Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980

See Appendix A,  Hispanic American Newspapers Title List for a list of source titles provided by Readex.

This collection, the first installment within Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers collection, presents 369 titles published by Hispanics in the United States, going back to the first known Hispanic American title published in New Orleans in 1808.

The nature of the content in Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980 is impressive. With a focus on Hispanic issues and news of specific interest to Latin America, the Caribbean, and Spain, rather than just general news presented in Spanish, this will be a very valuable source to researchers.

The geographic spread (and relative proportion) of titles appears to closely represent demographic density of current Hispanic populations. The few exceptions to this—states with Hispanic concentrations but without titles represented—are Utah and Nevada, as well as a few states in the South, such as Georgia and North Carolina.

Content is heavily weighted toward two states: Texas and New Mexico. Together they represent well over half of the titles selected, and 70 percent of the “volume” of the database (by number of issues). California and New York make up an additional 20 percent of the content, leaving the remaining 10 states to cover less than 10% of the database’s content.

A Spanish-language interface option might be appropriate for this database but is not available.