Dr. Robert M. Levine (1941-2003) was the Gabelli Senior Scholar in the Arts and Sciences, Director of Latin American Studies, and professor of history at the University of Miami. Throughout his career, Dr. Levine exhibited a strong interest in Brazilian cultural and political history, Jewish Diasporas in Latin America, Cuban history, and Latin American history in general. His papers, donated to the University of Miami, reflect all of these interests in the form of video cassettes, periodicals, clippings, photographs, photocopies, notebooks, microfilm, microfiche, articles, and other materials.
Included in the collection are photocopies of a collection of records from the Jewish community of Curaçao in the 18th century; production materials and photographs pertaining to Dr. Levine's "Hotel Cuba" documentary on the Jewish Diaspora in Cuba; a dozen reels of microfilms of Brazilian newspapers from the 1930s; notes, photographs, and documentation from Dr. Levine's research on the Vargas period in Brazil; and two large, hand-drawn maps indicating Jewish establishments in the major commercial district of Old Havana during the pre-1959 period.
The Leila Míccolis Brazilian Alternative Press Collection consists primarily of political and countercultural pamphlets and periodicals, concrete poetry, neo-concrete poetry and other vanguard/avant-garde artistic experimentation, fanzines, film reviews, university publications, theater, and musical pieces.
As opposed to the commercial and widely-circulated press of "official" Brazilian governmental venues, the publications contained in the collection especially treat stigmatized or marginalized groups, such as Afro-Brazilians, women, sexual minorities. It accomplishes this goal by utilizing various mediums including literary pieces, editorial cartoons, political comics, sociopolitical critiques of "Brazilianness," humor, and the promotion of ecological and environmental awareness. The collection also contains a large variety of materials from the 1970s Marginália movement, a term used to describe a series of underground publications which circulated during the military dictatorship.
The collection was painstakingly accumulated over the course of forty-five years by Míccolis who decided to place the archive in a North American university so as to assure the preservation of the collection, as well as to prevent its censorship.
