Audio Visual Materials at the Benson Collection

The music holdings comprise approximately 3,000 monographic and serial titles on Latin American music and over 6,500 phonodiscs, tapes, compact discs, and cassettes of both Mexican American and Latin American music. Included in its strong holdings of Mexican American and Northern Mexican recorded music are the Migrant Border Ballad Project Collection, field recordings of folk ballads from the Rio Grande Valley; the Rio Record Shop Collection with extensive inventory files and over 500 phonodiscs of Mexican American popular music of the 1960s to 1981; and the Joe Nicola Collection of 800 phonodiscs of norteño, conjunto, and ranchera music of the 1940s to the 1960s. Other sound recording collections—though non-musical—include oral history recordings of prominent Mexican Americans, the archives of Longhorn Radio Network ("A esta hora conversamos" and "The Mexican American Experience") and the archives of "Latino USA" from UT Austin's KUT radio station.

The Latin American recordings are primarily of art music by major Latin American composers and of indigenous folk music, although representative selections of protest and popular music are also acquired. Sound recordings from all regions of Latin America are included, but the largest sections are of Brazilian, Mexican, and Argentine music composed and/or recorded in the mid to late twentieth century. The Benson Latin American Collection's musical resources have been strengthened by the acquisition of the Dan Dickey, Stanley Ross, and Marjorie and Francis Burgess collections which emphasize popular music from the 1930s to the present. Representative music from other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean is also collected, for example, the Johannes Riedel Collection of Ecuadorian folk and popular music transcripts (1938-48) and allied materials. More recent acquisitions include the Appleby Brazilian Collection, comprised of 2,000 scores, several hundred sound recordings, and books; the Marion Verhaalen Collection on Camargo Guarnieri and Twentieth-Century Brazilian Music which encompases scores, recordings, and correspondence of prominent Brazilian composers of the past three decades.

Videotape, film, and DVD holdings comprise about 900 titles in total. A substantial portion of these materials relate to the Mexican American and Latino experience in the United States. However, Central America, South America and the Caribbean are also well represented by many works on the history, art, culture, and politics of these regions and the countries therein.

See G. Béhague, "Music in the Benson Latin American Collection," The Library Chronicle, 22, no. 3 (1992): 109-115.