Iberoamericana University in Mexico City Opens Visual History Archive Access Site

Iberoamericana University in Mexico City is the first university in Latin America to gain full access to the Visual History Archive.

Through the university’s subscription with ProQuest, students, faculty and the public will be able to view all 55,000 testimonies in the Visual History Archive.

The VHA access site comes just months after an interdisciplinary research group of scholars from across Latin America spent several weeks in residence at USC Shoah Foundation for its 2017 Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship. One of the seven scholars was Yael Siman, who teaches at Iberoamericana University. Other scholars came from Chile, Argentina, Mexico and Colombia.

The scholars researched testimonies of Holocaust survivors who settled in Latin America after World War II. They focused on survivors’ mobility, integration, citizenship and memory when they settled in Mexico, Chile, Columbia and Argentina after surviving the Holocaust.

Last year, USC Shoah Foundation also hosted a two-day convening of UNESCO’s Latin American delegation to introduce professional development training and resources to help educators in their respective countries use IWitness and testimonies to teach about genocide. All the participants were from their respective countries’ ministries of education.

About 110 Holocaust survivors recorded their testimonies for USC Shoah Foundation in Mexico. Other survivors spent time in Mexico after the Holocaust before moving on to other places.