Search Help

How does this work?
There are many ways to search the collections of the Freedom Archives. Below is a brief guide that will help you conduct effective searches. Note, anytime you search for anything in the Freedom Archives, the first results that appear will be our digitized items. Information for items that have yet to be scanned or yet to be digitized can still be viewed, but only by clicking on the show link that will display the hidden (non-digitized) items. If you are interested in accessing these non-digitized materials, please email info@freedomarchives.org.
Exploring the Collections without the Search Bar
Under the heading Browse By Collection, you’ll notice most of the Freedom Archives’ major collections. These collections have an image as well as a short description of what you’ll find in that collection. Click on that image to instantly explore that specific collection.
Basic Searching
You can always type what you’re looking for into the search bar. Certain searches may generate hundreds of results, so sometimes it will help to use quotation marks to help narrow down your results. For instance, searching for the phrase Black Liberation will generate all of our holdings that contain the words Black and Liberation, while searching for “Black Liberation” (in quotation marks) will only generate our records that have those two words next to each other.
Advanced Searching
The Freedom Archives search site also understands Boolean search logic. Click on this link for a brief tutorial on how to use Boolean search logic. Our search function also understands “fuzzy searches.” Fuzzy searches utilize the (*) and will find matches even when users misspell words or enter in only partial words for the search. For example, searching for liber* will produce results for liberation/liberate/liberates/etc.
Keyword Searches
You’ll notice that under the heading KEYWORDS, there are a number of words, phrases or names that describe content. Sometimes these are also called “tags.” Clicking on these words is essentially the same as conducting a basic search.

Search Results

Haydee Beltran Interview by Pilar Haydee Beltran Interview by Pilar
Call Number: PM 264AFormat: Cass AProducers: HaydeeCollection: Puerto Rico
Political prisoner Haydee Beltran is interviewed about her roles and values as a woman in the Puerto Rican Independence struggle. Equality, freedom, and dignity are her main concepts when involving men and women in the struggle. Imperialistic powers that take advantage of Puerto Rico need to be fought by both men and women. When the government caught their organization, both men and women were captured. This shows that both sexes were equally involved in the resistance. Pilar also explains their position in referring themselves as a POW. With a long history of the US and PR at war, the US always attempts to remove anti-capitalist/imperialist opposition. As a result, organizations are forced to become clandestine movements. The tape ends with Pilar explaining their recent hunger strike for Alfredo Mendez.