Because Latin American studies is a very interdisciplinary field, you may need to search for your topic in a number of different databases. Listed below are some of the most helpful resources. It helps to try out different search terms, subject headings, and Boolean operators.

Archivos Virtuales - Papers of Latino and Latin American artists
The purpose of Archivos Virtuales is to expand access to information about the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art's papers of Latino and Latin American artists. This Web site uses the Archives' published guide, The Papers of Latino and Latin American Artists (1996 and revised edition, 2000), as its foundation, incorporating all of the previously published collection descriptions, adding new acquisitions and detailed finding aids, when available, and enhancing it with an online selection of digitized letters, sketchbooks, photographs, scrapbooks, interview transcripts, and other primary sources.

Bibliografía Mesoamericana
Provides a comprehensive and continually updated bibliographic dataset of the published literature pertaining to the anthropology of Mesoamerica. Content includes archaeology, ethnography, ethnohistory, art history, linguistics, physical anthropology, and other related disciplines.

Biblioteca Virtual de CLACSO (In Spanish and Portuguese)
Created by the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO), this site features a database with 4,100 full-text documents and access to more than 10,000 full-text articles through links to other social science collections.

Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes (In Spanish)
An extensive digital publishing project of Spanish and Hispanic-American archival material. The catalog contains more than 14,000 full-text documents, including books, magazines and journals, doctoral theses, documentaries, interviews, audio narratives, visual collections, etc., in a variety of formats (digitized text, facsimile, multimedia, voice recordings, video, archival documents, photographs, drawings and paintings).

Cibera - Biblioteca Virtual Iberoamericana / España / Portugal (In Spanish and Portuguese)
An interdisciplinary library for specialists and students of the culture, history, politics, economics and people of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries as well as the Caribbean. This portal allows specialized searching of library catalogs and digital resources, a database of full-text documents, an archive of journal indexes, a database of research on German-speaking Latin America, and a news archive.

Cybertesis.NET (In English, Portuguese and Spanish)
"Cybertesis.NET is a powerful research tool that allows simultaneous searching of multiple websites through a single Web interface, and retrieval of more than 27.000 full-text theses stored in 27 different servers and university repositories, by means of the OAI protocol (Open Archives Initiative) as a service provider (metadata harvesting)."

Ethnic NewsWatch
This is a full-text database dating back to 1960 that contains newspapers, journals, and magazines of the ethnic, minority and native press, including Hispanic, African-American, Native American and many other minority communities in the United States. It is searchable in both English and Spanish, with titles in both languages and more than 100,000 articles in Spanish. Use search terms that are natural language and boolean: Plan Colombia. Plan Colombia AND paramilitary. Use additional fields to limit the search.

Expanded Academic ASAP
Expanded Academic ASAP contains abstracts and references for articles from more than 1,500 scholarly, trade and general-interest publications; many titles are also full-text. The database draws from core titles in every major academic concentration, as well as area-specific and issue-specific journals, academic journals with application in the professions, and publications with national news coverage and commentary.

GenderWatch
GenderWatch is a full-text collection of international journals, magazines, newsletters, regional publications, special reports and conference proceedings devoted to women's and gender issues. GenderWatch also contains a significant body of archival material dating back to the mid 1970's.

Handbook of Latin American Studies (HLAS)
HLAS is an annotated bibliography on Latin America, with works selected by scholars and edited by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. The multidisciplinary Handbook alternates annually between the social sciences and the humanities, and with more than 5,000 works selected each year offers an essential guide to available resources. Use natural language search terms: buddhism, cross-cultural studies, economic sanctions Iraq, etc.

Hispanic American Periodicals Index (HAPI)
HAPI Online, created by the UCLA Latin American Center, includes analyses of current political, economic, and social issues and covers developments in the arts and letters in Central and South America, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the US-Mexico border region. Content also covers Hispanics in the United States. HAPI Online consists of complete bibliographic citations to articles, book reviews, documents, original literary works, and other materials appearing in more than 400 key social science and humanities journals, from 1970 to the present.

Latin Americanist Research Resources Pilot Project
A cooperative initiative among 47 libraries and 7 Latin American Partner Institutions, their goal is to expand access to Latin American resources through electronic access and document delivery. It consists of Latin Americanist Periodicals Tables of Contents (LAPTOC), and Presidential Messages. LAPTOC is a searchable web database that provides access to the tables of contents of more than 800 journals published in Latin America, primarily covering the humanities and social sciences. The majority of these materials are available through interlibrary loan. The Presidential Messages database contains digital images of presidential speeches from Mexico and Argentina from the early 19th century to the present.

LexisNexis Academic
LexisNexis Academic offers access to thousands of news sources that cover general, regional, and international news, company, financial, and legal information, and many other topics. Many of the files are full-text, and there are several dozen Spanish-language titles. You can restrict your search to 'North/South American News' and 'Spanish Language News.'

El Poder de la Palabra (In Spanish)
A web site dedicated to poetic prose. It contains 2462 fragments of literary texts as well as the biographies and images of the authors. The collection includes authors from all over the world, but especially Hispanic authors. The site also includes images of works of art, architecture and music.

Political Database of the Americas (In English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish)
Non-governmental project of the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) at Georgetown University in association with the Department of Democratic and Political Affairs of the Organization of American States. Through its website, the PDBA centralizes, systematizes, and offers political-institutional information about all the countries of the American continent. The site provides free access to a set of relevant resources including the national constitutions, legislation, institutions and political actors, political-constitutional studies and electoral data for all the countries of the region. The information is presented in an objective and independent manner, facilitating analysis and debate from a comparative perspective.

Women's Studies International
This is an interdisciplinary database that covers the core disciplines in Women's Studies. Sources include nearly 800 journals, newspapers, newsletters, bulletins, books, book chapters, proceedings, reports, theses, dissertations, NGO studies, websites, and grey literature, as well as over 2,000 periodicals. An excellent resource for finding articles from a feminist perspective. Use Index in the Quick search screen and the Advanced search screen to build your search.

The Yale Map Collection
The Map Collection has the largest collection of maps in Connecticut and one of the largest university collections in the United States. Its collections are geographically comprehensive and consist of over 200,000 map sheets, 3,000 atlases, and 900 reference books. The Collection also houses approximately 15,000 rare (pre-1850) sheet maps. Though these cover many areas of the world, most pertain to North America, the United States, and New England. A selection of maps from the collection has been digitized and is available online. Included in this selection are maps from Mexico, the Caribbean and South America as old as 1550.