Tony Velez Photographs

[Home of Consuelo de Passos], 1989, v1989.1.13.9; Brooklyn’s Hispanic Communities Documentation Project, ARC.120; Brooklyn Historical Society.

The photo of the week by Tony Velez depicts Consuelo de Passos in her Brooklyn home with part of her collection of Mexican regional costumes in 1989. This photograph is part of the Hispanic Communities Documentation project, initiated by Brooklyn Historical Society in 1988 to document the experiences of Brooklyn residents who arrived from Puerto Rico, Panama, Ecuador, and several other Central and South American nations in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The collection includes over fifty oral history interviews conducted between 1988 and 1989. The  narrators describe experiences of immigration, living arrangements upon arrival in Brooklyn, neighborhood demographics, discrimination, employment, community development, and political leadership. You can listen to these interviews on our award-winning Oral History Portal, which allows you to search across nearly 400 individual interviews.

The collection also includes photographs, most of which were taken by project photographer, Tony Velezin the late 1980s. They document Brooklyn’s Latino/a communities in countless ways, capturing  religious festivals, parades, community gatherings, and individual and group portraits.

Tony Velez was born to Puerto Rican immigrants in the South Bronx and grew up there and in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn. After serving in the Vietnam War, he studied photography at Brooklyn College under the guidance of legendary photographer Walter Rosenblum. Velez’s work is widely recognized through exhibitions, grants, and commissioned work throughout New York City.  This photographs in this collection are not digitized, but we hope you will take the time to visit the Othmer Library to view these evocative photographs.

Interested in seeing more photos from BHS’s collection? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images. Interested in seeing even more historic Brooklyn images? Visit our Brooklyn Visual Heritage website here. To search BHS’s entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections visit BHS’s Othmer Library Wed-Sat, 1:00-5:00 p.m. library@brooklynhistory.org