The CeDInCI is a documentation center (library, newspaper archive and archive) dedicated to the preservation, conservation, cataloging and dissemination of the political and cultural productions of the Latin American left, from its origins in the second half of the 19th century to the present. The CeDInCI documentary collection brings together the largest collection of materials on left-wing culture in Latin America, covering the political-cultural productions of the main political currents from the last decades of the 19th century to the present (anarchism, socialism, communism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Guvarism, new left, revolutionary nationalisms), social movements (labor, student, women’s, human rights, peasant movement) and artistic and intellectual groups. It also has important documents and bibliographic and periodical collections of other political currents and families (liberalism, radicalism, conservatism, Christian democracy, social Christianity, Peronism and other Latin American nationalisms).
The CeDInCI was born as a non-profit civil association dedicated to the preservation of the cultural heritage of the left. The initial collection was constituted based on the personal archive of Horacio Tarcus, gathered over twenty years. In 1997 the idea was born to transform this voluminous private archive into a center open to the public. Since the inauguration of its first headquarters in April 1998, this initial collection grew substantially through some purchases and, fundamentally, donations (at a rate of about one hundred per year).
Today, CeDInCI offers the academic community and a wide range of readers one of the largest Latin American libraries specialized in social, political and cultural history of Latin America. Likewise, it makes available for public consultation thousands of collections of the most important periodical publications produced on our continent by political, cultural, union, student, human rights, women’s, etc. organizations. In these years it has become the main reference center in the field of studies on the left and social movements in Latin America, regularly receiving researchers not only from Argentina but also from the most diverse universities in America and Europe.