A Library for the Americas: The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection 9781477315125

Citation preview

A Library for th e Am ericas

Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture

A Library for the Americas The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection

edited by Julianne Gilland José Montelongo

uniVersity of texAs Press

Austin

Copyright © 2018 by LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections All rights reserved Printed in China First edition, 2018 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713–7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form

The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Design by Lindsay Starr Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gilland, Julianne, editor. | Montelongo, José, editor. Title: A library for the Americas : the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection / edited by Julianne Gilland and José Montelongo. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2018. | Series: Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture Identifiers: LCCN 2017024257 ISBN 978-1-4773-1511-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4773-1512-5 (library e-book) ISBN 978-1-4773-1513-2 (non-library e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Benson Latin American Collection. | Libraries— Latin America—Special collections. | Latin America— Library resources. Classification: LCC Z733.B4744 L53 2018 | DDC 025.2/798—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024257

doi:10.7560/315118

endsheet: Texas fragment of the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, 1540s. The painting depicts the alliance between Tlaxcalans and Spaniards, a coalition key to the fall of the Aztec Empire in 1521. Doña Marina, named also Malinche or Malintzin, figures prominently in her role of translator between the Spaniards and the natives. Ex-Stendahl Collection. page iI: Detail of map of Teozacoalco, 1580. Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala, 1577–1585.

Contents

vii Foreword Julianne Gilland, José Montelongo, Virginia Garrard, and lorraine j. haricombe xi Introduction A Brief History of a Great Library David Block

Latin American Collections 1

15

25

1

 In Praise of the Benson Collection/Elogio de la Colección Benson Mauricio Tenorio

2

The Relaciones Geográficas

3

Archive in a Library The Case of the Saint John d’El Rey Mining Company Richard Graham

Barbara E. Mundy

39

55

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4 5

A Walk through the Benson with Lucas Alamán Eric Van Young La pasión por lo impreso Historia del Fondo Arturo Taracena Flores Arturo Taracena Arriola

P la t e s Latina/o Collections

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6

The Benson Latin American Collection as an Oppositional Borderlands Archive David Montejano

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7

Printed Proof

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Telling Treasures The Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Archive at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection Norma E. Cantú

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The Cultural Politics of Ricardo and Harriett Romo’s Print Collection Tatiana Reinoza

P la t e s

201 Acknowledgments 203 Contributors

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contents

Foreword

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his book began its life many years ago, thanks to the vision, knowledge, and dedication of longtime Benson librarian Adán Benavides. Setting out to capture and represent even a part of the Benson’s treasures is a daunting project, but Adán and his colleagues recognized the potential for a volume like this to highlight the immense scholarly value and material beauty of such a collection. Thanks to the collective expertise of Adán and other longtime Benson librarians, this project in its initial phase was a reflection of decades of scholarly and institutional knowledge of the Benson’s holdings, much of that knowledge gained at the right hand of Dr. Nettie Lee Benson herself. The book took on a second life during the tenure of Professor Charles R. Hale as director of LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections. As the founding director of LLILAS Benson, a formal partnership between the Benson Latin American Collection and the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies that launched in 2011, he led the way in establishing an innovative and exciting institutional model for uniting collections and scholarship. With the inspiration and vision of a longtime colleague and friend of the Benson, Professor Mauricio Tenorio, Hale saw the opportunity for the book to evolve and reflect this new space of deep, sustained collaboration between the Benson and LLILAS. The book

you hold in your hands is the product of this evolution and new vision: a wealth of images that showcase the incredible depth, diversity, and history of the Benson is paired with a series of essays and reflections that are the words not of the institution, but of its researchers. The distinguished scholars who have contributed to this volume represent a broad spectrum of fields and disciplines within Latin American and Latina/o studies. What they have in common is the role that the Benson Collection has played in the research and intellectual contributions that have defined their careers. David Block, historian and former head librarian of the Benson Collection, did what only historians and librarians do—the day after he retired, David showed up at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Reading Room and set out to research and write a short history of the Benson Collection, which serves as an introduction to this book. A few weeks later he brought, besides the final version of his piece, a 1950s Bolivian newspaper that he acquired on eBay and wanted to donate to the library. The Benson produces a strange effect on those who have worked here—even when they go, they stay, and their generosity keeps supporting the collection long after they formally retire. Just as the book offers an opportunity to highlight what so many have worked to raise over past decades, it also reflects the rich and fertile ground on which the Benson will continue to grow. New collaborative archival initiatives reflect not only the growth and synergy of the LLILAS Benson partnership over the past several years, but the evolution more broadly of special collections and of research libraries such as the University of Texas Libraries in the twenty-first century. As the nature of our collaboration with scholars and researchers continues to advance and change, so does the development of our collections. Major digital archival initiatives of the past several years, from the groundbreaking example of the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive (AHPN) to the recent Mellon-funded Latin American Digital Initiatives (LADI) project, have made LLILAS Benson and UT Libraries archivists, librarians, and scholars—working side by side with institutional and community partners across Latin America—into innovators of postcustodial archival theory and practice. Primeros Libros de las Américas, an international collaboration to preserve digitally and provide open access to the hemisphere’s earliest printed books, has become the basis for an NEH-funded digital scholarship initiative that will yield a new corpus of fully searchable early indigenous texts. The newly launched Black Diaspora Archival Initiative, a joint effort of LLILAS Benson and Black Studies at the University of Texas, will make the Benson a major repository for documentary, visual, and artistic materials of the Black Diaspora throughout the Americas, the first of its kind. All of these current projects highlight how we not only expand the horizon of our collecting practices through sustained scholarly collaboration but also transform scholarship itself through innovation within our collections.

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Foreword

The year 2021 will mark the hundredth anniversary of the University of Texas’s acquisition of the Genaro García Collection, the foundational collection that attracted other notable collections and turned UT into a destination for Latin American research in the United States. The approaching centennial prompts us to reflect on the unparalleled resource that Benson librarians, archivists, and scholars were able to build during the last century: an irreplaceable and inexhaustible collection of physical materials—rare books and manuscripts, maps, photographs, music, oral histories, art, and objects—that document Latin American and US Latina/o history and culture. And it inspires us to sharpen our vision for the Benson we are already working to create in the twenty-first century: a space for scholarship and collaboration where the physical and digital live side by side, where open access and postcustodial practices give us opportunities to build new kinds of resources and offer access at a new scale globally, and where an ever more expansive and inclusive vision for collection development and scholarly engagement better reflects our long-standing commitment to preserve and document Latin American and Latino/a experience in support of social justice, cultural agency, and civil and human rights. We are immensely grateful to the contributors to this book for accepting the invitation to celebrate the remarkable place for learning that is the Benson Collection, but also for not shying away from the larger questions about what it means to have a monumental library and archive devoted to Latin America in the United States. Their essays have made this book both enjoyable and thought provoking. The Benson Collection’s history dates back almost a century. It was about time that we wrote a love letter to this library. Julianne Gilland

Deputy Director, Colby College Museum of Art Former Director, Benson Latin American Collection

José Montelongo

Librarian for Mexican Studies, Benson Latin American Collection

Virginia Garrard Director, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections

lorraine j. haricombe

Vice Provost and Director, University of Texas Libraries

Fore word

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Introduction A Brief History of a Great Library

David Block

I have found data that does not even exist back home. professor B. Piedad Urdinola, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2012

Map detail, García manuscript G61, Tepexi, Puebla, 1584.

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his accolade, one of many similar messages received over the years, affirms the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection as one of the premier repositories of its kind in the world. It is unique in gathering at a single location a complete range of information resources for the study of Latin America and the Latina/o populations of the United States. A circulating collection exceeding one million volumes, rare books and manuscripts of extraordinary scope and intrinsic value, a wide spectrum of electronic data and rapidly growing additions of art objects and folklore, all curated by knowledgeable staff, serve the needs of a clientele that is truly global. It is fitting that this great collection resides at the University of Texas at Austin. Throughout its history the university has shown a particular interest in understanding the broad region of which Texas is a part. While that interest has waxed and waned over time, a concern for Latin America, reflected conspicuously in faculty composition and library resources, has consistently distinguished the University of Texas among its peers. To introduce this volume I examine the development of the Benson Collection over its nearly 100-year history. Initially an aggregation of private libraries dealing primarily with Mexico, the collection has grown to support the study of all of Latin America and Latinas/os. This is no

small accomplishment. Gathering the publishing output from areas outside Anglo-America and western Europe requires sophisticated language skills and cultural awareness as well as remarkable tenacity. The University of Texas is extremely fortunate that Nettie Lee Benson rewarded her alma mater with four decades of imagination and persistence. She, her colleagues, and her successors have devoted considerable time and energy to acquiring materials from Latin America and US Latina/o communities and to developing approaches that address profound changes in scholarship and information technology. In the Beginning

The foundation of the University of Texas’s Latin American Collection is often attributed to chance. At the invitation of Mexican President Álvaro Obregón, the university sent a delegation to Obregón’s inauguration in 1920. Two members of the delegation—H. J. Lutcher Stark, a member of the Board of Regents, and Charles W. Hackett, a professor of history—were walking near the Zócalo in Mexico City when Hackett spotted a book in a shop window. It was a first edition of Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s Historia verdadera de la conquista de Nueva España, published in Madrid in 1632. Recognizing the work as a classic of early Mexican history, Hackett remarked that it belonged in the University of Texas library. Stark, himself a keen bibliophile, offered to buy the book and donate it to the university. As the story goes, when Hackett and Stark made this impulsive purchase they learned that the heirs of Genaro García were offering a large collection of Mexican books and manuscripts for sale. The son of a prominent politician who held cabinet positions in the government of Porfirio Díaz, García was a lawyer by training and a historian by calling. “Sr. García formed his library with the view mainly to make it his workshop,” writes E. W. Winkler, a UT librarian sent to Mexico City to examine the collection. “It is the library, therefore, of an industrious, productive, ambitious, and moderately wealthy student of the history of Mexico.”1 The saga of the García Collection’s purchase (for $100,000 plus shipping), its loading into a boxcar in Mexico City (all seventeen tons of it), and its transport to Austin in 1921 is told in colorful detail elsewhere.2 The addition of Genaro García’s collection of 10,000 books, 2,000 newspapers and periodicals, 15,000 pamphlets, and 200,000 manuscript pages, including the libraries of several prominent Mexican politicians of the nineteenth century, put the University of Texas on the map as an important repository of Latin American materials. It also began an ongoing polemic with Mexico over the legality of taking García’s library out of the country.3

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From García Library to Latin American Collection

The arrival of a boxcar load of books and documents in Austin overwhelmed the capacity of the library to catalog and house it. The university’s first library building opened in 1911. Ten years later it was filled to capacity, consigning the García materials to the library basement and other locations across the campus. In 1922 the library appointed Lota M. Spell as García library assistant to catalog the books, but at the end of her fiveyear employment, much of the manuscript material remained unprocessed and inaccessible. In 1927 Spell was replaced by Carlos E. Castañeda, hired as librarian of the Genaro García Collection and charged with giving it greater visibility. Castañeda’s tasks were complicated by the library’s continued acquisition of manuscript collections from and about Mexico. In a series of annual reports between 1927 and 1932 Castañeda points to ongoing receipt of gift materials and appeals to his superiors for additional staff, an acquisitions fund, “even a small one,”4 and more shelving and furniture.

Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (Madrid, 1632). Benson Rare Books and Maps.

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Ex-libris plate and stamp of Genaro García. Genaro García Collection.

Completion of the new main building in 1934, with the iconic tower that has come to represent the university, considerably enlarged library space and included separate quarters to house and tend the rapidly expanding Latin American holdings. A reading room occupied the west wing of the fourth floor and, at Castañeda’s suggestion, incorporated Southwestern-style décor. A new space enabled the library to consolidate its Latin American holdings in a single location. To recognize the facility’s reach beyond the García purchase and Mexico, it was renamed the Latin American Collection. Within the next decade, the library acquired some of its most famous materials, including a stunning collection of early Mexican imprints and documents compiled by Joaquín García Icazbalceta. Smaller in number of items than the García Collection but similarly rich in historic value, it includes sixteenth-century materials that reflect the interests of García Icazbalceta, himself a much-admired historian and a remarkable collector. Surprisingly, the far-reaching importance of the collection’s rarest pieces, the Relaciones Geográficas manuscripts—many of which had maps painted by native artists—that document conditions in Mexico and Guatemala in the 1570s, seems to have escaped Castañeda’s appreciation.

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Elevated view of the West Mall at the University of Texas, including the tower, union, and students crossing Guadalupe Street, 1943. Prints and Photographs Collection, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

Title page and detail from Fray Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana (Mexico City, 1555). Molina’s SpanishNahuatl Vocabulario was the first indigenous-language book printed in the Americas. This copy contains sixteenth-century annotations in another indigenous language, Otomí. Joaquín García Icazbalceta Collection.

The purchase of all these collections required allocations well beyond available library funds. In fact, the $100,000 price of the Genaro García Collection exceeded the entire amount budgeted for the library in 1921; the regents authorized the purchase using other funds at their disposal. University leaders held a vision of the importance of Spain and Mexico to an understanding of Texas. Castañeda recounts remarks by H. Y. Benedict, president of the university from 1927 to 1937, that “by heritage and geographical position the University of Texas ought to possess resources on the history, law, and literature of Spain and Portugal and their former possessions.”5 Legend has it that Benedict was on his way to present an appeal to the Texas legislature to make an allocation for the García Icazbalceta books and manuscripts when he suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage. More reliably documented is that the collection’s $60,000 purchase resulted from an appropriation from the Texas Senate Finance Committee in May 1937. The W. B. Stephens collection, purchased in 1938, and the Manuel Gondra and Diego Muñoz collections, both purchased in 1939, came through special allocations from the Board of Regents.

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Map of Cuzcatlán, 1580. Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala, 1577–1585.

In 1940 the Latin American Collection consisted primarily of a set of celebrated private libraries, assembled to support the interests of their former owners. While these acquisitions provided areas of formidable documentary strength, they were insufficient to support research and teaching equal to the university administration’s ambitions and the faculty’s demands. An opportunity to fill gaps in the collection came in 1936 through a library grant from the Rockefeller Foundation’s General Education Board. Of the $100,000 awarded by the board, $35,000 was allotted to Latin American acquisitions. Faculty played an active role in identifying collection weaknesses; Spanish American literary periodicals, current newspaper subscriptions, and government publications received particular mention. The university library administered the funds and processed requests through its order department. Receipt of materials proved slow and sporadic, even when faculty provided complete citations and suggested suppliers. In 1938 the university librarian Donald Coney began to warn C. W. Hackett that the Rockefeller Foundation had expressed concern with the outstanding balance in the Latin American account. Acquisition of individual works from Latin America proved more challenging than the purchase of large private collections. Carlos E. Castañeda joined the university’s Department of History in 1939, having completed his doctoral studies three years earlier. While he continued to hold his library appointment, increasingly his attention turned to historical studies. Near the end of his association with the library, Castañeda reflected on the prospects for the collection that he had administered for more than a decade: “If fate continues to favor the University, it will soon have the most extensive and richest Latin American Collections not only in the United States but in the entire Western Hemisphere.”6 Fate took the form of Nettie Lee Benson, who replaced Castañeda during his absence to head the Federal Fair Employment Practice Commission from 1942 to 1945; she succeeded him in 1946. In an interview given soon after her retirement, Benson revealed that at the time of her appointment she knew nothing about “library matters” and intended to take the position for only a year as she pursued graduate studies in history. She remained on the job until 1975.7 The Benson Administration

When Nettie Lee Benson began her tenure at the Latin American Collection, it had two full-time employees, approximately 30,000 print volumes, extensive manuscript holdings, and an annual acquisition budget of exactly $100.8 Thirty-three years later the collection had increased tenfold, the staff totaled twenty full-time employees, and the materials budget had grown to $200,000. Benson transformed the collection into an instrument capable of supporting research and teaching at the University

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of Texas during the period when the range of investigation and instruction expanded rapidly in collaboration with the Institute of Latin American Studies, founded in 1940. She did so with a mix of innovation, collaboration, and chutzpah. Developing any collection of information resources requires knowledge of what has been published, identification of reliable channels of acquisition, and procedures for making what is acquired accessible to readers. The university’s problems with the General Education Board Grant and similar experiences among other research libraries focused on Latin America necessitated the development of alternatives to working through established booksellers. In Latin America the time-tested method of scholarly communication is gift or exchange. With meager budgets for purchases, institutions and individuals developed networks that supplied publications through barter. One of the hallmarks of the University of Texas Latin American Collection has been its successful program of gifts and exchanges. Available estimates from the 1960s show that 80 percent of government documents and 23 percent of monographs added to the Latin American Collection came by gift or exchange. Writing in the early 1960s, Benson even contended that exchange was the most reliable means of acquisition, especially for periodical subscriptions. A robust gift and exchange program depends on labor-intensive processes, a reality that has reduced its viability in the twenty-first century. But at a time when acquisitions funds were scarce, the Latin American Collection relied on solicitations to grow. Between 1967 and 1982 Benson and her staff averaged nearly 1,000 letters per year, with a seemingly impossible 2,770 letters written in 1971–1972. These letters, written in Spanish and Portuguese, made overtures to institutions and individuals who might donate or exchange materials. And the university franked them all. The typewriter and postage meter were important components in the Latin American Collection’s development. Attempts to resolve the difficulties of acquiring materials published in Latin America have a long history. In 1933 the Pan American Union established the Center of Inter-American Bibliographic Cooperation in Washington, DC. The center was charged with advancing bibliographic knowledge in the hemisphere, compiling laws and regulations of the American republics, expediting exchanges between scholarly societies, and encouraging all countries in the region to publish catalogs of available books and periodicals. Three years later the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Michigan and the Committee on Latin American Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies sponsored a conference to examine the state of Latin American acquisitions in the United States. Neither initiative produced tangible results, and World War II significantly altered the rationale for research library collections and collaborative strategies for developing them.

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Nettie Lee Benson and Professor John W. F. Dulles receiving a shipment of archival materials from Brazil, 1975.

As the United States prepared for global conflict, planners discovered that the country lacked basic information on many regions of the world suddenly of strategic importance. To address the knowledge gap, the Library of Congress convened a conference at Farmington, Connecticut, in 1942 at which scholars and librarians discussed collaborative collection development and preservation of foreign print information. The Farmington Plan framed at the meeting proposed that “one copy of each new foreign book and pamphlet that might reasonably be expected to interest a research worker in the United States will be acquired by an American library, promptly listed in the Library of Congress Union Catalog, and made available by interlibrary loan or photographic reproduction.”9 Although she did not attend the Farmington meeting, this mission statement could well have been drafted by Nettie Lee Benson. The Farmington Plan functioned through agents located in each country; Porrúa Hermanos in Mexico City supplied books and pamphlets based on instructions drawn up by participating libraries. Porrúa agreed to supply Mexican imprints to the University of Texas with a 10 percent discount and pay shipping costs. Available sources do not offer a comprehensive accounting of the number of items that the Latin American Collection acquired under this arrangement. An existing compilation shows that between 1952 and 1956 Texas received an average of 100 pieces a year, and Benson commented that the collection acquired a great deal of material at a very reasonable cost. The Farmington Plan ceased operations at the end of 1972, but by that time research libraries had developed alternative acquisitions strategies. Higher education in the United States experienced remarkable growth after World War II. Student enrollment, faculty hiring, and library budgets all increased at an extraordinary pace. As more funding became available, research libraries expanded their holdings of foreign materials and developed collaborative approaches to their acquisition. In 1956 the Pan American Union and the University of Florida invited a group of librarians, scholars, publishers’ representatives, and book distributors to a meeting themed the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM). While the organizers

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neither promised nor projected an annual event, sixty years later SALALM continues to convene. Unlike earlier gatherings where delegates compiled lists of items to address and tried to resolve them out of existence, SALALM was dedicated to problem solving and “unashamed to confess ignorance but dedicated to eradicate it,” in Howard F. Cline’s elegant turn of phrase.10 Nettie Lee Benson attended the first SALALM, and the University of Texas hosted the second in 1957. In 1958 the Library of Congress sent a representative to South America to assess prospects for sustainable channels for Latin American acquisitions. The resulting report recommended employing a traveling agent who would purchase monographs and establish serial subscriptions on behalf of a consortium of research libraries. While the University of Texas was not among the initial sponsors of the initiative, Nettie Lee Benson was chosen to act as its first traveling agent. In 1959 the New York Public Library offered to cover her salary and expenses as well as $20,000 for purchases. Benson parlayed the offer into a matching amount from the University of Texas, which effectively doubled the Latin American Collection’s acquisitions budget and enabled it to receive first pick of any materials she discovered. Based on the results of her trip, members of SALALM agreed to sponsor the Latin American Cooperative Acquisitions Program (LACAP), administered as a for-profit enterprise by the New York book distributor Stechert-Hafner. Benson made two subsequent trips to South America on behalf of LACAP, purchasing books for a collective that ultimately included some forty members. Her work greatly enriched the stock of Latin American materials available in the United States. LACAP also identified booksellers in the region willing to prepare lists of current and retrospective materials they could provide to library customers. The Latin American Collection purchased these offerings in large quantity, 17 percent of Mexican acquisitions by one estimate, as a way of filling in gaps and introducing new authors and areas of research. LACAP’s success ultimately undermined its business model. Realizing that there was a reliable market for Latin American books and periodicals, firms in the region began to offer regular shipments of current materials at much lower cost. LACAP ceased in 1973, a year after the Farmington Plan, and the Latin American Collection turned to suppliers in the region. To mark Nettie Lee Benson’s retirement from the library in 1975, the Board of Regents named the Latin American Collection for her. Although Miss Benson, as she was always called, modestly declined the honor at first, it was a fitting tribute. Benson directed the Latin American Collection for thirty-three years, and she left a remarkable legacy: a world-class collection of Latin American materials housed in a new building replete with modern facilities and ample shelf space, a budget and staff capable of supporting a robust program of acquisitions and services, and, perhaps most important, a reputation that made the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection synonymous with excellence.

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As Benson neared retirement, she composed a document that she titled “The Role of the Head of the Latin American Collection.” In it she compiled an exhaustive list of public service and administrative responsibilities along with twelve personal attributes needed by a person in the position. She concludes that despite the demanding requirements, a member of the current staff could fulfill them. That person, Laura Gutierrez-Witt, became Benson’s successor. To face the profound changes ahead, Gutierrez-Witt and her colleagues—Jane Garner, Donald Gibbs, Ann Hartness, and Sonia Merubia—comprised a stable professional staff that administered the Benson Latin American Collection for the next quarter century. In those years the collection grew at an unprecedented pace, Mexican American studies became an additional focus, and digital information became a part of standard library practice. Collection Growth

The chart presents available statistics on one measure of the growth of the Latin American Collection over its history. Building on the 10,000 bound volumes in the Genaro García Collection, holdings of Latin American bound volumes grew slowly over the next forty years. The 1960s began a period of rapid growth. The number of bound volumes quadrupled between 1960 and 1980. This trend wavered with the oil bust of the 1980s before recovering in the next decade. Reductions in library allocations in the mid-1980s were offset in part by a series of successful grant proposals to federal education programs and funds redirected to the Benson Collection from the university’s Institute of Latin American Studies and College of Liberal Arts. However, budget reductions coupled with steep inflationary trends in Latin American book

Growth of the Latin American Collection, 1921–2016.

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prices resulted in cancellations of periodical subscriptions and sharp reductions in monographs purchases. Acquisitions rates gradually improved in the 1990s, and despite diminished support from government, foundations, and donors affected by the 2008 recession, sometime in 2011 the Benson Latin American Collection reached the million-volume milestone. Mexican American and Latina/o Studies

Responding to the importance of understanding the issues facing Latinas/os in the United States, the University of Texas established the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) in 1970.11 The Mexican American Library Program (MALP), a special collection created to support the CMAS curriculum and research on Mexican Americans, followed four years later. That MALP would be associated with the Latin American Collection was not a foregone conclusion, as the center’s directors understandably resisted its being conflated with the university’s large and well-established Latin American programs. Initially MALP had its offices in the Benson Collection but maintained its own collection development priorities, budget, and public services operation. However, the realities of running parallel services in the same space led to a merger of reference functions and close coordination between Benson and MALP staff beginning in 1976. To serve its primary constituency, MALP built a collection less book- and periodical-centered than its Latin American counterpart. From its initial allocation in 1970, more than half of the Mexican American collection’s funds were spent on videos, movies, and microfilm. Five years later books comprised less than 40 percent of expenditures, roughly the same as special collections. A published study estimates holdings of Latina/o materials at 14,000–15,000 bound volumes in 1992.12 In 2014 the collection had reached 35,000–40,000 volumes. From MALP’s inception, its staff stressed the importance of collecting and preserving archival materials compiled in Texas and the greater Southwest. Early annual reports written by the MALP librarian document the active solicitation of personal papers of prominent Mexican Americans and archives created and maintained by Latina/o organizations. In 1979 MALP received an award under the US Department of Education’s Ethnic Heritage Program that funded acquisition of a number of private archives and

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Materials from the José Ángel Gutiérrez Papers arriving at the Benson. Undated photo by Christian Kelleher.

established the program’s reputation as a major repository of primary resources. Two years later the League of Latin American Citizens (LULAC) designated the Benson Collection as the repository for its historical records. More recently acquisition of the papers of the noted folklorist Américo Paredes (2000) and the archives of the politician and activist José Ángel Gutiérrez (2010) and the Chicana theorist and feminist Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (2005) attract researchers from across the country.13 Currently Mexican American archival materials housed in the Benson Collection occupy more than half of its 8,000-plus linear feet of manuscript holdings. Digital Resources

Viewed in hindsight the digital revolution in libraries more closely resembles a long march. It began in the 1970s as a networked system of terminals dedicated to cataloging and interlibrary lending. Forty years and several technological innovations later, digital applications influence every facet of information exchange, altering forever the concept of “library.” While digital technologies came more slowly to Latin America, they now occupy an essential space; they are widely applied in peer-to-peer communication, in the creation of information resources in a variety of areas, and in the preservation and distribution of unique information in accessible formats. Information taken from the Benson Collection’s annual reports and related sources provides the following timeline. 1976: The first Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) workstation is installed in the Benson cataloging department. 1980: Benson Collection joins an automated interlibrary loan network. 1984: University of Texas Libraries install an interactive circulation system. 1985: The first database-linked terminal is placed in the staff area. 1986: Three public access database terminals are installed. 1992: Workstations to search UT Libraries’ CD-ROM network and external databases (LADB, Info-South, Chicano Index) are installed. 1993: Electronic services librarian joins Benson staff. 1994: UT launches the Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC), the first web-based information service on Latin America. 1995: The first Benson Collection website is launched. 2007–2009: Benson Collection digitizes 500,000 volumes for Google Books project. 2016: Benson volumes in Google Books project are added to HathiTrust Digital Library.

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The Benson Collection developed and maintains several digital initiatives and collaborates on many others. Among some truly remarkable international collaborations there are Primeros Libros de las Américas, which brings together libraries from the United States, Mexico, Europe, and South America; the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional (AHPN) Digital Archive, a joint effort with the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive and the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice; and the Latin American Digital Initiatives (LADI) project developed with organizations from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. No less remarkable are collaborations within the University of Texas, such as the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA), created with UT’s Department of Linguistics, and Onda Latina: The Mexican American Experience digital collection, a joint project of the Center for Mexican American Studies (Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies), the Department of History, and the Benson. LLILAS Benson

In 2011 the Benson Latin American Collection entered a strategic partnership with UT’s Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. As LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, these two venerable institutions joined resources and missions to support a common

LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, Sid Richardson Hall, University of Texas at Austin, 2014. Photo by Mari Correa.

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purpose, promoting deeper understanding of Latin American and Latina/o issues through world-class collections, globalized higher education, research, international exchange, and public programs. The first years of the partnership have yielded exciting results. Collaboration with LLILAS and campus faculty has produced unparalleled collecting opportunities for the Benson, such as archival initiatives related to the Central American revolutions and the Black Diaspora. Grant-funded projects have established LLILAS Benson as a leader in postcustodial archiving, as it works with institutions and communities in Latin America to preserve endangered archival materials locally and provide them digitally to a global research community. Shared space in Sid Richardson Hall has been transformed to support collaborative work and digital scholarship and expand their reach, including new meeting, teaching, and exhibition spaces. Benson librarians and archivists work with LLILAS professors to develop undergraduate and graduate seminars centered on archival materials as well as to create public programs and K–16 educational opportunities that extend collections and scholarship beyond the UT campus to local and regional communities. The LLILAS Benson partnership has gained notice across the UT Austin campus and among institutional peers. Within the University of Texas, the College of Liberal Arts and UT Libraries are looking to apply this model further across campus, embedding library resources and librarians more directly within academic units and centers. Nationally, LLILAS Benson staff have been invited to conferences and meetings to share their experience piloting this approach, and a recent external review suggests that the partnership “holds the promise of becoming a model for the global public university of the twenty-first century.” What is certain is that the partnership with LLILAS has opened a new world of possibilities for the Benson as its 100th anniversary draws near. The success of the partnership thus far has shown the expansive potential for the Benson’s future and also gives testimony to the wealth of resources that the Benson has built through the diligent work and unflagging energy of librarians and archivists during its first century.

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Notes 1. Letter addressed to historian E. C. Barker and dated February 7, 1921, in Mexico City; box 1, folder 1, Genaro García Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin (hereafter cited as Benson Collection). Winkler adds, “It was the appreciation shown him by American Scholars that caused Sr. García during the last year of his illness to look to the U.S. for a purchaser of his library.” Genaro García was fifty-three years old when he died in 1920. His wife and ten children survived him. 2. Nettie Lee Benson, “Latin American Collection,” University of Texas centennial issue, Discovery 7, no. 4 (1983): 54–55. Interestingly, Hackett’s version of the narrative makes no mention of the book in the window; “Materials for Spanish History in the Genaro García Library of the University of Texas,” box 19, folder 5, Charles W. Hackett Papers, Benson Collection. 3. For an interview featuring Benson speaking on the legality of the Genaro García Collection residing at the University of Texas, see Francisco Ortiz Pinchetti, “Vasconcelos desairó la colección original: Nettie Lee Benson.” Proceso, no. 473 (November 25, 1985): 50–53. 4. “Report of the work done in the Latin-American collection, 3/7/1927,” box 71, folder 10, Carlos E. Castañeda Papers, Benson Collection. 5. Carlos E. Castañeda, “The Human Side of a Great Collection,” Books Abroad 14, no. 2 (Spring 1940): 117. 6. Ibid.

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7. Nettie Lee Benson, interview by Stanley R. Ross, Hispanic American Historical Review 63, no. 3 (1983): 433. 8. “That does not sound like a great deal of money, but in those days it was a very useful little sum,” said Benson to historian Stanley R. Ross. “At that time you could buy many books out of Latin America for 25 cents a copy. A dollar or two dollars were high prices to pay for books then. Then, too, whenever I found a large set that I felt was very important, I would go to two or three departments and ask each one to contribute a portion of the money to purchase”; ibid., 442. 9. Edwin E. Williams, Farmington Plan Handbook (Bloomington, IN: Association of Research Libraries, 1953), 3. 10. Howard F. Cline, Latin America and the Farmington Plan (Washington, DC: [Library of Congress], 1958), 28. 11. In 2014 CMAS expanded its focus and enhanced its standing within the university, becoming the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies (MALS). 12. Margo Gutiérrez, “The Mexican American Library Program and Its Archival Collections,” Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin 22, no. 3 (1983): 134. 13. In 2013 CMAS recognized the importance of Mexican American primary sources at the Benson Collection by sponsoring a conference, the Mexican American Archival Enterprise.

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latin a merican collections

In Praise of the Benson Collection/ Elogio de la Colección Benson Mauricio Tenorio

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feel as though I am on my way to extinction. These are bad times for old-fashioned book lovers. The imminent extinction of libraries is rumored, though the word “library” still holds positive, if somewhat nostalgic, connotations. “Archive,” on the other hand, has acquired wicked implications of power in our post-Derrida times. Both a major library and a major archive of the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds, the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection of the University of Texas stirs in me at once the veneration and the nostalgia, the excitement and the fear, that books, libraries, and archives inspire. What will be their future? In a way, the very existence of something like the Benson is an intellectual marvel. More will be required for it to remain so and prosper. Indeed, the irony of exaggerated dreams of a digital era coupled with declining library budgets makes me feel on my way to extinction. Historians enunciate what archives and libraries cannot articulate by themselves. Our futures are interwoven. Also our pasts: consider the lasting love story that emerged in the crafting of my scholarly self at the

Above: Benson rare book stacks, 2016. Facing: El Pinche front page, May 12, 1904, Mexico City. Genaro García Collection.

Benson, my Benson Collection. As I wrote in the acknowledgments of “I Speak of the City”: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), I dwelled among the stacks of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection of the University of Texas at Austin for too long. I found the warmest of homes among its books and, especially, among its devoted and notable librarians. Anything I write is somehow a gesture of gratitude to them: Margo Gutiérrez, Ann Hartness, Michael Hironymous, Carmen Sacomani, Craig Schroer, and Don Gibbs.

The Benson’s mark is everywhere in my work and in my own self; I still mentally stroll through its stacks and desks in search of the histories, poems, novels, periodicals, and images I once, and for the first time, found there, volumes that formed me as much as the stroll itself. Over my years at the University of Texas, I dreamed of the Benson becoming a New York Public Library equivalent for the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds in the United States. In a way, it already is, but without the visibility, the private and public support, that it deserves. For years I thought it was a matter of letting the world know, a matter of more resources, of more initiatives. I now believe we need a cultural paradigm shift: When will the English-centered academe upgrade the cultural status of a world whose languages encompass more than half of the continent? We remain marginal, and the Benson furnished me with the great enjoyment, the paradise, of being part of, contributing to, and fully experiencing my “marginal” world in the United States. 1

Over my years at Texas, as a Mexican and as a historian of Mexico, I often had to face a common grievance among the many Mexican colleagues who—at least in my time—used to visit the Benson, sponsored either by the C. B. Smith grant, which funded Mexican scholar’s travels there, or by their own institutions. I had to deal with the old saying, that the gringos “nos robaron” our libraries and documents. I, for one, begged them instead to enjoy the fact that the books survived, that the documents existed, that they were well kept and ready to be studied. And I would then explain to my Mexican colleagues that the books and documents were not stolen but rather sold to the Benson by Mexican collectors, dealers, and the relatives of historical personalities and intellectuals. Rumors have it that the large Genaro García Collection was originally offered to José Vasconcelos and he did not want it. During Porfirian times, García had been the director of the National Museum and also, beginning

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Home of Guillermo de Landa y Escandón in Mexico City, where the Spanish envoy to Mexico’s Centennial was hosted during the 1910 festivities.

Inauguration of the monument to Alexander von Humboldt, Mexico City, 1910. These two photographs were part of a series created to document the Mexican centennial, Crónica oficial de las fiestas del primer centenario de la independencia de México. Genaro García Photograph Collection.

in 1906, the official chronicler of the fatuous 1910 centennial celebration of Mexico’s independence. At the time, the National Museum’s library functioned as both a deposit and a research library, having collected many old documents and books. Thus García’s collection was a uniquely large sample of Mexico’s science, history, literature, and politics. Moreover, it included the documentation and records of the preparation for and actual undertaking of El Centenario, Mexico’s 1910 vast festivities, including the remapping of Mexico City, countless monuments, books, and diplomatic delegations. I recall my first submersion into those many photos of parades, city lighting, and monuments. Included alongside were very rare views of interiors of the elites’ mansions, photographed (very likely by Guillermo Kahlo, though it is hard to say) in order to plan the hosting of prominent foreign dignitaries in those mansions. The many shots of the same places and façades starkly represent the complex process of trial and error, the painstaking organization of a national celebration backed by the might of the Porfirian state. Many historians have used these documents and images, now part of Mexico’s historiography thanks to the care and generosity of the Benson Collection. What is not part of the historiography but instead emerges from the Benson inhabitant’s experience are the mesmerizing moments in which, for instance, a scholar discovers the rare glimpses of little girls, the daughters of Mexico’s powerful, giving charity to poor urban children. Or the lost gaze and posture of a kid in overalls and carrying a basket, walking a street in Mexico City, caught when the photographer snapped façades or

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city decorations. García’s large and pompous chronicle of the Centenario could not capture these collateral glimpses of real life swept up in the event. According to the Benson archives, the García Collection was offered to the library in 1921 by the estate of Genaro García. The University of Texas commissioned Ernest Winkler to appraise the collection in Mexico City. He estimated that the García Library, as it was referred to at the time, was comprised of 20,000 books and pamphlets, about 2,000 newspapers and periodicals, and a large number of private archives by prominent historical figures that totaled about 60,000 pages. This was not even the whole lot; in 1915, Yale had purchased nearly 15,000 volumes from the same collection. Researching the then unprocessed papers of la señorita Benson, as she was known by two or three generations of Mexican historians, I found many traces of her complex collecting, far removed from any sense of “robos.” I recall the evidence of Nettie Lee Benson’s many trips to Mexico in search of books, documents, and pamphlets not truly appreciated by dealers. She went beyond conventional dealers and commercial houses. She at times found storage rooms full of old tesis de licenciatura, and, the records show, she would offer fixed figures for mountains of documents without inspecting the real content, saving papers and pamphlets that would otherwise have been sold as pulp. Her papers are also full of letters from dealers, relatives of famous intellectuals, collectors, and scholars offering her old colonial books and other texts. I remember in particular a letter from a prominent Mexican historian—one who is still active, still prominent—offering her some rare book that the historian had found. If I recall correctly, he wrote that in his continual pursuit of material for his research he had acquired two copies of the volume he was offering to la señorita, something like that. But la señorita Benson wrote cautious letters to libraries in Monterrey, in Guadalajara, in Mexico City, asking about the reputed volume, knowing all too well that some of those libraries had—or very likely used to have—copies. All major archives and libraries have complicated stories, especially those devoted to the Ibero-American or African or South Asian worlds, as with the extraordinary collection of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut of the Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin that had its origins in Prussian imperialist aspirations. But the fact is that the great Mexican collection in Austin is by and large the product of the resources of a wealthy state

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Dr. Nettie Lee Benson on a book-buying trip. Lima, Peru, 1961.

university and of Texas, the former intendencia de Durango, that one good day decided—imperially or not, I really don’t care—to become an important collector of Mexican materials. It is also the product of the intelligence, dedicated work, and responsibility of two or three generations of outstanding librarians and scholars. More than any nationalistic claims (American, Mexican, Texan), more than any moral retribution, the Benson Collection needs more resources to do what it has done for decades with generosity and efficiency: preserve and offer access to books and documents. 2

Beyond professional fruits, libraries and archives furnish historians with memories of wandering. Often, these extravíos lead nowhere professionally; they are simply part of our odd lives among papers, documents, and books. Over my years at Texas, my weekly visits to the Benson special collection built in my mind a compendium of flashing images, as if I had traveled for years in a bizarre faraway land. I recall the beautiful, large, eighteenth-century decrees by Carlos II, the many letters of New Spain’s Jesuits telling of their problems in expanding their missions in the Philippines, all in the Lucas Alamán Papers. I never wrote on the subject; I was simply fascinated by the texture and the quality of the paper, all the more impressive for a historian specializing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when technology made common cheap acid paper—paper that turns into dust in our hands. The eighteenth-century letters had a distinctive calligraphy and rhetoric that has become part of my lasting preoccupation—started then, at that Benson rare books reading room—with the history of philology. I cannot help but remember those readings in tandem with my recollections of the long and detailed letters of Ricardo Palma or Clorinda Matto de Turner with Vicente Riva Palacio in the Vicente Riva Palacio Collection. Somewhere I keep copies of those letters, the discussions of costumes, words, traditions between Mexico and Peru, penned by great writers of the Americas’ Spanish language. Of course, the library preserves the letters of the early twentieth century in specially designed plastic covers, for otherwise they would crack as easily as thin Catholic heavenly hosts. Still, I felt bad every afternoon when I would notice, as I was leaving the reading room, the many corners and edges of old paper scattered across the desk and the floor. Fortunately, as of late, the Benson has undertaken a massive digitization of those materials printed on cheap acid paper. I do not know why the letters of the prominent Catalan editor Santiago Ballescà to Vicente Riva Palacio now come to mind. Ballescà was a prominent printer but also a savvy impresario. His care and his nose for profit in the production of México a través de los siglos, among many other official

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Porfirian books, is recorded in these letters. Some of the many books he published for Mexican authors and authorities were produced in Barcelona. Over my many trips to Barcelona, I have sought unsuccessfully for the printers, the designers, the artists behind those publications. In a way, the Mexican historical consciousness owes a great deal to Ballescà’s design decisions in México a través de los siglos. Still, what I recall are the discussions about the costs, about the colors, and about the design of illustrations. And now come to mind the stern letters between two wealthy Porfirian impresarios, Julio Limantour and Hugo Scherer, dealing with the casas de vecindad that they owned and rented in Mexico City. I recall their cruel business language, with no sense of pity or humanity: make them pay or evict them from the vecindad. Or I now evoke, in my endless pursuit of images from turn-of-the-century Mexico City, the revealing family photographs by Fred and Otto Vogel, Abel Briquet’s collection of pictures, and the rare postcards of the art collector René d’Harnoncourt (most of them by the well-known photographer C. B. Waite). The Benson was vital in my

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Abel Briquet photograph of the Mexican National Library, ca. 1887. Briquet was one of the first modern commercial photographers in nineteenthcentury Mexico, known for his government commissions as well as his landscapes. Abel Briquet Photographs (Brisbin Photo Album).

C. B. Waite, undated photographs of Tetzcotzinco Hill and women doing washing. René D’Harnoncourt Photograph Collection, 1900–1925.

pursuit of the language of the city, for it holds one of the most extraordinary collections of pictures of popular Mexican cartoons and drawings—full of amazing palabrería—which, when I studied them, were still on print paper or as negatives. One hopes they will be digitized soon, as they constitute a singular window to Mexican humor and irony. I recall also my encounter with two relatively small collections: the 1927– 1928 letters from Eyler Newton Simpson, then a young economist studying the Ejido in Mexico, to the Institute of Current World Affairs, and the papers of the lawyer William F. Buckley. The former collection, if my memory does not fail me, comprises a thin, bound volume containing the carbon copies of letters by this very insightful and curious young scholar. Everywhere he asked questions, seeking from Salvador Novo or from Jesús Silva Herzog data on Mexican culture and economics, searching out connections, and also writing of his life and adventures with so many other interesting gringos in the Mexico City of the late 1920s. In the Buckley Collection, I remember very vividly reading a letter by José Vasconcelos to Buckley, a lawyer for American oil companies during the disputes that followed the 1917 Constitution. Vasconcelos asked for resources and sponsorship for what he declared was a revolt, commanded by him, against P. E. Calles’s government. The letter, somehow, comes to my mind simultaneously with that by Daniel Cosío Villegas to historian and University of Texas Professor Stanley R. Ross—in the S. R. Ross Papers—around 1968. Don Daniel writes of the tumult of 1968 and asks Ross to be ready to receive him in exile in Austin. Ross’s papers indeed are an excellent window to both Mexico’s twentieth-century history and the politics of Mexicanism in the United States. The Benson is also the repository of records left by the perennial and consubstantial presence of Mexicans in the United States. Over my years at the University of Texas I made excursions into some of those collections, searching for nothing in particular. In the Américo Paredes Papers I found solace for my fascination with popular languages and ballads, as well as something that fed my intrigue with Mexicans’ odd orientalism. His papers have references to his life as a soldier in Japan and Korea,

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something my former colleague José Limón studied in detail in his book on Paredes. Moreover, in the Benson’s stacks I used to search for books that once belonged to Paredes’s personal library, for they include the most revealing and beautifully written annotations by don Américo. I used that wisdom, that wit, in some study or another. One wonders why such a character, don Américo, has not reached the stature of a Robert Redfield or a Margaret Mead if, as a scholar and a liver of life, he achieved as much as they did. The collection of Carlos E. Castañeda, scholar and librarian at the Benson and active member of Mexican American associations in Texas, was for weeks my delight. I have not forgotten his efforts to bring the sentimental padre de la patria, the singer and songwriter Agustín Lara, to Texas and Lara’s ironic note in which he recalls what were very likely nights of women and alcohol, mocking Castañeda’s Texanness. At the Benson there are so many important collections recording the Mexican presence in the United States, and I recall in particular the papers of the League of United Latin American Citizens. It is one of the most complete records of discussions, contradictions, and struggles for rights by mexicanos in Texas. The collection has that rare advantage of the archive; it is there in all its

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Left: La araña front page, September 1, 1904, Mexico City. Genaro García Collection. Right: La Guacamaya front page, July 4, 1906, Mexico City. Genaro García Collection.

Américo Paredes, “Gitako: A Japanese Fairy Tale,” typed manuscript, 1947. Américo Paredes Papers.

incoherence, shelved before the academic formation of fixed ideas about identity, showing many conflicts and even traces of Mexican anti-black positions. The papers keep the record of daily and lasting struggles with which the historian can reconstruct not one but many stories. 3

The Benson’s open, welcoming book stacks were for long my home, my absolute pleasure. No need to highlight the import of the Benson’s collection of books, including the most impressive world assemblages of Mexican, Uruguayan, Guatemalan, and Argentinean literature, art, and history. For an intellectual inhabitant of nuestra América, for a reader and prose writer of the language of half of the continent, the Benson is the closest thing to paradise. I do not know whether it is still the case, but back then, just across from the front desk, stood the world’s best collection of magazines and journals from Ibero-America. All bound by year, one could take a volume for an afternoon and read what Argentines or Mexicans were discussing in, say, 1933. That part of the library, together with the impressive collection of fragile newspapers from all over Latin America—in those days kept in a storage facility—is the world’s window into the region’s daily life in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth. But also, located in different parts of the book stacks, one could find the most important scientific, economic, and historical journals and government publications. I remember perusing Mexican military journals, natural history publications, music journals, all there, waiting in the stacks for what Gabriel Zaid has characterized as a miracle: the encounter of a book with its reader. For me the books at the Benson belonged to two spheres: one was mostly in soft covers with the smell of vinyl and plastic, like old LPs—the PQ books, for instance; the other was a universe of brown paper, hard covers, and the pleasing aroma

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Sur cover, January– February 1961. The literary magazine Sur was published in Buenos Aires from 1931 to 1970.

Jorge Luis Borges with graduate students of the University of Texas, 1976. Borges, for whom paradise and libraries were one and the same, was a visiting professor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in 1961 and came back to lecture in 1969, 1976, and 1982. On February 2, 1982, Borges delivered the Hackett Memorial Lecture and drew a crowd of 1,200 people— not bad for a poet. Benson Miscellaneous Manuscripts.

of old and decrepit volumes, say, the 868 books in the Dewey system of classification. The entirety of Mexican or Uruguayan literature can be found in original editions, in its own jugo: the book above, the book below, the one left, and the one right, constitute a conversation undisturbed by twentyfirst-century fashions and by the massive production of best sellers. As Renato Leduc’s poem says, “cómo añoro / la dicha inicua de perder el tiempo.” How I miss the joy of wasting time—in the Benson book stacks. 4

The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection has long been the center where many scholars and intellectuals of the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds meet. There are no records of the decades of chats, sabrosas conversas, in the reading rooms and in the stacks, and there is no way to speak of the importance of this role played by the Benson, except through personal anecdote. Over my years at the University of Texas, I fantasized about the institutionalization of this role through annual gatherings of book lovers, through the creation of, say, the Daniel Cosío Villegas or Jorge Luis Borges (both former visitors of the Benson) lecture series. But at least I keep my own personal Benson moments in my mind: early encounters and discussions over books, in the library, with Eric Van Young, Charles A. Hale, Arturo Taracena, Josefina Vázquez, Francisco Foot Hardman, Ida Vitale, Enrique Fierro. I treasure my chats in the stacks with scholars who became vital interlocutors in my career, Ariel Rodríguez Kuri, Erika Pani, Carlos Illades, among others. I wish for the Benson to endure as this important center for dialogues that leave no traceable record.

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Vivo aún en el recuerdo de las tardes ahí, frente a la Benson, bajo las ramas de un roble que ceñía la escena: tarde, libros y lectura. ¡Ay! esos libros que salían de casa para no irse muy lejos, tan solo ahí, a la sombra de ese roble. Esas tardes siempre fueron actos disconformes entre los largos días de trabajo, clases, discusiones, administraciones. Omisión de uno mismo. Recuerdo la última vez ahí porque la última es la vez en que todo deviene lo que es porque ya fue. Y así me quedó grabada mi Benson, milagro de una biblioteca que contiene, como ninguna otra, el flujo cultural del que yo provengo, al que yo hablo y del que espero ser hablado. Abandoné esas tardes porque creí, sin convicción alguna, que ese era mi destino. Pero se me ha hecho vicio recordar esas tardes. Sea cual sea el futuro del libro, bibliotecas como la Benson mantendrán el rastro de una forma de ver el mundo. Desde siempre, los libros han sido el común denominador entre poetas, novelistas, historiadores, científicos, ensayistas y profesores. Aún antes de existir la neurología o la historia científica o la sociología o el oficio propiamente de novelista, todos formaban parte del gremio de los que vivían en bibliotecas, leían, escribían o atesoraban libros. Hasta muy recientemente, esta hermandad siempre tuvo poca membresía. No sólo por el ocio, el dinero y el vicio que implica dedicarse a los libros, sino porque, en realidad, ¿qué sentido tiene? Nadie en su sano juicio adquiere este vicio de bibliotecas y de leer, el cual puede dejar fama, poca, pero casi siempre trae hambre e intrascendencia. Uno de estos viciosos, un poeta, António Manuel Pires, confesaba a sus libros: “E só nós sabemos / que morremos sozinhos / (Ao menos escaparemos / à piedade dos vizinhos)”. Eso, eso es todo lo que puede sacarse de los libros. Under the oak trees outside the Benson Latin American Collection, 2017. Photo by Robert Esparza.

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Pues bien, hoy parecería ser que todo es downloadable y se asume que los periódicos, la radio, la televisión, las universidades, las escuelas, las revistas literarias, los cafés y las tertulias están repletas de gente con el oficio de los libros pero sin el vicio de las bibliotecas. Los estudiantes esperan todas las lecturas online. Las universidades están llenas de expertos en literatura y poesía o en historia y sociología que se ostentan como los verdaderos herederos de la hermandad de la gente de libros. Ellos son los que leen de verdad, los que piensan en serio y profesionalmente, los que investigan con rigor, los que escriben los verdaderos libros. Pero nunca se han extraviado en una biblioteca porque dentro y fuera de las universidades hay muchos profesionales, dueños del oficio del libro, gente competente que saca del papel y la tinta el pan y el sustento. Ese es su oficio, como el que vende coches o mameyes. Para esos profesionales, las bibliotecas son una buena idea, no el oxígeno para vivir. Las bibliotecas y el vicio de leer son otra cosa. No en balde a fines del siglo XVIII los verdaderamente poseídos por los libros eran trasunto de degeneración humana, eran los masturbadores consuetudinarios, los insalubres, los depravados, los intratables e impresentables. Porque leer y pensar a coro se hace porque se hace, puede dar sustento—yo vivo de ello—, pero no es carrera recomendable. Reducir la hermandad del vicio a un profesor que lee para preparar su clase o escribe un competente artículo académico para subir en el escalafón universitario, o reducirlo a un opinion maker que manufactura sesudos editoriales frente al cigarro, la taza de café y The Oxford Book of Quotations, reducir, pues, a esos oficios el vicio de los libros— esa perversión a un tiempo maléfica y bienaventurada—, es como reducir lo libresco a tenedor de libros, la escritura a la taquimecanografía. Los libros y sus alrededores—las bibliotecas—tienen muchos fans, pero ser gente de libros y bibliotecas, ser de la cofradía del vicio, es otra cosa, por seguro nada recomendable porque ser de bibliotecas no es vivir y leer o pensar a coro con los libros, es leer, pensar y punto. Eso es vivir. Un vicio. ¿A quién chingados le interesa la manda esta? ¿Quién es cojo o esquizofrénico por oficio? Uno confunde vida y libros, casa y biblioteca, por algún disparate genético o por un trauma de infancia o por desamor o por impericia social o por castigo divino. Si como hay para los aficionados del vino, hubiera maneras para desbibliotecarse, más de uno sería creyente y profeta de la terapia. No existe la cura, y ya infectados, nadie espera alivio. Los habitantes de ayer y hoy de la Benson Latin American Collection no esperamos ni compasión ni comprensión, solo que sobreviva, que prospere, que sea el rastro que vaya quedando de la subespecie: los viciosos del libro.

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The Relaciones Geográficas Barbara E. Mundy

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t was pursuit of the Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala that brought me to Texas in 1988. This collection of texts and maps, created in Mexico some 400 years before, had been sent to Spain soon after. While the corpus survived its transatlantic exodus almost intact, in the nineteenth century it began to be split up. In 1853, one lot of about forty-one texts and thirty-five maps was purchased, probably at a private sale in Madrid, by the extraordinary Mexican collector and bibliophile Joaquín García Icazbalceta. He repatriated them to Mexico. Eight decades later, García Icazbalceta’s heirs, perhaps cash-strapped or simply less keen on the patriarch’s piles of paper, sold them, along with his significant library and manuscript collection. They have been at the Benson since 1937, and I think of them as the crown jewels of this extraordinary collection. Extraordinary indeed. Having been produced in large cities and small towns of Spain’s overseas empire, the texts of the Relaciones Geográficas were written in Spanish by local officials who were responding to a royal questionnaire. They thus offered a rare systematic inquiry, with somewhat scattershot coverage, into the local conditions in Spain’s colonial realms around 1580. Leafing through one of the replies, usually written on folded folios of European paper with iron-gall ink, you might be surprised, and fortunate, to encounter tucked within the scrawly pages a punctum, that

Map of Cempoala, 1580. Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala, 1577–1585.

is, a map (or pintura, as they were called in their day). Some are brightly painted, others pen-and-ink drawings, some by untutored hands, others by highly trained artists. There are thirty-five pinturas in the Benson collection (seventy-six survive in the corpus as a whole), and what drew me to them was not just that, taken as a whole, they offer a freeze-frame of Mexican mapping at that moment but also that a large number of their creators, the majority, in fact, were indigenous painters. Living at the end of the sixteenth century, a century of calamity for New World peoples, some of these painters spoke Nahuatl, Mixtec, Totonac, Zapotec, or Otomí. Some spoke languages that would die out in the decades that followed, their last speakers victims of the killing epidemics that ravaged native peoples, introduced unwittingly by Europeans. My encounter with the maps set me on a scholarly trajectory that shaped my life. But looking back onto my twenty-something self, entering the cool beige rooms of the Benson rare-book room for the first time on June 21, 1988, I felt like a well-equipped pretender. I had never worked with real sixteenth-century maps before. My imposter’s gear included a new camera bag on my shoulder, holding the single lens reflex Nikon FM7 with its macro lens (a bank-busting anniversary-birthday-Christmas present from my generous in-laws), white gloves, a magnifying glass, sharpened pencils, and loose-leaf paper. But I made it through the brief interview with Laura Gutiérrez-Witt, who was then head of the library. I was transferred into the care of the librarian Anne Jordan, a no-nonsense Texas native, then in her midsixties. Even she seemed convinced by me, as she went to fetch the first requested file. Most of the maps are of smallish size and were kept in folders of acid-free paper the color of grocery bags. It was only when Mrs. Jordan laid the first one down on the table that I began to feel legitimate. There was something about the nondescript covering—like the curtain before the tabernacle—that heightened the excitement of what was within. I knew what most of the maps looked like from published photographs, some in poor black and white, but quick recognition gave way to disquiet in front of the real thing, whose appearance was wholly unexpected. The 1580 map from Cholula, for instance, was one of the smaller ones, about the size of an open notebook, painted on smooth, creamy European paper. No photograph prepared me for this encounter; the map’s coloration is the most delicate of tones—pale yellow ochre, soft pinks of cochineal, traces of fugitive greens—the forms bound by a wire-taut line. The monastery commissioned by the Franciscans at the center of town—new when the map was made in 1580—was all of two inches tall, but every façade detail carefully limned with precise strokes: stepped turrets, rose window, rooftop crosses, pointed belfry. Below, the plaza at the center of the map featured a miniature hexagonal fountain, the size of a child’s marble. Its flowing waters had quenched the thirst of generations of the Choluteca. To the right of the plaza, smoke rose from the chimney of the house of the

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Map of Cholula, 1581. Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala, 1577–1585.

local administrator, as if to ward off a morning chill. Around the plaza, the recently laid-out grid of streets filled the rest of the page, a city of 10,000 contained in a 44-centimeter span. George Kubler has written that “inanimate things remain our most tangible evidence that the old human past really existed.”1 When brought face to face with those inanimate things that they study, most art historians see not only the tangible evidence of the past but also of the nowness of the moment of creation and the animating force of the creator. In the Cholula map I could see the touch of its painter, the tlacuilo in Nahuatl, the language of the region, in the confident lines that limned street and building. I could detect how they trailed off as his reed pen lifted from the surface of the paper. Beneath them were the faint charcoal lines he (most likely he) used to plot out his work. Each city block has a different arrangement

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of buildings within, and the painter alternated pinks and ochres to paint them, creating an urban syncopation across the surface of the map. The delicate washes of color were thinner in areas, as if the tlacuilo had blown on the wet pigment to speed the drying. Suddenly, with my face close to the Cholula map, my eyes registering the presence of the tlacuilo, I felt that the gulf of time—the 406 years that separated the tlacuilo’s touch on the map’s surface and my devouring gaze—that chasm, closed up. I was in his immediate presence, the touch of the pen, the pooling of pigment, the gesture of line. The tlacuilo’s breath—something that the Nahua called ihiyotl and today understand to be an inner dwelling force capable of animating external objects—seemed to exhale from painted surface, collapsing the time and distance between his initial acts and my response. Over the days that I spent looking at the maps, I gained more of Mrs. Jordan’s confidence; I was given permission to photograph the maps, and I was often left alone with them, something that rarely happens today and in other kinds of institutions. Finally, on the last days during my work at the Benson, I requested to see the map from Teozacoalco, a town in Oaxaca, arguably the most important of the corpus because of a seminal article about it published by Alfonso Caso in 1949. The viewing would be something of a production because the map was so large, 177 × 142 centimeters, and many libraries (and librarians) would have been less than accommodating about hauling it out for a graduate student. But by then, Mrs. Jordan was my firm ally (and I loved her stories about Depression-era Texas), and she arranged for it to be rolled out for me. It was so large that no table in the regular reading room would hold it, so she had a table rigged up in one of the study rooms. And there it was. If the Cholula map brought me close to the tlacuilo’s breath, this map brought me in touch with another’s ambition. To make it, its artist (and since Teozacoalco was a Mixtec-speaking region, he would have been called a tay huisi tacu) had commandeered twenty-three sheets of European paper, an expensive commodity in its day, to create a surface as large as a bedsheet. Using the colonizers’ own material, carefully pasted and pounded together, the tay huisi tacu reinvented the more traditional woven cloth support used in the region for large maps, called lienzos. Upon the surface, the artist depicted an enormous territory, some forty-five kilometers in breadth, marshaling enormous detail including rivers, roads, and mountains. His reach extended across time as well as space: on the left of the map he included a list of the rulers of the town that reached back to the eleventh century, and this list was linked to the small images of the current ruler of the town, don Felipe de Santiago (his Mixtec name was not written down here), and his son don Francisco de Mendoza that were set near the center of the map. Many of the Relación Geográfica files include the initiating questionnaire, a three-page printed document issued by the king of Spain, Felipe II, and it is apparent that the reply of the indigenous nobility of Teozacoalco to

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Map of Teozacoalco, 1580. Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala, 1577–1585.

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First page of the questionnaire issued by King Philip II of Spain in 1577. The written and painted responses to this questionnaire are known as the Relaciones Geográficas.

the distant ruler was to be found in the map. The map thus opened up a conversation among the powerful local Don Felipe de Santiago, and the artistically ambitious tay huisi tacu who worked as his right-hand man, and the other powerful Felipe, across the Atlantic. From the outside, a scholar’s life seems like a very solitary one, as we spend much of our time alone, reading and looking. But from the inside, it’s very different. I feel I’m in constant conversation with the works and their creators, and these are living relationships. I’m not alone. One of the maps that I needed to see, from Atitlán, Guatemala, the southernmost geographic point represented by the corpus from New Spain, was in the conservation lab that summer. The conservator had been working on the map for almost six months, as I recall, gradually relaxing the rigid fibers of the paper by slow rehydration, gently easing the paper flat. The lab almost resembled a neonatal unit, with the delicate manuscripts suspended on individual cribs and boxes of gloves and cotton balls to negotiate each touch of the surface. The conservator was able to speak in intimate detail about the map, not so much of what it showed but about the condition of its paper support, the quality of the vivid pigments, their adherence to the sheet. The map was like an unfamiliar face to me, but the conservator knew the map like the lover knows the body of the beloved. Working solo in the lab, she was not alone, either. Physical records of my days at the Benson that June and later, in the summer of 1989, survive in my notes on sheets of loose-leaf paper, where these encounters with the maps are codified into measurements, descriptions, transcriptions of glosses written in pencil. They help me remember what went on in my head during that time. Stepping out of the Benson’s cool rooms into the protection offered by the covered walkway from the blasting late-June heat (Mrs. Jordan warned me that this was nothing compared to July and August when the humidity spiked, a phenomenon she blamed on the well-watered golf courses that were coming to carpet greater Austin), I thought about how the maps, culled from city and town across the expanse of New Spain, were a vestige of a great imperialist, colonizing project. Felipe II had ministers who tried to make the vast overseas expanse visible with these maps. Whereas I looked at these maps across the gulf of time, the king’s cabinet was separated from their makers and the places represented—those streets and monasteries and fountains—by the space of the Atlantic. The ministers’ idea was to have each place represent itself as well as answer a questionnaire; the written replies and accompanying maps were to be the basis of one great imperial map, these individual works like tesserae making up the great mosaic of empire. It took the confidence of the colonizer to think such a project could be done, that places as foreign to Madrid with sonorous names like Iztapalapa, Gueytlalpa, and Atlatlauca would muster to the call and create maps. That imperial confidence of Spain found no small echo in the United States at that moment, in June 1988. I felt I was living in a time and place

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Map of Atitlán, 1585. Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala, 1577–1585.

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that had blindly taken on Spain’s imperial mantle, particularly in Central America. Remember that the Iran-Contra scandal had erupted just two years before, with White House staffers acting as arms dealers to Iran in order to funnel monies to the opponents of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. And the ink was still wet on some then-uncertain peace accords signed in Guatemala less than a year before. The US drive to control the South would be reactivated within the next year, with the 1989 invasion of Panama. As I stood on the shaded walkway, the maps of the Relaciones Geográficas that were to be found on the other side of the glass windows, within the library, struck me as both tokens of similar imperial ambitions and evidence of its frailty. Created in the colony of New Spain by royal fiat and sent to the imperial center of Spain, they now lay far from their original and intended destination. As Spain’s imperial power waned, they were reclaimed by a then new nation, returning to Mexico in 1853, and were to be found there for the following eighty-four years. But the claims of the nation were again eclipsed by a new imperial power, and the maps were sent north across the Rio Grande at a time when Mexico’s wealth, battered by the long battles of the Revolution, was overshadowed by the rise in Texas oil money. It was to be expected that the maps, like much great art of the past, would pass from empire to empire. But the imperial ambitions of their current possessor seemed, in 1988, like mad folly. Now that we are fully vested in the new millennium, the maps have a different flavor, at least to my middle-age self. They have found a home in the cool beige rooms of the Benson and, resting calmly in their brown paper sheets, are unlikely to be dislodged any time soon by the passing of the imperial torch, having lost their glint as tokens of empire. Instead, they are determined statements of a presence that survives within the work. In each map, the tlacuilo or tay huisi tacu or maestro pintor asserts, “I am here now.” And the meticulous care that has been given to the maps at the Benson allows their presence, specters from the past, to reappear to us, with color and lines undimmed. The maps are accessible through high-resolution photography, on the Web, and in the things themselves. The artists— through the things they made—live on within the safe, beige, climate-controlled interior of the library. These inanimate things will be there for a new generation to see, to experience, to be reminded that we are just one tiny stratum adding to an enormous collation of human creative action. Because the Benson is not the collection of the dead. It is a collection of living (even breathing!) works that stand as witness to the great chain of creations to which each of us in some small way seeks to contribute.

Note 1. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 5.

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Morro Velho as seen from Boa Vista, Brazil. Undated. Saint John d’El Rey Mining Company Records, 1820–1960.

Archive in a Library The Case of the Saint John d’El Rey Mining Company

Richard Graham

T

he Latin American holdings of the University of Texas library began in earnest with the 1921 purchase of materials from the heirs of Genaro García, a Mexican historian, antiquarian, and politician. The importance of this acquisition derives from the fact that it combined printed and manuscript materials; it was both a library and an archive. And under the subsequent direction of Dr. Nettie Lee Benson the university continued to pursue this double goal. She was indefatigable in her work to identify what was available, whether in print or as manuscripts, and to secure the necessary funding to acquire it. When I first arrived in Austin in 1956 to work with Lewis Hanke, he suggested— no doubt because of his own interest in Bartolomé de las Casas—that for my master’s thesis I explore the life and work of the Brazilian-born Jesuit Antônio Vieira, who, like las Casas, sought to protect the Indians. After a preliminary look around I discovered that the library lacked a certain outof-print volume with Vieira’s major sermons as well as a multivolume collection of his letters. Hanke said to me, “Let’s go talk to Nettie Lee.” She received us matter-of-factly at the Latin American Collection, which was then housed in the tower, and left me with the impression that my request was not at all unusual. Within days she called me over and told me the sermons and letters were on their way. This kind of sustained, energetic enthusiasm created the library that exists today.

I wish every archive in the world were as closely linked to a major library as is true here, for the juxtaposition allows any curious reader to move effortlessly from the documents to those published works that shed light on the historical context, making the issues understandable and the importance of the documents clear. And the secrets contained in all those dusty archival papers can alter how we see the past. Such a change can be dramatic, unsettling, exciting. Take, for instance, the papers of the Saint John d’El Rey Mining Company, on which several scholars have based their research.1 Here I will first tell you something about the mine and then invite you to explore one issue with me. When Latin American countries gained their independence in the 1810s and 1820s, it was thought—in Britain, at least—that this would open up great opportunities for profitable investment. Besides the renowned silver mines of Mexico and Peru, another attractive prospect was Brazil or, more specifically, the region of Minas Gerais (i.e. General Mines), so named in the late seventeenth century because of its abundant gold and diamonds. Brazilian gold funded Portugal’s economy for more than a century, but by the early 1800s, placer mining techniques no longer produced very much, and capital was lacking for more ambitious undertakings. Brazilian independence, however, secured in 1822, meant that investors of any nationality were now welcome, and a few years later the tax on extracted minerals was radically reduced.2 As a result, entrepreneurs rushed in, especially British ones. One ambitious and experienced group of London businessmen with interests already in mining ventures in Colombia, Chile, and Mexico bought rights in 1830 to a Brazilian mine in the town of São João d’El Rei, which they anglicized in naming their company. When some twenty of the company’s men arrived in Brazil, however, they found the mine to be flooded and almost worthless. But their luck held! Nearby, in another township, eventually called Nova Lima, a mine called Morro Velho was for sale. After checking it out, the British investors purchased it in 1834, and that mine then became the company’s principal property, although they did not change the firm’s name.3 The company imported and installed up-to-date technology, transforming the mine into a highly productive property. With water drawn from a dam that the company built in the nearby valley, it used water power to operate machinery to lift the ore to the surface, crush the ore, pump water out of the mine, and saw the timber needed to make the beams and pillars that would support the rock overhead. Instead of relying entirely on picks, the company used gunpowder and later dynamite to bring down the rock. The first step toward breaking up the rock was executed by huge mechanical stampers. At the end of the process the gold was extracted from the ore by amalgamating it with mercury, which was then melted off with boiling water.4

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Workers extracting gold from its ore. Undated. Saint John d’El Rey Mining Company Records, 1820–1960.

There were destructive cave-ins in 1857 and 1867 that halted production for more than a year each, but a true disaster occurred in 1886 when seventeen workers lost their lives and fire burned the timbers that supported the mine, leading to one collapse after another. Although expert opinion at the time was that the mine was finished, a particularly energetic and persuasive superintendent named George Chalmers, who was still in his twenties and had been at the mine for only two years, argued that with a radically new approach to the lode and other changes it could be made productive once again. It took three years of planning, preparation, and acquisition of new equipment before work on construction could actually begin and another four before production of ore resumed, but the investment in time and money paid off handsomely. Eventually the mine stretched downward at a 45-degree angle for more than 8,000 feet, making it the deepest mine in the world.5 The return on the company’s investment averaged 18.7 percent per year from 1830 to 1887, despite the fact that its first dividend was only declared in 1842 and, as noted, in many other years the mine remained closed for repairs and rebuilding. The company continued to be highly profitable, albeit at a lesser pace, well into the twentieth century. In the 1970s it still produced some five tons of gold per year.6 Early on, Chalmers became aware that the company’s property included deposits of iron ore, and he systematically bought land to ensure the company’s control over an area that eventually reached 130 square miles. In 1902 he proposed to the company directors in London that they mine iron ore and explore the manufacture of iron and steel. In 1910 he wrote,

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Saint John d’El Rey Mining Company exhibition at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. The installation’s backdrop diagram shows a detail of the mine shaft descending at a 45-degree angle. Saint John d’El Rey Mining Company Records, 1820–1960.

“There is no doubt the Company’s iron will be of great value in time and, at the extinction of the probable life of the mine, the Company is likely to have a more lucrative business to go on than that of gold mining.” But the directors in London were not impressed. One of them said he did not want the company to “speculate . . . in Iron Lands” because their development “rests with the dim and distant future.”7 In the annual report the chairman concurred: “We are a gold mining company; I think we ought . . . to stick to our business of gold mining.”8 In 1919 Chalmers did finally persuade the directors to join the Anglo-Brazilian Iron and Steel Syndicate (ABISS), but it was not a successful venture and ended in 1930. Now we know that the Morro Velho mine held one of the richest iron deposits in the world. The Bretton Woods agreement of 1944 on international currency meant that the price of gold remained fixed for decades even though costs continued to rise, significantly limiting the company’s profitability. In 1957 it was sold to the M. A. Hanna Corporation of Cleveland, Ohio. The gold-mining part of the enterprise was then passed on to others, eventually to a South African gold mining company. The company’s records in London remained there, where they were first explored and inventoried in 1973 by William Callaghan, then a University

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of Texas doctoral candidate. Thanks to the active collaboration of Professor John “Jack” W. F. Dulles, who was trained as a mining engineer, had worked for many years in Mexico, and became an officer in the Brazilian part of the Hanna enterprise before joining the University of Texas faculty, Nettie Lee Benson was able to acquire this London archive for the university. I have only hinted at the intimate knowledge of the physical plant and financing of the Saint John mine made accessible through its archives, but the significance of these papers goes well beyond that. Because they are located within a large, specialized library, the researcher has at hand a vast collection of relevant books and journals with which to reconstruct the larger context—political and economic—that make the documents truly revealing. Here I want to explore only one of the many historical issues that this archive illuminates, for the Saint John d’El Rey archive reveals much about the complexities of nineteenth-century slavery and the campaign to end it well before Chalmers came on the scene. This topic looms large in both British and Brazilian history and, as a comparative foil, in the history of the United States as well.9

Miners at work. Undated. Saint John d’El Rey Mining Company Records, 1820–1960.

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From the start, the company found it difficult to find free workers who were willing to work continuously underground amid the endless dust and darkness, except at those seasons when no agricultural work was available. At the time of his arrival in Brazil in 1830, the first superintendent of the operation concluded, after some investigation, that “we shall do little or nothing without slaves.” As he explained, compared to free workers, slaves “work more steadily and where you want them to work. They are much more easily subjected to search than free laborers, who are great thieves and easily offended.”10 So, when the company acquired the Morro Velho mine, it also bought the mine’s 125 slaves, adding them to the 143 from São João d’El Rey. The number of slaves, both owned and rented, soon increased to 533. By 1867 the company employed nearly 1,600 slaves, most of them rented. In the mid-1840s more than half of the slaves who worked the mine had been recently and illegally transported from Africa in a trade aggressively condemned but not always successfully impeded by the British government.11 A large proportion of its slave force was female. The company’s first superintendent in Brazil purchased female slaves because, he told his British readers, they would “wash and cook for the men and learn to mend their clothes.”12 But, in fact, we know that most of the women did tough, demanding, manual labor in the mine itself. One of their principal activities

Brickmaking at Morro Velho. Undated. Saint John d’El Rey Mining Company Records, 1820–1960.

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Gathering of slaves at Saint John d’El Rey Mining Company. Reprinted from Richard Burton, Explorations of the Highlands of the Brazil (London, 1869).

was to break up the rock that emerged from the stamping machine into fragments the size of a clenched fist, using heavy spalling hammers. Others then stood in double rows at long conveyor belts to inspect the ore and eliminate the unusable material. Male and female slaves were rewarded for exceptional hard work and good behavior at elaborate and dramatic ceremonies known as revistas, witnessed by all adult slaves every other Sunday. Dressed in special clothes— the men in loose-fitting white cotton shirts and pants, red caps, collars, cuffs, and stripes down the outer seams of their trousers, the women with red stripes horizontally across their white skirts and on their hats and scarves—the slaves were lined up in military rows separated by gender to witness the granting of symbolic awards—medals and ribbons—to the best behaved among them. Once a slave had received seven of these awards he or she was freed. With so many hundreds competing for such awards, only the very exceptional ever reached that goal (on average, six per year), but the purpose was to keep each of them believing that it was possible.13 Doubtless aware of the growing antislavery sentiment in Britain, the directors of the company went out of their way to stress how well the slaves were treated. One company official in London asserted in 1841 that its slaves were “better off than the labouring classes in Europe and . . . with respect to food and raiment, care, and attention when sick, infirm, or old,” the free Brazilians “are infinitely worse provided. . . . A more orderly, contented, and happy set of beings than they are would be difficult to meet.”14 He did not attempt to explain why, if this were so, free workers were not willing to take the place of the slaves.

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The British are generally seen as leading a worldwide antislavery effort, and Britain abolished slavery within its own empire by 1833. Yet the Saint John Company—headquartered in London and with stockholders who were mostly British— relied heavily on slave labor and continued to do so for decades. When the British Parliament began in the 1840s to deliberate on the passage of an act to truly enforce anti-slave-trade measures relating to Brazil, one version would have made it unlawful for any British subject to “hold, hire, retain, or employ” any slave. This obviously threatened the Saint John Company, provoking the chairman of its board to write about the issue directly to the Earl of Aberdeen, the foreign secretary. The company, he said, would be destroyed if the bill were passed as it stood. He claimed the company had “committed no offense against any law either of Great Britain or Brazil,” but this bill, if it became law, would “suddenly and summarily” deprive them of “property which they have lawfully acquired” and do so without “compensation.” The company directors “are as much opposed as any person [to the overseas traffic] in Negroes.” But the effect of their opposition to that trade would be minimal, he said, for out of a population of two million slaves in Brazil, English companies owned fewer than 2,000, that is, a thousandth part of the whole. Moreover, if they were forced to divest themselves of their slaves, those slaves would lose the advantages of working for a company noted for its humane treatment of slaves: “No greater injury could be done to them.” Finally, he stressed, as had his predecessors, that there was “no adequate supply of labour in Brazil independent of the Negro population”; without slaves, “the value of the company is destroyed.”15 The bill, known as the Aberdeen Act, passed in 1845 but contained no provision referring to slaves owned or hired by British citizens.16 The issue of the company’s ownership of slaves came to a head again in Brazil in the late 1870s. At that time it was revealed that this British enterprise had in early 1845 purchased another British-owned mine called Cata Branca and in that case agreed with the sellers to rent its 385 slaves for fourteen years, after which, according to the contract, the slaves would be freed. The arrangement was not unusual, and a similar provision had been considered with another firm in 1830 when the first superintendent,

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Pensioner of the Morro Velho Company. Undated. Saint John d’El Rey Mining Company Records, 1820–1960.

acknowledging that “at the end of 14 years they would be free,” went on to say that by then they would be “miners by profession and would therefore remain to work for the company.”17 The 1845 contract also stipulated that the slaves’ children would be freed when they reached age twenty-one. But at the end of the stated fourteen years, the company took no action to free the slaves, who now became effectively its property. The slaves themselves were apparently unaware of this provision of the contract, and those who had not died were still working as slaves twenty years after they should have been freed. Nor had the company freed any of the children. So, in 1877 the company was charged with illegally holding persons in slavery. Morro Velho was in the judicial district of Sabará, where the case went to court. The district judge appointed an advocate for the slaves as he would have done for others without the civil status of competent persons such as orphaned children, the mentally retarded, and the indigent.18 The advocate was no slouch, as he later showed by publishing a twenty-eightpage pamphlet about the case.19 He stressed that his charges were legally free but “moan[ed] in slavery, decimated by their captivity,” in contrast to the company that relied on the “arrogance of money and haughtiness of some Englishmen,” a theme to which he returned on several pages. He railed against the “crafty tricks and gross chicanery” employed by the company, which now claimed that it merely rented these slaves and did not own them, although, as the advocate noted, it had not mentioned that fact when it had occasionally freed one of them.20 The district judge’s sentence was unequivocal: “I declare the slaves free.”21 The case then went to an appellate court in the provincial capital of Ouro Preto, where it was

Miners changing shift. Undated. Saint John d’El Rey Mining Company Records, 1820–1960.

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overturned. But the advocate did not give up and appealed to the Supreme Court, where, in October 1881, the appellate court’s decision was declared null and void on procedural grounds and the case was remanded to a different appellate court, this one in Rio de Janeiro.22 The case would not have had much of an impact on public opinion, however, had it been limited to the legalese of a judge’s sentence or even the persistent advocacy of one humbly placed lawyer. But the question of the company’s slaves secured widespread attention in Brazil after a riveting speech delivered in the national Parliament in 1879 by the young Joaquim Nabuco, heir to a prestigious political family. He denounced the Saint John d’El Rey Company for maintaining in slavery men and women who were legally free, and he asked, “Why in 20 years has nothing been done? Why has justice slept for 20 years? Why for 20 years has this crime been repeated over and over again? .  .  . All these men and women are free and have, in the original contract [between the two companies], their freedom-charter, evident, unquestionable, and sufficient to make odious, impossible, and criminal any challenge to their liberty.” Responding to those who argued that the issue should be resolved in court, he insisted that any delay “would be an act of piracy in a new slave trade. . . . Must anyone born free in this country . . . depend on the decision of a certain judge in a certain place in order to enjoy the fruits of freedom and the rights recognized by our constitution?” And he resoundingly concluded, “Are these men and women not as free as we?”23

Fausta Carolina and Joaquina Antonia, ages 92 and 95 according to notes on the photos, miners at Morro Velho. Undated. Saint John d’El Rey Mining Company Records, 1820–1960.

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“Final Emancipation of Company’s Blacks.” Labeled without date. Saint John d’El Rey Mining Company Records, 1820–1960.

As a result of this speech, excerpts of which were widely quoted in the press, an abolitionist could no longer be accused of blindly supporting the haughty British. There was an irreconcilable difference between the position that the British government publicly presented to the world and the private actions of a British company. As Nabuco sarcastically pointed out, at the fortnightly revista ceremony at Saint John’s mine a British flag “proudly . . . threw [its] waving shadow upon the heads of slaves.”24 The hypocrisy was all too evident. Abolition became a nationalist cause, and it was the defenders of slavery who could be cast as allies of the British. The movement now had a wedge into the widely controversial public debate. More and more people joined the cause. For its part, the company hastily freed those slaves originally belonging to the Cata Branca company who were still alive, by this time numbering only 123.25 But the damage had been done and the company’s public image blackened. A year later, in 1882, the company freed all its remaining slaves.

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During the next six years the Brazilian abolitionist movement grew into a powerful political block until slavery was finally abolished without compensation to the owners. To some degree the movement won out because the Saint John Company had presented such a good target. We cannot know how much longer slavery might otherwise have persisted. But we do know that the end of slavery, by significantly weakening the regime, fostered the declaration of the republic that replaced imperial rule in 1889. The company, for its part, continued to prosper, now without slaves. The Benson Collection allows us to explore this story and its wider implications because of its complete holdings of Brazilian congressional debates and its microfilm of nineteenth-century Brazilian newspapers, not to mention the memoirs of participants, printed collections of their correspondence, and its several biographies of those involved. The joining of an archive and a library opens up pathways of inquiry for every user. In this essay I have drawn on the work of others who used the Saint John papers. Two of these authors—William Callaghan and Matt Childs—took their doctorates at the University of Texas, and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection made their work possible. It is not just a jewel, it is a crown. Notes

1. Unless otherwise noted, I have drawn my information on the Saint John d’El Rey Mining Company from the following works: William S. Callaghan, “Gold Mining on the Brazilian Frontier: The Archives of the St. John d’El Rey Mining Company,” Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin, no. N.S. 11 (1979): 27–32; William S. Callaghan, “Obstacles to Industrialization: The Iron and Steel Industry in Brazil During the Old Republic” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1981); Matt D. Childs, “A Case of ‘Great Unstableness’: A British Slaveholder and Brazilian Abolition,” The Historian 60, no. 4 (Summer 1998): 717–740; Marshall C. Eakin, British Enterprise in Brazil: The St. John d’el Rey Mining Company and the Morro Velho Gold Mine, 1830–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989); Bernard Hollowood, The Story of Morro Velho (London: St. John d’el Rey Mining Company, 1955); Douglas Cole Libby, Transformação e trabalho em uma economia escravista: Minas Gerais no século XIX (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1988). Sandra

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Lauderdale Graham, who has also used the Saint John d’El Rey archive, offered invaluable suggestions for this essay. 2. In 1827 the tax was reduced from 20 percent to just 5 percent; Friedrich Renger, “O quinto do ouro no regime tributário nas Minas Gerais,” Revista do Arquivo Público Mineiro, no. 91:92–105. It was only in 1891 that a constitutional provision guaranteed that owners of the surface also owned the minerals beneath it, and even this right was somewhat circumscribed by a 1926 amendment stating that mines and mineral deposits needed for national defense could not be transferred to foreigners; Fernando H. Mendes de Almeida, ed. and comp., Constituições do Brasil, 4th ed. (São Paulo: Saraiva, 1963), 133, 198. I gratefully acknowledge the help of Guilherme P. das Neves on this matter. 3. Saint John d’El Rey Mining Company, “Board’s queries, Mr. Warre’s replies, Mr. Herring’s remarks on Morro Velho” (ca. 1834), query 17, in Saint John d’El Rey Mining Company Records, Benson Latin

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American Collection, University of Texas at Austin (hereafter cited as SJ–BLAC). 4. Richard Francis Burton, Explorations of the Highlands of the Brazil: With a Full Account of the Gold and Diamond Mines. Also, Canoeing Down 1500 Miles of the Great River São Francisco from Sabará to the Sea (London: Tinsley, 1869), 1:208, 230–235, 245–261. 5. Eakin, British Enterprise, 49, 289n81. 6. Libby, Transformação e trabalho, 309; Eakin, British Enterprise, 68–69; Callaghan, “Obstacles to Industrialization,” 262. 7. Chalmers to Henry P. Harris, Morro Velho, May 23, 1910, and John Swinburn to McCall, London, August 17, 1910, St. John Papers at Morro Velho [not at BLAC], quoted in Callaghan, “Obstacles to Industrialization,” 237, 259. 8. Saint John d’El Rey, “Annual Report,” December 8, 1910, p. 5. 9. In exploring this issue I have relied most particularly on Childs, “Case of ‘Great Unstableness.’” 10. Charles Herring Jr. to Director, July 6, 1830, letter-book 1, letter 1, p. 7, SJ–BLAC; Charles Herring Jr. to Director, September 21, 1830, letter-book 1, letter 6, pp. 29–30, SJ–BLAC. 11. Eakin, British Enterprise, 172–173. On page 32, however, Eakin gives the figure as 1,400. On the treatment of their slaves as reported by the company and by its critics, see pp. 34–35, 132, 196–205. 12. Charles Herring Jr. to Director, December 31, 1830, letter-book 1, letter 14, p. 69, SJ–BLAC. Of the adult slaves owned by the company in the 1860s (as distinct from those rented from others) 47 percent were women; Burton, Explorations of the Highlands, 273. 13. “Annual Report,” 1851, pp. 58–59, quoted in Eakin, British Enterprise, 197; Burton, Explorations of the Highlands, 276–277n. 14. Saint John d’El Rey Mining Company, “Annual Report,” 1842, quoted in Hollowood, Story of Morro Velho, 34. 15. John Diston Powles, Chairman of the Board, to Earl of Aberdeen, London, June 17, 1843, letter-book 4, fols. 49–54, SJ–BLAC. I was led to this letter by Childs, “Case of ‘Great Unstableness,’” 722–723. 16. “An Act . . . to carry into execution a Convention . . . for the Regulation and final Abolition of the African Slave Trade [8th August

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1845],” downloaded on January 18, 2015, from William Loney RN—Background, at http://pdavis.nl/Legis_28.htm. 17. Charles Herring Jr. to Director, November 13, 1830, letter-book 1, letter 10, p. 53, SJ–BLAC. The period of fourteen years of temporary enslavement was standard; it was used at least as early as 1818 with reference to Africans illegally imported to Brazil but “emancipated” by the government, with the obligation to serve that length of time either in government works or rented out to private persons, “for it not being just that they should be abandoned”; Alvará de 26 de janeiro de 1818, in Collecção das leis do Brasil, 1818 (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1889), 9, item 5. See also Agostinho Marques Perdigão Malheiro, A escravidão no Brasil: Ensaio histórico, jurídico, social, 3rd ed. (Petrópolis, Brazil: Editora Vozes, 1976), 3–a:61. 18. Malheiro, Escravidão no Brasil, 3:125n730. 19. Jacintho Dias da Silva, O Supremo Tribunal pela verdade e a justiça: Victoria dos pobres ex-escravos da extincta companhia Catta-Branca contra a prepotente companhia S. João d’El-Rei (Morro Velho), pamphlet (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia Perseverança, 1881). In this pamphlet the advocate (curador) remains anonymous, but the author himself is identified as the advocate in Charles Williams to Joaquim Nabuco, August 22, 1881, folder 313, received doc. 6381, Arquivo Joaquim Nabuco, Recife, Acervo Fundação Joaquim Nabuco (hereafter Nabuco Papers). 20. Silva, Supremo Tribunal, 3, 6, 7, 9, 11, 15, 22. 21. Ibid., 15. 22. Ibid., 4–5. 23. Joaquim Nabuco, speech, August 26, 1879, in Brazil, Parlamento, Camara dos Deputados, Annaes, 1879, 4:182–185. As a result of this and other speeches, Nabuco—who often traveled to London—became a popular figure among British antislavery advocates such as Charles Herbert Allen, secretary to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society; see Allen to Nabuco, London, January 8, 1880, folder 310, received doc. 6314, and April 5, 1881, folder 312, received doc. 6363, Nabuco Papers. 24. In Rio News, October 15, 1879, p. 2. 25. Childs, “Case of ‘Great Unstableness,’” 726 and n23. But compare to Eakin, British Enterprise, 202–203.

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A Walk through the Benson with Lucas Alamán Eric Van Young

I

n a long, chatty letter from Paris dated May 20, 1845, Father José María Luis Mora wrote to Dr. Valentín Gómez Farías in Mexico City about the political situation in Mexico as seen from Europe. These two ardent liberal politicians—the one a priest and historian, the other a physician and sometime president of the republic—were among the most important political figures during the three decades or so following Mexico’s winning of its independence. Writes Mora in very clear but caustic turns of phrase, Mexico is a country of which there is unfortunately little or no good to say, but even such as it is, the impression of it [in Europe] is worse than it deserves. . . . In general, it is thought that public men [of talent] are scarce in Mexico, and one must agree that the examples sent here give a very poor idea of the country. . . . Among living [statesmen] you and Alamán enjoy the best opinion: you as a moral man, an energetic reformer, as not being bloodthirsty, as firm and principled in your ideas. The ideas of Alamán are considered exaggerated, and he [is seen] above all as a man who loves power inordinately [not to do good] but to enjoy its benefits, and as a man of administrative ability due to his education and talent; and all believe him the chief

Memoir of General Antonio López de Santa Anna, 1872. The memoir was handwritten by the general in exile and signed in Nassau, Bahamas. Antonio López de Santa Anna Collection, 1821–1878.

of the clerical party thought to be dominant in Mexico. His character is estimated this way less because of the low dealings he has had with Santa Anna, than for the fraud [and resulting] bankruptcy [he perpetrated], which ruined his creditors while leaving him untouched.1

I shall return in a moment to the matters raised in Mora’s letter and to Lucas Alamán. Academic libraries, for the most part, contain what we already know, or think we know, or have forgotten, while archives shelter what we do not yet know, or wish we knew, or wish we knew more about. The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin is arguably the premier research library on Mexican history in the United States and one of the world’s great libraries specializing in Latin American studies more generally. It embraces both a vast collection of published materials in manifold forms and an archival repository of enormous dimensions housed under the rubric of special collections, comprising thousands upon thousands of unpublished documents and other paper artifacts. I refer to it as an archival repository rather than an archive as such (although the distinction may seem a pedantic one) because while it contains a great trove of primarily unpublished historical records, these manuscript and printed documents have not been acquired and cataloged with any other purposes in mind than the preservation of historical memory and the use of the materials by scholars. Although the University of Texas at Austin is a great public institution of higher education, the archival collections in the Benson Collection are not intended to serve state purposes in the Foucauldian sense of exerting state power through the disciplining of knowledge or in the way in which political scientist James C. Scott might understand an archive as a tool for the state to impose legibility on society. The memory of Mexico’s past preserved in the special collections section of the Benson Latin American Collection has served me spectacularly in the two major research projects that have occupied my scholarly energies over the past thirty-five years and has done the same for scholars from the United States, Mexico, Europe, and elsewhere. While it must be acknowledged that the primary materials preserved in “the Benson” (as the library is familiarly known to researchers) and the wide and generous access to them extended to an international scholarly community have been mainstays of historians working on Mexico, the acquisition of documentary collections from private parties within Mexico itself has not been without controversy. I have on occasion heard Mexican colleagues grumble that the University of Texas at Austin was incrementally pilfering Mexico’s national patrimony. But anyone who has worked in Mexican archives, at least before the past twenty years or so, will have become aware of the haphazard preservation techniques, the idiosyncratic rules of access,

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The defense of Veracruz against the French, lithograph, 1838. Antonio López de Santa Anna suffered shrapnel wounds in the battle and subsequently lost his leg. Genaro García Imprints and Images.

and the absence of documents supposed to be in a given collection because of outright theft or carelessness among professional and avocational scholars about returning materials that wandered off unofficially but should never have left the repository in the first place.2 This situation in Mexico has changed greatly for the better in recent times with the reform of archival practices and techniques from the center of the country outward, beginning with the Archivo General de la Nación and extending to repositories in the states and municipalities. Whatever the scarcity of financial resources that accounted for the situation, however, the changes that have in large measure reversed it, or the delicate politics of historical documents migrating from Mexico to the United States, I have also heard Mexican colleagues breathe an audible sigh of relief that they can consult precious sources that might well have gone astray were they not preserved in the Benson.

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The first of my own research projects supported by the documents in the Benson eventuated in a large book on the popular sectors in Mexico’s independence movement (1810–1821); the second, a biography of the nineteenth-century statesman, historian, public intellectual, and entrepreneur Lucas Alamán, is still in progress as I write this essay.3 While I doubt that either project would have failed to materialize or been fatally diminished had I not worked in the Benson special collections, both are much the richer for the time I spent with those documents. My own experience of the Benson began when I was an assistant professor of history at UT Austin in 1980–1982. Having just seen a first book into press, a lightly revised version of my 1978 UC Berkeley doctoral dissertation on the rural economy of the Guadalajara region in the eighteenth century, I had begun what turned out to be a twenty-year study of the Mexican independence movement embracing virtually all of New Spain. This was prompted by the evidence I found in the Guadalajara archives that the indigenous villages on the margins of Lake Chapala, to the south of the city in western central Mexico, were heavily involved in the insurgency of 1810–1821. Initially ascribing this involvement to a variety of material factors, mainly encroachments on indigenous lands by market-oriented haciendas in the

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Book of prayers of José María Morelos, hero of Mexican independence. The annotation, signed by the notary Alfonso Quiroz, reads, “This book belonged to the apostate José María Morelos Pavón, executed today at the edges of this town for being a traitor to his country and his King. San Cristóbal Ecatepec, December 22, 1815.” Officia Propria Sanctorum Ordinis Eremitarum S. Augustini (Madrid, 1792). Benson Rare Books and Maps.

eighteenth century, I came later to a more complex interpretation embracing cultural and political elements as well as economic ones. Chiefly, however, I sought to launch an inquiry, through a deep engagement with archival materials, into the why, how, and where of popular participation—that is, of common people generally uninscribed in the historical record—in the Mexican insurgency. My tactical approach to this question was to drill down to the most granular documentary level I could manage, bypassing general accounts of the insurgency and questioning received wisdom about protonationalist sentiment among ordinary people, cross-class and cross-ethnic alliances among the rebels, the purely agrarian origins of popular resistance, protest, and violence, and so forth. The special collections section of the Benson served me extremely well in approaching my goal of doing the most granular examination of popular rebellion I could achieve. Of particular importance to my research was the Juan E. Hernández y Dávalos Manuscript Collection, accompanied by the valuable calendar of its contents compiled by Carlos E. Castañeda and Jack A. Dabbs. Hernández y Dávalos (1827–1893) was a Mexican antiquarian, historian, bibliophile, and civil servant who bankrupted himself compiling a vast compendium of primary and printed sources documenting New Spain’s struggle for independence from Spain. Hernández y Dávalos planned to publish his collection in eighteen volumes but only managed a very substantial six-volume compendium during his lifetime. The entire collection of documents and other materials came to the UT library by purchase in the early 1940s, subsequently to be incorporated into the Benson. Particularly useful is plentiful documentation of a famous episode of the insurgency in the Guadalajara area, the rebel fortification of the island of Mezcala in Lake Chapala, from which insurgents held off repeated royalist attacks for three years or so. But there are other pockets of unexpectedly revealing material, as well—so many of them, in fact, that choosing an example or two proves difficult. Beyond their empirical richness, the documents are quite moving, since many of them give the historian-reader that almost electrical jolt, tinged with melancholy and surprise at the compression of time between historical actor and observer, in realizing that but for him or her the lives of these ordinary people would go completely unremarked; mentioning them in passing is a sort of redemptive gesture. The most poignant illustrative example of this in my own career of leafing through often pristine but just as frequently musty, water-stained, and sometimes even worm-eaten documents comes not from the Benson materials, although it has its parallels there, but from a Guadalajara archive where I was researching my doctoral dissertation. In following the career of a local hacendado who lost his property through bankruptcy in the late eighteenth century, I came across a letter he had addressed to a local church or judicial official (at a remove of about forty years I cannot at this moment recall which) pleading for more time to make good the debt he owed on

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his multiple mortgages. When I opened the letter, the sand he had used to blot the ink fell out of a crease onto the table before me, indicating that not even the intended recipient had read it and certainly no one else since it was written. Of the rich materials in Benson special collections let me take, for instance, the statements dictated to a military scribe by twenty-one alleged insurgents, including one woman, captured in a military action near one of the Chapala lakeside towns in February 1815. The likelihood is extremely high that they were all indigenous people, although only their places of birth and occupations are listed in the documents. Most of them were farmers (labradores)—peasants, it is fair to say—with a sprinkling of shepherds, petateros (weavers of the reed mats used by poor people for sleeping), a couple of arrieros (mule skinners), and a fisherman. There was a strong presumption that they had served as insurgents in one capacity or another, although they claimed unanimously to have been pressed into service by rebel commanders. They might have made good their self-exculpatory accounts had not Antonio Hernández, a former rebel commander turned informer for the royalists, fingered them as willing insurgents. After quick courts martial, all were executed (including, apparently, the woman, which was unusual) except for a pair of boys considered too young to suffer the death penalty—barely adolescents, one assumes.4 Similarly fascinating and revealing are the statements made in March 1812 by a group of accused insurgents captured outside the siege lines during the investment of the city of Cuautla, near Cuernavaca, where a large rebel army under the command of Father José María Morelos had been bottled up by royalist forces. Of the many statements one stood out for me—that of José Marcelino Pedro Rodríguez, by ethnicity Indian, a laborer on a local hacienda, twenty-five years of age, and illiterate. For some reason the royalist officials interrogating him asked if he wanted his body sent back across the siege lines into Cuautla after his execution (carried out by firing squad on March 25, 1812). Initially he answered yes because he said he had heard that Father Morelos had with him in the besieged town a miraculous child who could revive the dead after three days, although he later backed away from this statement a bit. This one short document posed so many questions in my mind, opening up issues of popular messianic and religious belief, that reading and rereading it was like peering over a cliff into a vertiginous drop. And the novelty never wore off, even after I had written an article devoted exclusively to unpacking Pedro Rodríguez’s story.5 My biography of Lucas Alamán (1792–1853) grew out of the Mexican independence research, since in the last years of his life he published in five volumes what is still one of the best histories of this much-written-upon subject and a great monument of nineteenth-century Mexican historiography, Historia de Méjico. While this work has a markedly conservative tilt, in keeping with Alamán’s politics, it is so detailed, so beautifully written

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Lucas Alamán, lithograph from his Historia de Méjico (Mexico City, 1849–1852). Benson Rare Books and Maps.

(if in a dense nineteenth-century style), and so balanced in many of its judgments that modern scholars including myself draw on it heavily for material both empirical and interpretive. Alamán came to think that although Mexican independence from Spain had been inevitable, the manner of its achievement sent the new republic down a blood-stained path of almost inevitable state failure, as reflected in the Mexican-American War, in whose immediate wake he penned his history. After completing my project on Mexican independence I had thought to do research on the history of Mexican psychiatry from the late colonial period to the early twentieth century or so, but after some false starts, including a stint in the Mexico City archives, I put that project to one side for various reasons. Now, historians are always writing minibiographies or snippets of life histories, so it occurred to me that a traditional path to getting at the questions of interiority that interested me—of how people’s minds work and how they see the world—alternative to analyzing the delusions of the mentally ill, was through telling a life story in detail and on a large scale; and so I turned, in essence, from abnormal psychology to biography. I had long been interested in Alamán because of his obvious brilliance and just as obviously mixed reputation, in his own time and since, reflected in Father Mora’s letter to Gómez Farías quoted at the beginning of this essay. Several times chief minister in the national government (1823–1825, 1830–1832, 1853), he has been seen as an archreactionary, Machiavellian figure for his alleged complicity while he was chief minister in the national cabinet in the assassination of independence hero and president Vicente Guerrero (1831) during a time of widespread unrest in the country, for being the architect of the last dictatorship of Antonio López de Santa Anna (1853), and for blotting the triumphalist narrative of the liberal political ascendancy that dominated Mexico’s self-image after the mid-nineteenth century. Yet while Lucas Alamán grew increasingly conservative in his later years, even briefly conspiring to install a monarchy in Mexico, he was for most of his career not a reactionary but a centralist modernizer and even a moderate liberal.

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As with my research in the Benson special collections unit on Mexican independence, I have gleaned so much important material from the Lucas Alamán Papers there and from other clusters of documents (the papers of other statesmen of the era such as Mora, Gómez Farías, Mariano Riva Palacio, and so forth). The Benson holds the Lucas Alamán Papers, consisting of more than 350 items: letters, memoranda, and other documents covering most of his life. This is one of the two most important collections of materials relating exclusively to the statesman.6 Yet considering how much paper Alamán generated during his life, including thousands of letters relating to his political and private business affairs, ministerial reports, newspaper articles (he founded two Mexico City newspapers, both venues for conservative political views), and drafts of his substantial historical writings, there is very little of a personal nature left in his voluminous correspondence. The Alamán Papers in the Benson Collection come as close to giving us a picture of the man’s private and internal life as documents in any other repository. Let me cite but two examples among many from the materials held by the Benson. Lucas Alamán, like many other young gentlemen of a certain elevated social background and economic resources, did the grand tour of Europe, traveling and studying there between early 1814 and early 1820, when he returned to Mexico. He visited great museums and artistic monuments, hobnobbed with other Mexican travelers and expatriates, came to know some of the great intellectual figures of the day, including Baron Alexander von Humboldt, with whom he maintained a close friendship through letters for the rest of his life (the nonagenarian German lived until 1859, six years longer than his younger Mexican friend), and studied mining, chemistry, and other subjects in Germany and France. From his passports, still preserved among his papers in the Benson special collections unit, we can trace his movements with great exactitude, sometimes even to the hour of his arrival and departure from a given city.7 Alamán came to Europe at the age of twenty-two and returned home to Mexico at age twenty-eight; there would be one

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Passport of Lucas Alamán, 1814. The entire upper half of the document consists of the name and titles of Don José Miguel de Carvajal y Vargas, Duke of San Carlos and state secretary of King Ferdinand VII. Lucas Alamán Papers.

more extended sojourn within a couple of years, and after that he never left the country again. Arriving at Madrid in the summer of 1814, he progressed to Paris, spent some months there, and was present for Napoleon’s return from exile for his Hundred Days on March 20, 1815. Alamán spent the spring and summer of 1815 in London, moving on to Rome, Naples, Spoleto, Ravenna, Cortona, Florence, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice, Verona, and Milan. He crossed into Switzerland and spent a leisurely several weeks floating down the Rhine River in the company of a friend, finally visiting Frankfurt, Dresden, Weimar, Leipzig, and Freiberg, where he studied mining techniques for at least several weeks, and then passing on to Amsterdam, the Hague, Rotterdam, and Brussels. Returning to Paris, he lived for a number of months in the Trocadero district, at rue Mirabeau 40, then returned to Mexico after an extended visit to his father’s ancestral lands in northern Spain. Trivial as it may appear at first glance, this sort of detailed itinerary allows us to reconstruct an important, formative time in a young intellectual’s life—to know where he was, what he probably saw, and whom he may have met. A second example of the important role documents from the Benson Collection have played in my biographical project on Lucas Alamán is the bundle of papers relating to the bankruptcy of a huge textile factory at Orizaba, in the state of Veracruz, of which Alamán was a managing partner from its establishment in the late 1830s until its auction at a fire-sale price in 1843.8 Not strictly speaking a part of the Alamán Papers collection, this was a relatively later acquisition by the library and became available when my research was already well advanced. It proved to be extremely revealing of the statesman-entrepreneur’s ambitions for wealth as well as his unexpected willingness to cut corners in the acquisition of that wealth. However sinister his political reputation may have been, Alamán himself cut a figure of haut bourgeois probity and was scarcely ever the target of accusations of the sort of corruption while in office that stuck to many contemporary politicians. In this case, he was the moving spirit in the establishment of what turned out to be the largest textile factory in Mexico at the time, the Cocolapan mill. This required hundreds of thousands of pesos of investment as well as management expertise, technical knowledge, and influence with the government. After flourishing for a brief time in the late 1830s, the enterprise hit the rocks of a national economic downturn, insufficient raw material (cotton), and inexpert management on the part of some other managing partners. The long and short of the story is that the business went into a rapid downward spiral and then into an extremely complicated bankruptcy process that tried the patience of judicial authorities and nonmanaging investors who felt they had been defrauded. As it turned out, Alamán had invested less of his own money, which he probably did not have in the first place, in the project than was generally supposed, and the eventual

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Map of Lake Yuriria and Liceaga Island, taken from the Insurgents on November 1, 1812. The paper and style of this hand-drawn map suggest that it was made soon after the War of Independence battle it portrays. In the summer of 1812, the insurgents made Yuriria their northern headquarters, fortifying two islands in the middle of Lake Yuriria. Rumored to be impenetrable, the fortress was no match for Colonel Agustín de Iturbide, who led royalist troops in a violent siege both from the mainland and in canoes and rafts. Benson Rare Books and Maps.

Fuerte de Barrabás, ca. 1818. This hand-painted map depicts a stronghold of the insurgent forces during the Mexican War of Independence and General Vicente Guerrero’s victory against a royalist attack on the Cerro de Barrabás, a hilltop fortification. Benson Rare Books and Maps.

arrangement to pay off the creditors in 1843 saddled him with a large debt that shadowed him financially and politically for the rest of his life and necessitated his selling off some other property. One quite enraged investor solicited the legal opinion of José María Luis Mora, a trained lawyer as well as a priest, then living a penurious existence in Paris. No friend of Alamán’s, Mora responded to the angry creditor with a detailed analysis of the statesman’s liabilities in the matter, concluding that he had essentially been guilty of fraud “de hecho si no de derecho” (in fact if not in law).9 So richly documented in the Benson Collection, the episode demonstrates several aspects of Alamán’s life, character, and times of great significance for a biographer. Throughout his life he strove after wealth not only to satisfy the desire for material comfort and provision for his large family but also to compensate for the fall from economic and social grace he experienced as a young man through the loss of his family’s fortune and the extinction of a title of nobility granted several generations before. The Cocolapan project was only one of several that conformed to this pattern. Apart from what the incident tells us about the early course of industrialization in Mexico, of which Alamán was by far the most articulate exponent at the time, and the general situation of the economy in the decades after independence, it also speaks to the way he capitalized on his political connections and social networks to put the enterprise together as its fixer and front man. Finally, the Cocolapan episode indicates that Alamán was not above cutting a corner or two to achieve his ends. There were other instances of this in his career as entrepreneur and public man—not many, perhaps, but just enough to suggest that the bourgeois rectitude he projected was not the entire story. If anything, this makes him a more interesting figure for a biographer. The several months I have spent looking at documents in the Benson on two large research projects since 1980 have been among the most pleasant and gratifying of my nearly five decades as a working historian. The working conditions there are extremely comfortable, the staff congenial, and one may well run into colleagues from all over the world, as I have on a number of occasions. It is with some sadness that I reflect that I may never be there again, but one never knows where a historian’s search for pieces of the past may take her or him.

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Notes

1. Item 1182, Valentín Gómez Farías Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection (Benson Collection). 2. This occurs in US archives and libraries as well, as events in the Library of Congress a few years ago demonstrate; the issue is one of scale. 3. Eric Van Young, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Struggle for Mexican Independence, 1810–1821 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001; Spanish edition 2006). For numerous preliminary approaches to the Alamán biography, see Eric Van Young, Writing Mexican History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), introduction and chapter 4. 4. 6–2.254, 1815, Hernández y Dávalos Collection, Benson Collection. 5. 4.71.371–383, 1812, Hernández y Dávalos Collection, Benson Collection. Previously published as a journal article, the story of

Pedro Rodríguez now appears as chapter 6, “The Cuautla Lazarus: Reading Texts on Popular Collective Action,” in my Writing Mexican History. 6. The other, in Mexico City, is at the Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Carso (formerly Condumex), which embraces eight to ten times that number of items. 7. Items 83–85, 88, 91–92, 94–98, Lucas Alamán Papers, Benson Collection. 8. Miscellaneous Manuscripts 162, Benson Collection. 9. Mora’s reply is written in a minute hand on the reverse of Lizardi’s letter. Manuel de Lizardi, London, to José María Luis Mora, 24 rue de la Fontaine St. George, Paris, July 7, 1842; Mora to Lizardi, July 28, 1842; 7-742, José María Luis Mora Papers, Benson Collection.

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Edict against indigenous languages, Guatemala, 1824. The government of Guatemala issued an order to parish priests to eradicate native languages as a means to promote national unity. Arturo Taracena Flores Collection.

La pasión por lo impreso Historia del Fondo Arturo Taracena Flores

Arturo Taracena Arriola

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rturo Taracena Flores nació en la ciudad de Guatemala el 7 de septiembre de 1887. Desde los quince años trabajó en la International Railways of Central America (IRCA), salvo durante un breve período a finales de la década de 1920, cuando se dedicó a administrar la finca de su esposa en el departamento de Quetzaltenango y que pronto se vio obligado a vender por la crisis económica mundial. En la IRCA llegó a ser el cajero principal de la compañía, cargo en el que se jubiló en 1966. Su afición por los libros y la historia le vino muy temprano en la vida, producto de descender de dos familias que jugaron un papel de cierta importancia en la política de la joven República de Guatemala. Su abuelo paterno, José Manuel Taracena Ugalde (1818–1872), fue un abogado y notario radicado en la ciudad de Amatitlán, entonces de gran relevancia por la producción de cochinilla, principal producto de exportación del régimen conservador guatemalteco. Allí fungió como escribano y hay constancia de que, siendo aficionado a la lectura, fue suscriptor del periódico El Museo y de Memorias para el Antiguo Reyno de Guatemala (1852) del arzobispo Francisco de Paula García Peláez. Aruro Taracena Flores encabezaba una familia más bien adscrita al pensamiento conservador guatemalteco. De hecho, buena parte de sus amigos e interlocutores provenían de dicha tradición, como eran los casos de José Manuel Montúfar Aparicio y José Arzú Herrarte, ambos historiadores y bibliófilos por tradición familiar.

Por el lado materno, su abuelo, José María Flores Prado (1822– 1880), fue abogado y corregidor de los departamentos de Alta Verapaz y Suchitepéquez. Aún más importante fue el papel de sus bisabuelos, los abogados José María Flores Acosta (1799–1840) y Marcelo Molina Mata (1800–1879), quienes respectivamente llegaron a ser presidente del Congreso de la República Federal de Centro América y jefe del Sexto Estado de la Federación o Estado de Los Altos. Dos personajes de pensamiento liberal, jugaron un papel importante en las décadas de 1830 y 1840 en el desarrollo y disolución de la República Federal de Centro América, a la que siguió en 1847 la instauración de la República de Guatemala. Es de esas tres familias que Arturo Taracena Flores va a heredar parte del fondo documental y bibliográfico, que luego siguió acrecentando, tanto por esfuerzo propio como por heredar nuevos fondos. De hecho, Arturo Taracena Flores tomó el hábito de comprar libros nuevos y viejos que le permitiesen ir completando las temáticas centrales del fondo familiar; es decir, historia, geografía, acuerdos fronterizos, biografías, códigos de leyes, mensajes presidenciales, literatura de Guatemala y de Centro América, así como de sus relaciones con sus vecinos (México, Belice, Panamá, Colombia) o con las potencias imperiales de entonces (Estados Unidos, Inglaterra, Francia y Alemania). El interés de Taracena Flores por la historia social guatemalteca lo llevó a recopilar literatura piadosa (novenas, catecismos, almanaques, etc.), libros de receta, de literatura, de flolklore y costumbrismo, de ciencias naturales, diccionarios y guías turísticas. La mayor parte del fondo Arturo Taracena Flores que existe en la Benson Latin American Collection de la Universidad de Texas en Austin está más centrada en la historia decimonónica y en la de la primera mitad del siglo XX que en la colonial, aunque tenga piezas de este último período. La razón es que el fondo colonial que heredó y acopió, lo regaló en el año de 1956 al Museo del Libro Antiguo, que se encuentra en la ciudad de Antigua, Guatemala, una iniciativa que compartió con Mariano Pacheco, otro importante coleccionista. Asimismo, facilitó libros para la fundación del Museo de la Casa de la Cultura de Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, de donde provenía la familia Molina Mata. Tal acopio bibliográfico conllevaba no sólo conseguir ediciones originales, sino completarlas con segundas y terceras ediciones hechas en el país o, si era el caso, en el extranjero. La posibilidad de este último se dio por el hecho de que Arturo Taracena Flores mantuvo relaciones personales y académicas con importantes historiadores extranjeros y porque, además de ser miembro de la Sociedad de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala, también lo era de la Real Academia de Historia de Madrid, así como de las academias de historia de Honduras, Costa Rica y México. Muchos de sus libros tienen anotaciones manuscritas a fin de aclarar fechas, personajes, ediciones, errores, etc. Asimismo, cada libro tiene como exlibris su nombre o su firma de puño y letra, pues nuestro personaje tenía

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una bella caligrafía. Para completar la solidez de su fondo, Taracena Flores también coleccionó manifiestos, carteles, periódicos y, sobre todo, recortes de periódico que guardaba por tema en diferentes sobres o en el interior de los libros a que hacen referencia. Paralelamente, escribió a mano 6,000 fichas bibliográficas—donadas a la Universidad de San Carlos—, que completaban las contenidas en los diez tomos de la Bibliografía Guatemala, impresos por la Tipografía Nacional a partir del trabajo del chileno José Toribio Medina y el guatemalteco Gilberto Valenzuela. En esa labor bibliográfica, Arturo Taracena Flores estuvo apoyado por tres amigos periodistas: José Arzú Herrarte (1888–1944), Rufino Guerra Cortave (1899–1993) y César Brañas Guerra (1899–1976). El primero, historiador, diplomático y periodista, descendiente de una familia clave en la historia de la independencia y la federación centroamericana, durante varios años fue director del Diario de Centro América. Los otros dos trabajaban como periodistas en El Imparcial. Guerra Cortave, pariente lejano de Taracena Flores, estaba encargado de los archivos del célebre periódico guatemalteco fundado en 1922. Brañas Guerra era un escritor notable, además de sobresalir como director de la página cultural de este periódico. Cada día, al regreso de su trabajo, Taracena Flores pasaba a las oficinas de El Imparcial a charlar con sus amigos e intercambiar ediciones. El primero en morir de ellos, en 1944, fue José Arzú Herrarte, cuyas hermanas le legaron ese año parte de la colección de éste, aunque les siguió comprando posteriormente ediciones raras que él no poseía. Los otros dos le sobrevivieron. Los fondos bibliográficos de Arturo Taracena Flores sirvieron para apoyar al gobierno de Guatemala, primero durante las negociaciones del Tratado de Límites con Honduras a finales de la década de 1920 y, seguidamente, para sustentar la posición guatemalteca en torno al diferendo territorial sobre Belice con la Gran Bretaña en las décadas de 1930 y 1940. Con la Revolución de Octubre de 1944, un nuevo interés se abrió en el afán coleccionista de Taracena Flores en torno a los gobiernos de Juan José Arévalo Bermejo y Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. A partir del movimiento que derrocó al presidente Arbenz Guzmán en junio de 1954, en el cual su hijo menor, Eduardo Taracena de la Cerda (1925–1995), fue un importante miembro, su interés por la historia contemporánea guatemalteca lo condujo a hacer un especial énfasis en la recopilación de libros, folletos y volantes de la época. De esa forma, el Movimiento Democrático Nacional (MDN), dirigido por el coronel Carlos Castillo Armas, que luego se convirtió en el Movimiento de Liberación Nacional y que contó con el apoyo del Departamento de Estado, la CIA y la United Fruit Company, estuvo en el centro de su acopio bibliográfico. Taracena Flores empezó entonces a poner especial atención en coleccionar publicaciones clandestinas de los opositores a Arbenz y, luego, de los de Castillo Armas. Seguidamente, con el inicio de la lucha armada en Guatemala, los vaivenes políticos de su hijo Eduardo también lo indujeron

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a procurarse los volantes, propaganda e impresos mimeografiados de las primeras guerrillas surgidas a inicios de la década de 1960 bajo el influjo de la Revolución Cubana, del Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (PGT) y de otros partidos de izquierda de corte arevalista o arbencista. Asimismo, le importó coleccionar la respuesta escrita que a éstos daban los partidos anticomunistas del momento: Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN), Partido Democracia Cristiana Guatemalteca (PDCG) y Partido Revolucionario (PR), entre otros. Recopiló también documentos ligados a la “Conspiración del Niño Jesús” en contra del gobierno del general Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, que culminó con levantamiento militar de 13 de noviembre de 1960, así como aquellos que emanaron de las jornadas estudiantiles de marzo y abril de 1962. Un año después, añadió el material sobre el gobierno militar dirigido por el coronel Enrique Peralta Azurdia, a raíz del golpe de estado de marzo de 1963 y la respuesta al mismo de parte de la izquierda guatemalteca, especialmente la que optó por la lucha armada y que estaba encarnada por el Movimiento Revolucionario 13 de Noviembre (MR13), las Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (FAR) y el Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (PGT). A su vez,

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Left: Propaganda poster, Guatemala, ca. 1957. Arturo Taracena Flores Collection. right: Propaganda poster, Guatemala. Undated. Arturo Taracena Flores Collection.

en el marco de la contrainsurgencia, el gobierno militar y los partidos de derecha, en el especial el MLN, promovieron el surgimiento de los escuadrones de la muerte, que llenaron las paredes de las ciudades guatemaltecas con afiches de los comunistas condenados a muerte, muchos de ellos coleccionados por Taracena Flores. Finalmente, se encuentran los fondos relativos al gobierno de Julio César Méndez Montenegro, durante el cual su hijo Eduardo Taracena de la Cerda jugó un papel destacado como asesor. La Colección Taracena Flores fue clave para la publicación de la obra Guatemala: La violencia en 1968 por el Centro Intercultural de Documentación de Cuernavaca, México. Editada en tres tomos, resulta fundamental para el estudio de la primera etapa del conflicto armado interno guatemalteco al abordar los temas del tratamiento dado por la prensa nacional de 1960 a 1967, y reproducir los impresos clandestinos y la prensa marginal de izquierda y de derecha para el mismo período. Es más, aporta elementos valiosos para el estudio de la Guerra Fría en el país centroamericano en momentos en que apareció la Doctrina de Seguridad Nacional y los Estados Unidos ayudaron a la profesionalización del ejército de Guatemala como una institución eminentemente contrainsurgente. El presidente Richard Nixon había sido electo y la guerra en Vietnam alcanzaba su apogeo. El editor de Guatemala: La Violencia, el padre Alejandro del Corro contó con la colaboración de Guillermo Cruz Ventura y de Arturo Taracena Arriola para microfilmar en una semana gran parte de los documentos que dicha colección poseía, luego de que Arturo Taracena Flores permitiera a

Propaganda leaflet, Guatemala. Undated. Arturo Taracena Flores Collection.

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su nieto que el material fuese consultado, aunque sin saber claramente el uso que se le daría. Para entonces, Cruz Ventura y Taracena Arriola ya eran militantes revolucionarios y comprendieron la importancia de preservar la memoria histórica del presente que ambos vivían hace cuarenta y seis años, una militancia que enfrió las relaciones del abuelo con el nieto. Arturo Taracena Flores falleció en la Ciudad de Guatemala el 11 agosto de 1970, marcando el límite cronológico de su extensa y puntual colección. Ese año, Taracena de la Cerda negoció la entrega final del Fondo Taracena Flores a la Universidad de Texas en Austin poco antes de morir su padre. En tal operación intervinieron la misma Nettie Lee Benson y el historiador Mario Rodríguez. Este último había contado con el apoyo documental de Taracena Flores para la elaboración de su libro The Cadiz Experiment in Central America, 1808–1826 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), como él deja constancia en la introducción. La Colección Arturo Taracena Flores contiene aproximadamente, 7,000 libros, 5,000 hojas sueltas, circulares y afiches, varios cientos de periódicos y revistas, así como de recortes, mapas y misceláneas. Ocupa 33 pies

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Left: Propaganda leaflet, Guatemala. Undated. Arturo Taracena Flores Collection. Right: Propaganda poster, Guatemala, ca. 1951–1952. Guatemala Arturo Taracena Flores Collection.

lineales de cajas con documentos que fueron procesados en dos partes. Ann Hartness se concentró en el período de 1944–1963 y nos dejó una cuenta exacta de esta parte de la colección: 2,636 documentos, cuya descripción está contenida en Revolution and Counterrevolution in Guatemala, 1944– 1963:  An Annotated Bibliography of Materials in the Benson Latin American Collection (Austin: General Libraries, University of Texas, 1995). El resto de los documentos no está clasificado con tanto detalle, pero se tiene la descripción del contenido de cada fólder y el lector o el investigador los pueden consultar en línea. Hoy en día la Colección Taracena Flores resulta de gran importancia para el quehacer de la historiografía sobre Guatemala en la medida en que no sólo cubre el período de siglo y medio en que Guatemala se formó como estado independiente bajo un régimen republicano, sino que aporta material único sobre la contrarrevolución de 1954 y el comienzo del movimiento revolucionario en 1962. Tales hechos definieron el destino de este país en la segunda mitad del siglo XX y siguen estando en la base de las contradicciones que vive la sociedad guatemalteca, caracterizada por una desigualdad, una impunidad, una violencia, un militarismo y un anticomunismo endémicos. No es difícil constatar la cantidad de investigadores norteamericanos, latinoamericanos y de otros países del mundo que la consultan in situ.

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plates

Joannes van Doetecum, Meridionalis Americae pars quinque regiones ab Hispanis dividitur, 1592. Etching and engraving after a map by the cartographer Petrus Plancius. Bottom left: a bird’s-eye view of Cuzco, the Inca capital at the time of the Spaniards’ arrival in Peru. Benson Rare Books and Maps.

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Calendar wheel from Fray Toribio de Benavente, Memoriales (1527–1549). The wheel is the earliest known description of the Aztec calendar. Benavente, called by natives Motolinía (Poor One), was among the Franciscan monks who arrived after the Conquest with the mission of converting millions of natives to Catholicism. Joaquín García Icazbalceta Collection.

Circular genealogy, ca. 1550–1580. This document depicts the descendants of Nezahualcóyotl (Coyote Who Fasts), ruler of Texcoco in the fifteenth century. Upper right: Nezahualcóyotl appears as a coyote. Ex-Stendahl Collection.

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Map of Guaxtepec, 1580. Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala, 1577–1585.

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Miguel Cabello Valboa, Miscelánea Antártica, manuscript, 1576–1586. This manuscript about the origins and kingdoms of the Incas incorporates legend and romance. The author spent many years in Quito as a priest and wrote particularly rich descriptions of the region of Ecuador. Mexican historian Joaquín García Icazbalceta acquired the manuscript in Madrid ca. 1853. A first full edition was published in Peru in 1951. Joaquín García Icazbalceta Collection.

Map of Montevideo (below); scene of barter between natives and a sailor (left). The illustrations are from Dom Pernetty, Histoire d’un voyage aux isles Malouines, fait en 1763 & 1764; avec des observations sur le Detroit de Magellan, et sur les Patagons (Paris, 1770). Simón Lucuix Collection.

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Cover art of José Hernández, Martín Fierro, 1895 (right), and undated (left). Martín Fierro first appeared in Buenos Aires in 1872 and became an instant bestseller. The Benson holds more than 300 editions of the famous epic poem of Argentine gaucho life as well as anthologies, selections, dramatizations, translations, juvenile adaptations, and calendars. Most of this material arrived in 1961 as part of the Pedro Martínez Reales Collection.

Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, engraving by José Joaquín Fabregat, 1797. Benson Rare Books and Maps. 70

Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Theatro de virtudes políticas, Mexico City, 1680. The triumphal arch that Sigüenza designed for the arrival of the new viceroy in 1680 was an allegory of the virtues that constitute a great prince. Influenced by the work of indigenous historian Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, Sigüenza used twelve Aztec rulers to illustrate these virtues and adorn the arch. In doing so, he connected the incoming Spanish viceroy to a long, noble, native political lineage. Benson Rare Books and Maps.

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Map of Zapotitlán, 1579. Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala, 1577–1585.

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Joya Hairs, Tikal, Guatemala. Undated. Born in Honduras and raised in Jamaica, Joya Hairs (d. 2014) became a photographer at a young age and pursued commercial and artistic projects throughout Central America and Mexico. Much of Hairs’s work focused on Mayan archaeology and Guatemalan culture, including official work documenting the excavations and artifacts at Tikal and projects documenting Guatemalan artisanal and festive traditions. Joya Hairs Papers and Photographs.

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Joya Hairs, Lake Atitlán, Guatemala. Undated. Joya Hairs Papers and Photographs.

George O. Jackson Jr., Peregrinación a Wirikuta, Estación Catorce, San Luis Potosí (Huichol), 1999. George O. Jackson, Jr., Essence of Mexico Collection. © George O. Jackson, Jr.

George O. Jackson Jr., Cuaresma (Fourth Sunday), Venustiano Carranza, Chiapas (Zoque Maya), 2000. George O. Jackson, Jr., Essence of Mexico Collection. © George O. Jackson, Jr.

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Antiphonarium (Mexico City, Pedro Ocharte, 1589). Joaquín García Icazbalceta Collection.

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Typescript with handwritten corrections by José Vasconcelos of Ulises criollo, memoir published in 1935. Author, philosopher, and politician, Vasconcelos served as Mexico’s minister of education from 1921 through 1924. He experienced his most productive years as an author during the 1930s, following an unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1929. José Vasconcelos Manuscripts. © Herederos de José Vasconcelos.

José Vasconcelos. Mexico’s Ministry of Education provided this undated portrait of Vasconcelos when he visited Austin in 1924 to give a speech at the University of Texas. Benson Rare Books and Maps.

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Puerto de Acapulco, 1907. The chromolithography was made in the Florentine workshop of Alejandro Ruffoni based on a sixteenth-century painting by Adrian Boot. The twentieth-century reproduction was commissioned by the historian Francisco del Paso y Troncoso. Benson Rare Books and Maps.

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Forma y levantado de la Ciudad de México, 1907. The chromolithography was made in the Florentine workshop of Alejandro Ruffoni based on a sixteenth-century painting by Adrian Boot. The twentieth-century reproduction was commissioned by the historian Francisco del Paso y Troncoso. Benson Rare Books and Maps.

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Emancipation letter, Colombia, ca. 1850–1851. The Benson holds a small collection of letters, edicts, and other historical manuscripts documenting slavery and manumission in early nineteenth-century Colombia. Benson Rare Manuscripts.

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Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution, in Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (London, 1805). Benson Rare Books and Maps.

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Map of the Missions of Sonora and Its Surroundings, by Juan Antonio Balthazar, 1752. Benson Rare Books and Maps.

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Illustration from Eusebio Kino, Exposición Astronómica de el Cometa (Mexico City, 1681). The Italian Jesuit missionary and astronomer Eusebio Francisco Kino charted the route of the Great Comet of 1680. He explored Baja California and established missions in Sonora and Arizona. Benson Rare Books and Maps.

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Map of the Philippine Islands, in Pedro Murillo Velarde, Historia de la provincia de Philipinas de la Compañía de Jesús: segunda parte (Manila, 1749). The Jesuit priest Pedro Murillo Velarde and Tagalog engraver Nicolás de la Cruz Bagay collaborated to make this map of the Philippines for the king of Spain. The Chinese sampan and Spanish galleon ships allude to the archipelago’s commercial connections to Asia and Latin America. Other symbols in the map mark the Philippines as a Catholic space, underscoring the religious ties that bound the colony to other parts of the Spanish Empire. Joaquín García Icazbalceta Collection.

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Religious images in Murillo Velarde’s Historia, segunda parte, 1794. The two popular sacred images are from Manila and its hinterland: Nuestra Señora de la Rosa of San Pedro de Macati and Nuestra Señora de la Paz y Buen Viage of Antipolo. Manileños prayed to Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage to protect galleon ships. Joaquín García Icazbalceta Collection.

Nómina de la reseña e pagas, 1575. Manuscript payroll of 180 soldiers who traveled with Francisco de Sande, the third Spanish governor of the Philippines, from Acapulco to Manila in the galleons San Juan and Santiago. The document provides insights into the identities of the ordinary men who carried out the labor of colonization. It lists each soldier’s name and age, birthplace, height, and characteristics such as scars and birthmarks. It also records the weapons each soldier brought on board (muzzleloader, sword, dagger) and his salary. Genaro García Collection.

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Manuscript of the novel El Zarco, by Ignacio Manuel Altamirano. He wrote it between 1886 and 1888, and it was published posthumously in 1901. Altamirano, a novelist, poet, and journalist, was a major contributor to the development of a national literature in Mexico. Benson Rare Manuscripts.

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Emperor Maximilian I and Empress Carlota of Mexico, undated. The Austrian Archduke Maximilian was installed as emperor of Mexico by Napoleon III in 1864. Carlota was a Belgian princess who became empress of Mexico as Maximilian’s wife. Genaro García Photograph Collection.

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Fore-edge painting of Chapultepec Castle. The artist is unknown for the tiny painting added to the outer edge of this copy of Apuntes para la historia de la Guerra entre México y los Estados Unidos (Mexico City, 1848). Benson Rare Books and Maps.

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Julio Cortázar’s logbook for the novel Libro de Manuel, published in 1973. Handwritten by Cortázar, this notebook contains leitmotifs, outlines, and nuclear ideas for the novel. Julio Cortázar Literary Manuscripts. © Herederos de Julio Cortázar

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Julio Cortázar, typescript of Rayuela, with corrections. When it was published in 1963 in Buenos Aires by Editorial Sudamericana, critics called this open-ended book a “meta-novel” and “anti-novel.” Rayuela is a cornerstone of the 1960s explosion of narrative creativity that came to be known as the Latin American Boom. Julio Cortázar Literary Manuscripts. © Herederos de Julio Cortázar.

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above: Calasans Neto, Bahia: la ville, wood engraving, acrylic, 1992. Master engraver, painter, book illustrator, and film and theater designer Calasans Neto (1932–2006) was beloved in the artistic circles of his native Bahia and throughout Brazil. Starting in his teens as a painter, he quickly moved to engraving as well and became known for his “matrixes,” plywood canvases that combined an engraver’s woodcut carving with painted layers. Neto was deeply influenced by folk tradition and aesthetic forms such as the cordel in both his print and carved work. Michel Schooyans Art Collection. © Estate of Calasans Neto.

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facing: Illustration from Gerónimo de Mendieta, Hystoria ecclesiástica indiana, written 1571–1595. Mendieta’s handwritten manuscript includes descriptions of native peoples’ religious rites and beliefs before the voyages of Christopher Columbus and narrates the introduction of Christianity in the Americas. Mendieta’s book is one of the most valuable accounts of the history of the Americas in the sixteenth century. It remained unpublished until the historian Joaquín García Icazbalceta found it in Spain, acquired the manuscript, and published it in 1870. Joaquín García Icazbalceta Collection.

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facing: Map of Mixquiahuala, 1579. Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala, 1577–1585. right: Pintura del pueblo Tecpatepec contra Manuel de Olvera. Undated. This image is part of a legal document from the late sixteenth century that alleged abuses committed by Manuel de Olvera, Spanish colonial official of Mixquiahuala, Mexico. Genaro García Collection.

Title page from Jan Sepp, Surinaamsche vlinders. Papillons de Surinam (Amsterdam, 1848–1852). Sepp’s work is a collection of hand-colored plates on the butterflies of Suriname drawn from nature. Benson Rare Books and Maps.

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Owls, by Ernesto Lohse, in Émil August Göldi’s Álbum de aves amazônicas (Zurich, 1900–1906). Göldi (1859–1917), a Swiss naturalist and zoologist, joined the staff of the National Museum in Brazil during the reign of Dom Pedro II. After the demise of the monarchy, Göldi reorganized the Museum of Natural History and Ethnography in the state of Pará, and the museum was later renamed Goeldi in his honor. He identified many new species of birds and mammals in Brazil. Benson Rare Books and Maps.

Title page from Thomas More, Utopia (Basil, 1518), with epigrams by Desiderius Erasmus. Titlepage borders are from designs by Hans Holbein. Handwritten at the bottom: “It belongs to the Bishop of Mexico Fray Juan de Zumárraga.” The historian Silvio Zavala (Ideario de Vasco de Quiroga, Mexico City, 1941) contends that this volume must have been borrowed from Zumárraga by Vasco de Quiroga, bishop of Michoacán, who organized indigenous populations after principles derived from Utopia. Genaro García Collection.

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Letter from Hernán Cortés to King Charles V, Roman emperor. It is signed October 15, 1524, at “the great city of Tenuxtitan” (Mexico City). Cortés argues in favor of encomiendas, a system through which the labor of a group of natives was granted to the conquistadors. Joaquín García Icazbalceta Collection.

Cover of José Francisco Borges, A chegada da prostituta no céu, undated. A popular oral literary tradition that took print form in the late nineteenth century, the literatura de cordel (string literature) of Northeast Brazil features archetypal stories and characters as political and social messages. Artists hang their folhetos—self-published, illustrated chapbooks—on strings (cordéis) to sell at fairs and market stalls, giving the genre its name. The Benson holds more than 8,000 cordel works and prints. Benson Cordel Literature Collection. © José Francisco Borges.

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Cover of José Francisco Borges, Riqueza de sertanejo é chão molhado, undated. Benson Cordel Literature Collection. © José Francisco Borges.

Marcelo Soares, Os violeiros, undated woodblock print. Benson Cordel Literature Collection. © Marcelo Soares.

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Tabula geographica regni Chile, engraving, 1646. This geographic table of Chile is one of several remarkable illustrations in Alonso de Ovalle, Histórica relación del reyno de Chile (Rome, 1646). Joaquín García Icazbalceta Collection.

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Letter from Gabriela Mistral to Guillermo de Torre. Dated only “October 27,” it appears to have been written during the years when Mistral was Chilean consul in Portugal (1935–1937), when she worked to help refugees flee from the Spanish Civil War. Mistral won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945. Gabriela Mistral Papers. © Herederos de Gabriela Mistral.

Lobby card of El charro inmortal, 1955. Agrasánchez Collection of Mexican Cinema.

Lobby card of Deseada, 1950. Agrasánchez Collection of Mexican Cinema.

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A Waiwai man dressing for the Shodewica feast. Photo by Niels Fock, Guyana, 1954. Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America.

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A crowd gathers for a photograph somewhere in the Vaupés region of the Amazon. Photo by Arthur P. Sorenson, Colombia, 1962. Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America. The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America is a dynamic digital repository of multimedia resources in and about the indigenous languages of Latin America. AILLA is part of LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections and is located in the Benson Latin American Collection.

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Letter from Ernesto Cardenal to Pablo Antonio Cuadra. In 1958, Nicaraguan poet Cardenal was a novice at the Trappist monastery Our Lady of Gethsemani, in Kentucky. His spiritual director was Thomas Merton, who in this letter is referred to as “Fr. Louis,” the name he used in the monastic community. Ernesto Cardenal Papers. © Ernesto Cardenal.

top: Praying for the dead, León, Nicaragua, 1979. Ernesto Cardenal leads a prayer for the Sandinista soldiers killed in combat. Ernesto Cardenal Papers. left: Ernesto Cardenal, Julio Cortázar, and Julio Valle Castillo in Managua, Nicaragua, 1982. The banner above them reads, “The triumph of the revolution is the triumph of poetry.” Ernesto Cardenal Papers.

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Juan Bautista, Advertencias para los confessores de los naturales (Mexico City, 1600). Bautista offers instructions and rules related to the sacrament of confession, with bilingual text in Spanish and Nahuatl. The document is one of the Benson’s primeros libros, or early Mexican imprints. Joaquín García Icazbalceta Collection.

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facing: Three handwritten texts by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Libro de profesiones del Convento de San Jerónimo. The rare manuscript belonged to the San Jerónimo Convent in Mexico City. In the first paragraph, signed in 1669, Sor Juana professes her vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity. In the second, twenty-five years later, she renews her vows and signs them in her own blood. In the third, undated but likely written in 1695, she requests that the date of her death be inscribed above and asks her sisters to pray for her, signing, “Yo, la peor del mundo.” In the middle of the page, a nun fulfills her request and writes, “Murió a diecisiete de abril del año 1695 la madre Juana Ynés de la Cruz.” Dorothy Schons Papers.

Political cartoons and illustrations by José Clemente Orozco for the Mexico City weekly satirical paper El Ahuizote, 1911. One of Mexico’s great twentieth-century muralists, Orozco produced numerous works on paper, including illustrations he made for newspapers in his early career. His work is preserved in the Benson’s extensive holdings of early Mexican periodicals. Genaro García Collection.

José Clemete Orozco, “El vomitivo,” El Ahuizote, November 13, 1911.

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José Clemete Orozco, “Los diez minutos de Sol . . . han concluido!” El Ahuizote, November 18, 1911.

Detail, José Clemete Orozco, “El mundo de la farándula,” El Ahuizote, November 4, 1911.

José Clemete Orozco, “En el Guignol político,” El Ahuizote, November 4, 1911.

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Photograph of Magda Portal, 1926, and manuscript draft of poem, 1981. The Peruvian poet and writer also was a political activist for women’s and workers’ rights. Magda Portal Papers. © Herederos de Magda Portal.

Radio Venceremos broadcasting from a mountain cave at La Guacamaya, El Salvador, ca. 1981. Radio Venceremos was an underground radio network of the antigovernment Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) during the Salvadoran civil war of 1980–1992. Digital recordings of the broadcasts are available online through the Human Rights Documentation Initiative at LLILAS Benson, in collaboration with the Radio Venceremos Archive at the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, San Salvador. Photo courtesy of Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. © Radio Venceremos Archive, Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen.

Cassette tape by George Lister, September 11, 1975. The papers of George Lister (1913–2004) document his sixty years as a foreign service officer and human rights officer with the US Department of State. Correspondence, reports, and various documents detail his human rights work, speaking engagements, and other affairs. George Lister Papers.

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US government documents related to the disappearance of Charles Horman, Chile, 1973. Materials collected by the US filmmaker Charles Horman’s wife, Joyce Horman, and father, Edmund Horman, document his abduction, torture, and execution in the days after Pinochet’s September 11, 1973, coup d’état in Chile. Joyce Horman and Edmund Horman Papers.

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Masked stilt dancers from Santa María Roala at the Indian State Fair of Oaxaca, 1941. Donald Cordry Mexican Masks Collection, 1931–1978.

Camino de la Gloria by Daniel Cabrera, “Fígaro,” in El Hijo del Ahuizote, November 1, 1885. Genaro García Collection.

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The papers of José Revueltas in storage before being acquired by the Benson Collection in 2010.

José Revueltas (left) and Pablo Neruda. The dedication says, “To Pepe Revueltas, fraternal memories, Pablo Neruda, 1941.” José Revueltas Papers.

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José Revueltas’s ID card for the First Latin American Conference of Socialist Students, Guadalajara, Mexico, 1936. José Revueltas Papers.

Manuscript detail, José Revueltas, Los días terrenales. Published in Mexico in 1949, the novel was well received by literary critics but reviled by orthodox Marxist militants including Pablo Neruda. Revueltas had an uneasy relationship with the Communist Party, from which he was expelled twice. In the case of this novel, the comrades’ criticism persuaded him to withdraw the novel from circulation. José Revueltas Papers. © Ediciones ERA.

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Architectural treatise composed in Mexico ca. 1640 by Carmelite friar Andrés de San Miguel. The manuscript includes sections on geometry, mathematics, and astronomy as well as the narrative of a 1595 shipwreck in Florida. Genaro García Collection.

Detail, Map of Gueytlalpa, 1581. Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala, 1577–1585.

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First page of Romances de los señores de la Nueva España. Comprising thirty-six poems in Nahuatl, this unsigned manuscript is one of two principal sources of Aztec song and a key document in the study of Aztec life in the sixteenth century. The songs recorded in this volume were transcribed from native singers, providing a window into the oral tradition of ballads in colonial central Mexico. Genaro García Collection.

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facing: Engraving of Fray Antonio Margil de Jesús, Praeclarissimae Zacatecarum Civitati, Pietro Bombelli, Rome, 1769. Margil was an eighteenth-century Franciscan missionary who led the College of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de Zacatecas and founded several missions in northern New Spain, including Texas. He founded Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo on the banks of the San Antonio River in 1720. Genaro García Collection.

Photograph of María Luisa Puga, undated.

The diary of Mexican writer María Luisa Puga comprises 327 notebooks written from 1972 through 2004, the year of her death.  It is a diary of struggles both personal and artistic, a record of her intellectual interests, and a window into the social and political environments of her years in Europe, Africa, and Mexico. María Luisa Puga Papers © Herederos de María Luisa Puga.

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The Benson Latin American Collection as an Oppositional Borderlands Archive David Montejano

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was stumped when asked to reflect on my time doing research at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. My first thought was that this was a request for nostalgia, for memories of time at the Benson and the sentiments aroused by those memories. But I sensed little emotion or sentiment in my recollections. This differed from my recollections of time in the stacks of the main library at the University of Texas in the late 1960s. As an undergraduate then, I can recall riding an aging tower elevator with a wire mesh door and then trolling through dimly lit stacks with their musty odor, collecting an armful of books, and then planting myself at a carrel for an hour or two. That memory evokes sentiment, usually in the form of a smile. But the Benson Latin American Collection that I came to know in the late 1970s, in an open, airy space with plenty of natural light and comfortable chairs, with staff doing the stack runs, held no such Proustian remembrances. The modernist setting of Sid Richardson Hall discouraged such sentimentality. Yet thinking of my experience at the Benson did provoke some semiconscious, unresolved questions to come to the fore. The Sid Richardson complex, highlighted by the LBJ Presidential Library, was built in 1971, a year after I had graduated from UT and gone to Yale for my doctoral work. The Benson Collection was located in the south wing of Sid Richardson Hall, while the Eugene C. Barker Texas History

Detail of manuscript draft of poem by Alurista.

Center (later the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History) was in the north wing. During the late 1970s, when I did dissertation research for what would eventually become Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas (University of Texas Press, 1987), I relied on the Benson Collection and the neighboring Barker Center. I recall shuffling back and forth between the two. I joked about it to colleagues. Offhand, it made sense that these archives—one housing Mexican and Mexican American documents and the other housing Anglo-Texan documents—would provide different perspectives about the same events and actors. Were the Alamo defenders freedom fighters or squatters laying the groundwork for annexation? Were the Texas Rangers heroic lawmen or deputized vigilantes? Was the Chicano movement of the 1970s communist-inspired, or was it a civil rights campaign? I found supporting materials for one side or the other depending on which archive I was visiting. I took the division for granted and did not dwell on this impression then. But what did this seeming ethnic or political division say about the nature of history and history archives? Interrogating this impression, this joke about my shuffling back and forth, is the focus of my essay.

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Austin Chicano Huelga march from the capitol, November 1970. Economy Furniture Company Strike Collection, 1968–1972.

Because of their institutional setting, archival holdings often appear to be timeless and infallible repositories of facts and documents. The required identification, the signing in and signing out, the expected silence, the rules regarding access and handling of material, and so forth—all suggest that the archival library holds important primary material that can shed clear light on the past. But the collection of the material itself has a history that can be excavated and examined. How is knowledge constructed and preserved? How is it classified? Historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot has raised these questions about historical production in his provocative argument about “silencing the past.” According to Trouillot, “The production of historical narratives involves the uneven contribution of competing groups and individuals who have unequal access to the means for such production.”1 Trouillot was referring to silences in the official narrative of the Haitian Revolution, but his general argument was that the writing, collection, and classification of historical narratives are themselves reflections of an unequal social order. Accounts or documents that might question that inequality have been subject to omission, if not erasure, from the historical canon. To put it in prosaic terms, the victors usually write the history. In the case of Texas and the American Southwest, the victors did compose a dominant triumphal history of annexation and progress. But the silencing of the defeated Mexicans did not take place. The deposed Mexican elite was determined to make its views known. San Jacinto hero Juan Seguin wrote his memoirs, in large part, to vindicate his honor. In California, Mariano Vallejo, the last governor of Mexican California, did the same, telling Hubert Howe Bancroft, who was busy recording the testimonios of the Californio elite, that it was “my history, not yours” and that he, Vallejo, would write it.2 In the early twentieth century, J.  T. Canales of Brownsville wrote an essay to defend “bandit chief” Juan Cortina “in the court of history.”3 Many early examples of dissident Mexican and Mexican American voices taking exception to the dominant historical narrative have been recorded and collected; many more have yet to be recovered. Yet given the history of uneasy and unequal relations between Anglos and Mexicans in the region, one would be surprised if the collection of accounts and documents and their development into archives did not reflect this experience in some way. At the University of Texas, where historians and archivists began to assemble an impressive collection of Texana in the early twentieth century, two archives, ostensibly divided by geography, evolved to represent the relations between Anglos and Mexicans in the larger society. On the one hand, there emerged a Texas Collection focused on Anglo colonization and development.4 Celebratory in nature, the early acquisitions laid the groundwork for “Texas exceptionalism,” the notion that Texas represented the pinnacle of Anglo-Saxon civilization. Such views would be documented in the stories and recollections gathered by J. Evetts Haley

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for the Texas Collection in the 1940s and molded into epic 1930s narratives by Walter Prescott Webb in The Great Plains and The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense.5 The Texas Collection would become the Barker Texas History Center in 1945.6 Alongside the Texas collection there arose, with the acquisition of the Genaro García Collection in the 1920s, a Latin American one. Under the leadership of archivist-historians Carlos E. Castañeda and Nettie Lee Benson, the Latin American Collection developed into one of the premier archives for Mexican, Central American, and South American historical documents. Papers acquired from Mexican Americans, who were politely referred to as “Latin Americans” during the first half of the twentieth century, were reflexively included in the collection. Thus, insofar as Texas material was concerned, the two archives, with some notable exceptions, basically developed along ethnic lines. The division reflected the segregated society of the time; it was common sense. And once the founding faculty and staff had set the criteria for appropriate and desirable material, the evolution of the two archives was bound to unfold organically, mirroring the various interests and collection efforts of successive cohorts of faculty and archivists. If one can say that the Texas Collection reflected the views of West Texans like Webb and Haley, then one might say that the Latin American Collection reflected the views of two South Texans, Castañeda, who grew up in Brownsville, and Benson, who grew up in Sinton and taught English in Monterrey, Mexico. So the voices contesting Texas exceptionalism ended up in the Benson Collection, while those espousing it were in the Barker Texas History Center. This was the archival landscape I encountered when I began doing research for Anglos and Mexicans in the late 1970s. I was struck by a common thread in the professional and personal papers of key Mexican American leaders collected in the Benson—José de la Luz Sáenz, Carlos Castañeda, George I. Sánchez, Eleuterio Escobar, for example—all had been civil rights activists. All had been involved in challenges against the stark segregation prevalent in the 1940s and 1950s. If I wanted to look at the records of the Fair Employment Practices Committee of the World War II period, I would go to the Carlos Castañeda papers. If I wanted to look at campaigns for school desegregation and improvement, I would go to the Eleuterio Escobar and George I. Sánchez papers. On the other hand, if I wanted to understand the proponents of the status quo, I would wander over to the Barker Texas History Center, where I could find statements

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Latin American Collection librarian Carlos E. Castañeda (at right) showing a rare document to a patron, 1941. Carlos E. Castañeda Papers.

and documents from, say, Governors Coke Stevenson and Allen Shivers. The challengers of the segregated order were in the Benson, and across the breezeway in the Barker Texas History Center were its defenders. The two archives, reflecting the character of Anglo-Mexican relations of that time, seemed to stand in tense opposition to each other. I also became conscious of an irony that I was studying the making of segregation at a time when it had basically collapsed and that the collapse was what now made my revisionist history possible. I would not experience the backlash that Américo Paredes received in the late 1950s with the publication of “With His Pistol in His Hand,” about folk hero Gregorio Cortez eluding and outsmarting Texas lawmen.7 As a result of the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, a significant reordering of race and ethnic relations had taken place in Texas and the country. At the University of Texas at Austin, the construction of the monumental presidential library of Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1971, off to the side of and above Sid Richardson Hall, commemorated the politician most associated with the downfall of Jim Crow segregation. Less visible but important were the collateral changes taking place next door in both the Benson and Barker libraries and on the campus below. The Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS), founded in 1972, had begun to provide the base support for a pioneering cohort of Mexican American faculty and graduate students. In 1974 had come the creation of the Mexican American Library Project (MALP) at the Benson. An Ethnic Heritage Studies grant from the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) in 1979 resulted in a notable

Texas Rangers, ca. 1919. Roy Wilkinson Aldrich Papers, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

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growth in Mexican American holdings, including the papers of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the oldest Mexican American civic organization in the country. In short, documenting the Mexican American experience had become an explicit part of the Benson Collection’s mission. During the 1980s the Barker Texas History Center gradually expanded its holdings beyond Texas and southern history and evolved in 1991 into the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. Texas or southern exceptionalism was no longer the guiding philosophy.8 The Briscoe Center has continued to diversify its acquisitions, developing a civil rights component that includes the James Farmer papers. In recent years, the Briscoe Center purchased the José Enrique de La Peña diary, thus preserving a very different account of the battle of the Alamo and its aftermath. Such an acquisition would have stirred a controversy in the days of Haley and Webb. The

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Cover art for original edition of Américo Paredes’s “With His Pistol in His Hand” (University of Texas Press, 1958). Américo Paredes Papers.

Chaca Ramírez, Early morning sun on the way to Burlington, North Carolina, August 20, 1977. The photographer and civil rights activist Chaca Ramírez captured this moment during the Texas Farm Workers Union march from Austin to Washington, DC, June 18 to September 5 (Labor Day), 1977. Manuel (Chaca) Ramírez Photograph Collection. © Estate of Manuel (Chaca) Ramírez.

Bumper sticker. Raza Unida Party Records, 1969–1979.

Briscoe also acquired the voluminous papers of Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez, further weakening whatever racial-ethnic identity its holdings once had. Although the ethnic divide between the two archives has weathered over time, conflicting views on Texas politics and society still can be discerned between them. The holdings in the Benson and Briscoe not only shed light on the segregation of Anglo and Mexican in the first half of the twentieth century; they also tell the story—from different perspectives, of course—of the Chicano civil rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Narrating that story had been a project of mine long in the making and in fact had been my original dissertation topic. So twenty years after the publication of Anglos and Mexicans, I again found myself shuffling back and forth between the Benson and the Briscoe, carrying out research for the sequel, Quixote’s Soldiers (University of Texas Press, 2010), about the Chicano movement in San Antonio. The Benson was a critical resource. Here were the papers of the Raza Unida Party, of Ramsey and Albina (Abbie) Piña Muñiz, and of José Ángel Gutiérrez. The Benson also housed the impressive Chaca Ramírez photographic collection of Chicano activities and events in the 1970s. But what marked the completion of the research phase and pushed me to finish the

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book was the discovery—at the Briscoe—of a box in the voluminous papers of Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez labeled “Chicano movement.” Congressman Gonzalez was an outspoken adversary of the Chicano movement and the Raza Unida Party. In the box were police reports and photos of activists (and friends) I had interviewed, confidential memos from clergy about meetings I had attended, and so forth. The material in the box inspired me to bring Quixote’s Soldiers to completion. Again, I found that the Benson housed the challengers of the status quo and the Briscoe Center its defenders. A symbolic reminder of the political divide was the very name of the Briscoe Center for American History. Governor Dolph Briscoe had famously called the Raza Unida Party members “Castroites” and their stronghold of Zavala County “a little Cuba.” In short, the breezeway between the Benson and the Briscoe was a metaphorical political boundary. To represent the various and opposed perspectives in my work, crossing that boundary became a common routine. The Benson contains a rich collection of oppositional voices to the Texas status quo. The list of acquisitions over the years has been impressive and includes the papers of poet-activists Alurista, Ricardo Sánchez, Abelardo Delgado, and Carmen Tafolla

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top left: Raza Unida Party founder José Ángel Gutiérrez talking politics in Chicago, 1972. José Ángel Gutiérrez Papers. bottom left: Chicano march in Uvalde, Texas, 1972. José Ángel Gutiérrez Papers. right: Manuscript draft of poem by Alurista (Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia), undated. Alurista Papers. © Alurista.

and scholars Julian Samora, Américo Paredes, and Gloria Anzaldúa. Guiding the development of these holdings over the years have been archivists Elvira Chavarria, Gilda Baeza, and Margo Gutiérrez and consultant Martha Cotera. Faculty associated with CMAS—Ricardo Romo, Emilio Zamora, Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez, to name a few—have been instrumental in the acquisition of papers and collections. Ultimately the value of archives lies in the knowledge production, or publications, they yield. The decline of “Texas exceptionalism” as a narrative plot owes much to the rise of an impressive Mexican American historiography in the past thirty years. The primary material for the revisionist histories of Mario T. Garcia, Emilio Zamora, Neil Foley, Cynthia Orozco, and Carlos Blanton, to name but a few scholars, was culled from the Benson Collection. Because of these various efforts, the Benson has become one of the premier research libraries for those interested in Mexican American and borderlands history, politics, literature, and art. And because of its established tradition in documenting the Mexican American experience, the Benson will most likely continue to reflect the spirit of those challenging inequality and exclusion.

Notes 1. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 2. Genaro M. Padilla, My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). 3. J. T. Canales, Juan N. Cortina: Bandit or Patriot? (San Antonio: Artes Gráficas, 1951). 4. As Laura Gutiérrez-Witt puts it, “Tienen más que ver con la expansión anglosajona en Texas”; “La biblioteca latinoamericana: Nettie Lee Benson y la historia de México,” typescript, n.d., p. 5. 5. Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (Boston: Ginn, 1931) and The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935; reissued by the University of Texas Press in 1965). 6. See Patrick L. Cox and Kenneth E. Hendrickson Jr., eds., Writing the Story of Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013). 7. There was some apprehension about the public reception. Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas was masterfully crafted by

the University of Texas Press staff. But the author’s photo I had submitted had been so reduced on the jacket cover that one could not see that I was holding Walter Prescott Webb’s book, The Texas Rangers, in my hands. Lost was the point that Anglos and Mexicans was an explicit response to Webb and Texas historiography. 8. Curious to see whether one could detect a trace of “Texas exceptionalism” from the earlier period, I did a Google word search on that most sacred of all Texas topics—the Texas Rangers—to see how Mexican American critiques of that police force were classified. A Google search for “Texas Rangers” yielded 374 hits for the Briscoe Center and included the classic critique by Julian Samora, Joe Bernal, and Albert Peña. But there was an interesting item missing from the Briscoe holdings—the 1919 Texas legislative hearings conducted by J. T. Canales on Ranger atrocities in the lower Rio Grande Valley. That official state document was archived in the Benson Collection. How to explain this classification? A residue of the past, perhaps?

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Printed Proof The Cultural Politics of Ricardo and Harriett Romo’s Print Collection

Tatiana Reinoza

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hen every wall of their three-story home and every shelf of storage space had been filled to capacity, Ricardo and Harriett Romo began to contemplate the afterlife of their art collection. They thought carefully about approaching an institution and decided on the Benson Latin American Collection as their first choice. The Benson research library and archival collection is world-renowned for its books, periodicals, and manuscripts pertaining to Latin America and US Latinos from the sixteenth century to the present but perhaps less known for its holdings on the subject of contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o art.1 In 1998 the Romos—scholars, art collectors, and university administrators based in San Antonio, Texas—donated the first set of fine art prints to the Benson. Their print collection in this repository now holds more than 600 works on paper. Recounting my experiences with art and print culture in the archives of the Benson, in this essay I narrate my own “archive story” with the Ricardo and Harriett Romo Collection of Mexican American Art Prints.2 According to historian Antoinette Burton, “The claims to objectivity associated with the traditional archive must be met in part by telling stories about its provenance, its histories, its effect on its users, and above all, its power to shape all the narratives which are to be ‘found’ there.”3 In that

Detail of Sam Coronado, Henry Romo, 2007.

effort, I provide not only an ethnographic account of how I crafted a narrative around the Romos’ collecting practice based on encounters in the collection but also describe how the archive’s strategic placement legitimated the corpus of prints as a body of knowledge. After all, theorist Achille Mbembe notes, “the archive has neither status nor power without an architectural dimension,” and the site determines how we approach the preserved “fragments of lives and pieces of time.”4 The Benson provides the collection with a particular status. Transformed from visually autonomous objects to public documents, the art prints acquire a status of proof of the often unwritten histories, identities, and activisms of Latino communities in the United States. As Ricardo explained during an interview, “We felt that it would be within our own interest to have something, to have proof, evidence, that we were there, that we witnessed it, we captured it, and we have the ability to share it with other people.”5 The Romos’ decision to donate a large portion of their print collection to the Benson’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Division rather than to a museum intrigued me. Most collectors want their art to belong to a museum where it can be displayed as part of a permanent collection and accrue symbolic value. Until recently, however, few US museums have expressed a desire to willingly and systematically acquire Latina/o art.6 As academics (Ricardo a historian and Harriett a sociologist), the Romos established a close relationship with the Benson library through their own research and teaching. While Ricardo Romo served as vice provost for the University of  Texas at Austin, he placed a collection of his academic papers in the Benson’s archives. Their choice to gift an archival art collection to this institution was not only a matter of convenience and trust but part of a collecting impulse invested in securing the archivability of these works on paper and making them accessible to students. Studying the Romo Print Collection at the Benson was one of the formative experiences that set me on the path I walk today as an art historian who specializes in Latina/o graphic arts. Without the formalities or the restrictions characteristic of many special collections, the Benson provided the space and the freedom to spend entire afternoons looking closely at works by artists such as Amado Peña, Marta Sanchez, Liliana Wilson, and Terry Ybañez. I learned to properly handle prints and to understand the idiosyncratic systems that govern collection making, including how these objects live inside larger structures at the mercy of categorization, keywords, and internal filing systems. Among the many memorable items indicative of the Romos’ collecting practice, I found early limited editions made at Self Help Graphics in East Los Angeles, posters for groundbreaking exhibitions such as Los Four (1974) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and a vast collection of fine art prints from Texas-based Latina/o artists.

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Richard Duardo (1952–2014), Four Fridas, 2003. This serigraph with hand coloring was printed at Modern Multiples, Los Angeles. Ricardo and Harriett Romo Collection of Mexican American Art Prints. © Estate of Richard Duardo.

Each of these objects generated new questions about Ricardo and Harriett’s commitments to social activism and aesthetic interests as well as the weight of autobiography. Their acquisitions of early editions from Self Help Graphics, the flagship Chicana/o print workshop spearheaded by Sister Karen Boccalero in East LA, invited a venture into the social history of Southern California. Prior to completing graduate school, the Romos worked as public schoolteachers and witnessed the Mexican American student mobilization in the historic walkouts of 1968 and the shocking murder of Los Angeles Times journalist Ruben Salazar during the antiwar protest known as the Chicano Moratorium, as well as the splendor of public art forms in East Los Angeles, the community Ricardo researched for his doctoral dissertation.7 The Romos immediately recognized the value of Self Help Graphics’ artistic and community-building programs in opening new horizons for their K–12 inner-city students. Harriett recalled how the organization “was helping those kids in East LA, the kids that we were working with, to give them something to inspire them, to encourage them, to be creative and to reach the talent that we saw in those kids. We just decided that any time they had a show or a print series, we’d just buy as much [art] as we could. That became a way of beginning to build that collection.”8 Among those talented students, the trailblazer Richard Duardo, a former high school student of Ricardo’s, served as one of the first printers for the workshop and would eventually earn the moniker of “Warhol of the West.”9 Duardo’s Four Fridas (2003) graced the entryway to the Benson Rare Books and Manuscripts for most of my years as a graduate student. As the Romos began their quest to acquire more works on paper in the 1970s, the emerging field of Chicana/o art was also gaining ground at cultural institutions. Encountering the 1974 poster of Los Four propelled my interest in how the landmark exhibit had impacted the young collectors. Curated by Jane Livingston and Cecil Fergerson at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Four represented the first major breakthrough for Chicana/o art at a mainstream institution and featured the work of the East LA collective integrated by Carlos Almaraz, Gilbert “Magu” Lujan, Roberto “Beto” de la Rocha, and Frank Romero. Through the excesses of an urban baroque or the sensibility that cultural critic Tomás Ybarra-Frausto lauds as “rasquachismo,” the artists reconfigured LACMA’s white cube into a dazzling display of color and texture.10 Neo-expressionist paintings, collages, and drawings were hung salon style alongside large-scale assemblages made of found objects, a mural addressing a workers’ strike, and the front end of a Chevy low rider, all of which transformed the gallery.11 The Romos attended the opening, along with record numbers of diverse audience members, including many first-time visitors, who found themselves mingling among art, mariachi music, and sangria. The poet and art historian Roberto Tejada describes how the spectacle and

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display “must have struck some temperaments as a muddled assault on the institution’s devotion to the alleged ‘purity’ of modernist form.”12 Those temperaments became apparent in the disrupted expectations of critics such as the Los Angeles Times writer William Wilson, who voiced his discontent through racist characterizations: “Half of the Los Angeles Museum of Art’s contemporary gallery is its usual sleek and sophisticated self. The other half looks like the setting for a fiesta, a ‘West Side Story’ rumble or, possibly a revolution.”13 Beto de la Rocha’s unassuming ink drawing, featured on the exhibition poster, shows a male sitter looking directly at the viewer. With an exaggerated, perhaps nervous smile, the figure is aware of the viewer’s gaze, which quickly shifts to the intimate space of a home. De la Rocha’s fluid lines move the viewer across a living room filled with everyday objects that evince the markings of class and cultural specificity. A woven rug to his left and a two-tiered end table with a lamp lead the eye to a small entryway where a partially hidden figure pulls away in laughter. The small dining table is set with a pitcher and some plates as if in preparation for dinner. The most peculiar sight occurs above and behind the male figure with a mandorla that emanates from his wavy hair. Inside the mandorla, though hardly discernible, de la Rocha summons a Marian appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patroness of the Americas. The Catholic icon finds thematic resonance in the sign of the cross above the doorway, as it partially obscures a large painting over the sofa. Behind the figure, a television set announces the start of an All American series. In these revealing vignettes, the artist exposed museum visitors to alternative locations of embodied and situated knowledge that spoke of the Mexican American experience in East Los Angeles—a world so near and yet so foreign to many Angelenos. Records in the archive lead us to unpredictable places—both comforting and discomforting—that shape our views of history and our ability to rewrite its narratives. Looking closely at de la Rocha’s drawing as I struggled to understand Wilson’s hostile reaction led to more questions about the logic of modernism and how it produces disciplinary structures. What was the boundary or the point of rupture where Los Four’s experiments in the everyday threatened the authority or taste of a critic trained in the Western tradition? How did the collective’s exhibition challenge the museum’s modernist culture, which is part of a Eurocentric discourse

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Exhibition poster, Los Four: Almaraz/de la Rocha/Lujan/Romero, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1974. The offset lithograph poster features a 1972 untitled ink drawing by Beto de la Rocha. Ricardo and Harriett Romo Collection of Mexican American Art Prints. Courtesy of Los Angeles County Museum of Art. © Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Yolanda López, Arte picante, exhibition poster from offset lithograph, 1975. Rupert Garcia and Sammi Madison Garcia Collection, Department of Special Research Collections, University Library, University of California, Santa Barbara. Courtesy of University of California Santa Barbara Library. © Yolanda López.

intent on constructing “borders framed in the language of universals and oppositions,” as Henry Giroux notes in relation to the essentialist binary of high versus popular culture?14 Why does the notion of aesthetic quality invoke the anxious enforcement of institutional exclusions?15 These are, of course, larger questions that stem from archival encounters, but the collection itself dictates an intense questioning in our ways of seeing—how we see, what we see or cannot see—and these in turn provide insight into the processes of canon formation. Emboldened by Los Four’s ingress into one of Los Angeles’s premier institutions and aware of the stakes in opening new avenues for intervention at local institutions, the Romos delved into their first curatorial project. Arte Picante: Contemporary Chicano Art opened on January 11, 1976, at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery and solidified the couple’s role as cultural custodians of Chicana/o art and advocates of institutional inclusion. They had recently relocated to San Diego. Ricardo joined the faculty in the UCSD Department of History, while Harriett began her doctoral program in sociology. By the fall of 1975, they had assembled a committee of faculty and graduate students known as the Chicano Arts Festival Committee. Among them, the artist Yolanda López, who was working on her master’s in fine arts in the Department of Art, figured prominently as one of the organizers and contributed a portrait of her mother and grandmother for the exhibition poster. Featuring the work of thirty-three California-based artists, Arte Picante framed the contemporary survey within the liberatory politics of the Chicano movement. A rare copy of the exhibition brochure that I found in Ricardo’s personal papers describes their concept: “Arte Picante is an exhibition of the vitality of Chicano contemporary art, an art which is firmly rooted in the socio-political activity known as the Chicano movement. . . . And it is the expression of this life and heritage which we are extremely proud to exhibit on this University campus.”16 As witnesses of an art that aligned itself with a larger social movement, the Romos used their cultural capital to open doors to previously unavailable venues knowing full well this was “the first time that Mexican American art had been shown at UC San Diego.”17 Arte Picante produced an organic template of how to bring the art and politics of ethnic communities into the privileged spaces of knowledge production, an intention that continues to drive their collecting practice. We can surmise that, as curators who chose a bilingual and playful title (picante denotes hot or spicy), the Romos believed the art was striking and unapologetic. It seems the local critics also noticed, even if they made overarching ethnic generalizations like that which appeared in the weekly San Diego Reader: “The Latin American spirit with its passionate intensity, its heterogeneous roots and its commitment to radical consciousness is full of brio and emotionality that sets it apart from the restrained aestheticism of mainstream American art.”18 Their exhibit also came on

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the heels of ChicanArte (1975), a statewide survey of Chicano art held at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park. The Romos, in contrast, placed their sights on an institutional structure of higher education—a university art gallery—that would be widely available to students. Their choice highlights their commitment to developing a particular audience, the next generation of scholars and professionals who can potentially shift the values of a society that insists on keeping Latinos external to the national imaginary. When the Romos returned to Texas in 1980 to continue their academic careers at the University of Texas at Austin and later the University of Texas at San Antonio, they maintained their interest in cultural brokering at institutions of higher learning. While those first ten years in Southern California shaped their social consciousness as collectors, the next thirty years of their practice enthusiastically focused on supporting Latina/o art in the state of Texas. Their geographic relocation not only placed them closer to their families, including Ricardo’s in San Antonio’s West Side, but also positioned them at the forefront of a new developing market in Latina/o art. During the 1980s the Romos frequently attended openings at the Austin Museum of Art, where Ricardo served on the Board of Directors, and the new Austin art gallery Galeria Sin Fronteras, run by their friend and colleague Gilberto Cárdenas.19 Through these various social networks, they met artists such as César Martínez, Luis Jiménez, and Sam Coronado, and their collection began to embrace a Tejano sensibility. Their friendship with Coronado, in particular, created an opportunity to support the launch of Serie Project in 1993, a printmaking residency program that brought emerging and established multicultural artists to work alongside master printers for the production of limited editions.20 After completing two artist residencies at Self Help Graphics, Coronado returned to Austin with the purpose of establishing a similar program. Although several collaborative presses existed in the area, Coronado understood how race and class continued to segregate the field and limit Latina/o artists’ exposure to the medium. I knew whenever I started this thing that there was a need for it, because I tried to get into places to go do prints and I could never get in, and I knew a lot of people that wanted to do that, but it was either you knew somebody or your work was recognized. It was a good starting point, and I never thought it was going to last twenty years. I knew there was a need for it. And I knew that whatever need it was, it was going to have to be separated from what was going on around us, because we couldn’t rely on their support. We at that point were not accepted as printmakers, so I said, Well, what do we have to lose? What do I have to lose, except time and maybe some money? But I didn’t realize how much time and how much money [laughs].21

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Sam Coronado (1946–2013), Guerrillera, serigraph, 2001. The serigraph edition of fifty was printed at Coronado Studio as part of Serie Project’s eighth residency year, 2000–2001. Courtesy of Coronado Studio. © Coronado Studio.

Given their extensive support of Self Help Graphics, it was only natural that the Romos became dedicated patrons of Serie Project. From its inception, they made annual acquisitions that now boast a complete series of the first twenty years of its print production. Without the support of private patrons, artistic ventures such as these remain largely untenable. Tracing an archival formation allows us to see how the Romos became part of a precarious infrastructure supporting Latina/o artists during Texas’s neoliberal turn. By the 1990s, state sponsorship for the arts began to dwindle, and art organizations as well as individual artists turned to forms of commodity production such as limited-edition prints that could diversify their income sources.22 Serie Project and the Romos as patrons and cultural advocates were at the forefront of changing the landscape of cultural production for Latina/o artists from what Constance Cortez calls the “Third Coast.”23 These efforts helped promote the professional advancement of many Texas-based artists, including Celia Alvarez Muñoz, Rolando Briseño, Carlos Donjuan, Celina Hinojosa, and Michael Menchaca, who became part of a tradition of socially conscious printmaking. The Romos were at the center of this market shift, mostly as invisible and anonymous social actors in a field that was still malleable and could serve their interests in both art and education. It was in the Romos’ role as collectors and private patrons that I became familiar with their practice and advocacy. A few months prior to the start of graduate school in 2007, I met Sam Coronado at an arts activism panel.24 He spoke on the history of Serie Project, and during the slide show he lingered on one of his own prints, that of a young girl carrying a rifle, a poignant portrait of the guerrilla movement of my native country, El Salvador. Being a researcher who tries to make meaning of such chance encounters, I soon found myself leading a grassroots initiative to inventory prints and documents at Serie Project. My work with the organization led me to understand the crucial role of collectors in sustaining the vibrant print cultures in Texas, and this newfound insight served as the basis for my master’s thesis, entitled “Collecting in the Borderlands: Ricardo and Harriet Romo’s Collection of Chicano Art.”25 The results of my research prompted curatorial projects like the McNay Museum’s 2012 exhibition Estampas de la Raza: Contemporary Prints from the Romo Collection. Though many scholars continue to pursue research on Latina/o art from the focal points of Los Angeles and New York, archival collections such as the Romo Print Collection provide new ways of mapping Latino cultural production through these various networks of exchange. In their histories of collecting, scholars often obscure how much of the impulse to consume, preserve, and document arises from close relationships. Sam Coronado’s portrait Henry Romo (2007) shows a soldier squatting down with an air rifle in what appears to be a tropical swampland. His green fatigues and metal helmet disguise an earnest young man whose inscrutable identity the viewer attempts to glimpse through the engraved

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lines of a ghostly sienna heart. The heart, a recurring motif for Coronado, recalls his interest in religious icons as well as his personal struggles with heart disease. In Henry Romo, Coronado honored Ricardo’s father’s contribution to the “Greatest Generation,” when the young Mexican American entrepreneur voluntarily enlisted in the armed forces and fought bravely in the Philippines campaign of the Asiatic-Pacific theater.26 Lush vegetation surrounds the figure in the foreground. Palm leaves create diagonals on the bottom left, the large green leaves to the soldier’s right mimic the shape of a heart, and vertical tree trunks guide the viewer farther into a hazy, remote horizon. Using black-and-white vintage photographs from the Voces Oral History Project, also housed in the Benson’s Rare Books and Manuscripts, Coronado paid homage to the young Latinas/os who served their country during World War II. As a veteran himself, Coronado knew firsthand the struggles that Latina/o veterans face in a country where their allegiance is often suspect. The Henry Romo print also allowed him to make a meaningful gesture toward a friend and patron who had supported his greatest labor of love, his print workshop. Henry Romo became the centerpiece of an exhibition, Hard Fought: Sam Coronado’s WWII Series, that Benson Director Julianne Gilland and I co-curated in the spring of 2015. The narrative print offered an occasion to draw out a tapestry of complex connections between various archival collections— the Romo Print Collection, the Voces Oral History Project, the Sam Coronado papers, the Serie Project papers, all of which represent the rich social fabric of these visual print cultures. Private archives and art collections are formed for a variety of reasons, including desire, trauma, and political resistance, and they often circulate and function through alternative circuits. In the worst cases, they become systems of closed knowledge in which the accumulation of objects and their related histories are little more than privileged property. Placing the work at an accessible educational institution is a transgressive act that defies that logic. The material culture specialist Susan Pearce asserts that the placement process is integral to the archive’s formation: “The transformation from formally private to formally public, which can be quite an extended process, is an important aspect of collection-making.”27 As educators and scholars, the Romos envision their print collection as a teaching portfolio that can be used by faculty, students, and community members.28 In Harriett’s view, the collection needs to serve a larger purpose: “I mean, what good is it going

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Sam Coronado, Henry Romo, 2007. The serigraph was printed at Coronado Studio. Ricardo and Harriett Romo Collection of Mexican American Art Prints. © Coronado Studio.

to do to have it under our bed, or in our flat file, if it can be available to students to see the range of themes and the different artists and what they were doing over a period of time?”29 Taking print culture out of circulation or simply out of its wooden frame invokes the process of mourning, the “death” of the object, or what Mbembe calls its “interment”: “Archiving is a kind of interment, laying something in a coffin, if not to rest, then at least to consign elements of that life which could not be destroyed purely and simply.”30 And yet, it also symbolizes a new life; the prints in the Romo collection acquire a new role in the realm of knowledge production. In my attempt to understand the placement of this collection at the Benson, I realized how much of the Romos’ decision underscores their desire to make the academy a more inclusive space. Their interest in the democratization of education as well as the “democratic multiple” aligns with the values of the Chicano movement, which shaped the Romos’ careers and intellectual activism. Chicana feminist theorist C. Alejandra Elenes explains how the social movement stressed the importance of creating new sites of intellectual inquiry: The efforts and struggles of the Chicano movement to increase the presence of Chicana/o students in higher education, and to create “new” academic spaces to study systematically the experience and contributions of Chicanas/os to US society, has produced significant scholarship that contributes to the reconceptualization of “American” intellectual traditions and canons.31

The Romos prioritize how these objects allow students to participate in constructing new narratives on Latino art history and the students’ own political subjectivities. For many students, like myself, particularly those reared between cultures and languages, Elenes finds, “the power to name/ construct their world is crucial to reconstructing their histories and cultures.”32 The Benson adds the architectural dimension that imbues the archive with a generative power. This archive story is a testament to the many ways the Benson has shaped my intellectual formation as an image specialist. I hope it will inspire other students in the humanities and social sciences to craft their own stories by finding their way among special collections that speak of the everyday lives, expressive cultures, and political discourses of Latinos in the United States. Moreover, my experiences with these collections inform my commitment in activist scholarship methods.33 Working in alignment with marginalized or underrepresented communities is not only a valid practice but a vital one from which to build new scholarship, and archive building is essential to this endeavor. Much work remains to be done in identifying Latina/o art manuscripts, objects, and primary documents to ensure their conservation and secure their placement in an accessible

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public collection.34 Among the most important lessons I take from the Benson is an understanding that archives are made up of notes, bills, lists, letters, prints, and posters and yet so much more. Archives are relations forged over time, hopes and dreams of lives that resist being forgotten, and new histories waiting to be written. Notes

1. Although the terms “Chicanx” and “Latinx” are becoming more common in everyday use, I adopt “Chicana/o” and “Latina/o” as the preferred terms used by contributors in this edited volume. 2. My use of the concept heeds the call of historian Antoinette Burton, who views archives as products of political, cultural, and economic struggles that require us to tell stories of their formation in order to dispel their mythical or “natural” origins; Antoinette Burton, “Archive Fever, Archive Stories,” in Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and Writing of History, ed. Burton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 6. 3. Ibid. 4. Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Saleh (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), 19. 5. Ricardo Romo, interview by the author, San Antonio, October 26, 2008. 6. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and National Portrait Gallery are among the first to hire curators of Latina/o art and establish this focus as part of their permanent collections, only after considerable pressure from advocacy groups. 7. Ricardo Romo’s doctoral dissertation, later turned monograph, on the history of East Los Angeles was a major contribution to urban history; Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983). 8. Harriett Romo, interview by the author, San Antonio, October 26, 2008. 9. Richard Duardo, interview by Steve Olson, Frank 46 (Fall 2011): 88. 10. “Rasquachismo is a sensibility that is not elevated and serious, but playful and elemental.

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It finds delight and refinement in what many consider banal and projects an alternative aesthetic—a sort of good taste of bad taste. It is witty and ironic, but not mean-spirited (there is sincerity in its artifice)”; Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility,” in Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, UCLA, 1991), 155. 11. To date, the best visual documentation of the exhibition and its opening reception is the documentary film titled after the collective; Jim Tartan, dir., Los Four, 16 mm film, 28 min., Ruiz Productions, Los Angeles, 1974. 12. Roberto Tejada, “Los Angeles Snapshots,” in Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960– 1980, ed. Kellie Jones (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2011), 76. 13. William Wilson, “A Bit of the Barrio at County Museum,” Los Angeles Times, February 27, 1974. 14. Henry A. Giroux, “Modernism, Postmodernism, and Feminism: Rethinking the Boundaries of Educational Discourse,” in Postmodernism, Feminism, and Cultural Politics: Redrawing Educational Boundaries, ed. Giroux (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 22. 15. For a critical reading of the notion of aesthetic quality see Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 169. 16. Arte Picante, exhibition brochure, Ricardo Romo Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection (Benson Collection). 17. Harriett Romo, interview by the author, San Antonio, October 26, 2008. 18. Steve Kowit, “Neither Gringo nor Mexican,” San Diego Reader, January 15–21, 1976. 19. Harriett and Ricardo Romo, “Four Decades

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of Collecting,” in Estampas de la Raza: Contemporary Prints from the Romo Collection (San Antonio: McNay Art Museum and University of Texas Press, 2012), 18–19. 20. Sam Coronado took an interesting approach in separating his print workshop, Coronado Studios, from the nonprofit artist residency Serie Project. His hope was to create a sustainable enterprise by having a commercial facility that would do contract printing and serve as the exclusive publisher for the Serie Project, while the nonprofit would give the organization access to grant funding. Legally and financially they remain two separate entities. 21. Sam Coronado, interview by the author, Austin, March 6, 2013. 22. One can study this shift by looking at Serie Project’s financial records as well as grant applications that detail its budgetary restrictions and aims; Serie Project Inc. Records, Benson Collection. 23. For more on the genealogy of Chicana/o art from the Third Coast see Constance Cortez, “Aztlán in Tejas: Chicana/o Art from the Third Coast,” in Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge, by Cheech Marin, Max Benavidez, Constance Cortez, and Tere Romo (New York: Bulfinch Press, 2002), 32–42. 24. “Abriendo Brecha” is an activist scholarship conference based at the University of Texas at Austin that draws together scholars, activists, artists, and others whose research and creative intellectual work is developed and carried out in alignment with communities, organizations, movements, or networks working for social justice. 25. Tatiana Reinoza (Perkins), “Collecting in the Borderlands: Ricardo and Harriett Romo’s Collection of Chicano Art” (master’s thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2009).

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26. Ricardo Romo, “Henry Romo,” audio recording, Guide by Cell (512–895–9154) no. 1, February 2015, Benson Collection. 27. Susan M. Pearce, Museums, Objects, and Collections: A Cultural Study (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 37. 28. I have personally taken students to work directly with prints in the Romo Collection when I served as a teaching assistant in George Flaherty’s course Chicano Art: Histories and Futures in fall 2012. 29. Harriett Romo, interview by the author, San Antonio, October 26, 2008. 30. Mbembe, “Power of the Archive,” 22. 31. C. Alejandra Elenes, “Reclaiming the Borderlands: Chicana/o Identity, Difference, and Critical Pedagogy,” in The Critical Pedagogy Reader, ed. Antonia Darder, Marta Baltodano, and Rodolfo D. Torres (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2003), 194. 32. Elenes, “Reclaiming the Borderlands,” 206. 33. Anthropologist Charles Hale defines these methods as involving horizontal dialogues, broad-based participation, critical scrutiny of analytic and theoretical frameworks, and thorough critical self-reflection; Charles R. Hale, Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 8. 34. New efforts are under way with the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, spearheaded by Latino collections specialist Josh Franco, to secure archival materials by Latina/o artists around the country. Through a distinct regional approach, the Benson also acquires artists’ personal papers of local significance, including those of Sam Coronado, Carmen Lomas Garza, Marta Sanchez, Regina Vater, and Liliana Wilson, among others.

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Telling Treasures The Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Archive at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection

Norma E. Cantú

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Gloria Anzaldúa, manuscript draft of Borderlands, with her annotations and drawings, October 1986. Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers. © Gloria E. Anzaldúa Literary Trust.

ibraries are special, magical, mysterious, and sacred spaces for me. Every time I walk into a library of any kind I get a rush, a feeling that all is right with the world. In Denver, in Washington, DC, in London, Paris, Madrid, or Laredo, Texas. Public, academic, private collections—the libraries where I have worked have never let me down, regardless of how grumpy or helpful the librarians. My love of books no doubt comes from an instinctive knowledge that I would make words my life’s work. Such love was nurtured by my early forays as a child and through my teens to the Laredo Public Library—up above the police station in downtown Laredo—with its woodwork and musty smell of books. Years later when I worked at Central Power & Light Company only a block away from the public library, I would spend my lunch breaks browsing through the stacks. This love continued when I was a work-study student at the library at Laredo Junior College (it was not yet Laredo Community College), where my job consisted of reshelving books in the stacks of the college library housed in the former chapel at Fort McIntosh. As a scholar I particularly revere academic libraries; they hold a special fascination for me, as do the research librarians who help me navigate the intricate resources, tracking down obscure references or rare tomes—even more so in the distant past of graduate school when I would take refuge in the stacks at the libraries at Texas A&I in Kingsville and the University

of Nebraska in Lincoln—and especially so, the rare-books librarians in Madrid. What a thrill it was to find a book I was looking for in the card catalog—remember those? I remember the utter joy of just wandering around browsing the stacks and serendipitously finding just the right book that would help me with whatever research I was doing—eighteenth-century drama, pageantry in medieval times, poems about picking cotton by a Chicana poet. I remember the Sala de Raros at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid and the wonder and awe I felt as I worked with manuscripts that were more than 500 years old. Regardless of these joys over the years— shaping my identity as a reader, a researcher, a writer—regardless, one library remains a constant: the Nettie Lee Benson. It holds treasures that speak to my soul and to each and every stage of my life. It is telling that I don’t recall the first time I visited the Benson; I do, however, recall feeling especially moved by its holdings—Latin American collections! I yearned to read the literature that my literature classes had not even acknowledged. The special collections signify for me an incomparable treat for scholars. Yes, I loved the idea of the Benson, but I loved the works housed there even more. Yet, it was not until the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa archives found a home there in October 2005, only a year and a few months after her untimely death in May 2004, that I felt an even stronger attachment and reverence for the holdings. Later at a CantoMundo workshop one summer, Margo Gutiérrez set up a display for the CantoMundo participants, all Latino poets. We didn’t want to leave! We kept marveling at the first editions but even more so at the ephemera, the manuscripts, the handwritten notes by authors like Cortázar. But we stood in awe, above all, admiring Anzaldúa’s documents, with her drawings—stick figures that appeared to be mere doodling, the “monitos” she was known for—along with the many revisions to her texts, evidence of painstaking work. I had looked at some manuscripts, had held some of the manila folders with the letters, class notes, drafts of manuscripts, and so forth, but it was another thing to see my fellow bibliophiles marvel in unison at her work.

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Gloria Anzaldúa, detail, undated transparency illustration for a lecture. Using an overhead projector, Anzaldúa incorporated numerous drawings and symbols into her lecture “gigs” across the country. Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers. © Gloria E. Anzaldúa Literary Trust.

I know of several scholars who have worked in the archives—friends like established scholars Claire Joysmith, Ricardo F. Vivancos Pérez, Romana Radlwimmer, and Amelia Montes, as well as younger and up-and-coming scholars like Lauren Espinoza. Chicana lesbian critic Amelia Montes scoured the material looking for clues about Anzaldúa’s illness and discovered the diabetes logs—a breakthrough in her research for her forthcoming book. Lauren Espinoza, before going on to graduate studies in Arizona, was an undergraduate at UT–Pan American when she first worked in the archive for an exhibit at Anzaldúa’s alma mater, Pan-American University, now the University of Texas–Rio Grande Valley. That first exhibit in 2009 was part of an event, “El Retorno,” that has become an ongoing annual event honoring Anzaldúa’s legacy. In conversation with Lauren, she shared with me the indescribable feeling, her awe as she handled the papers that Anzaldúa had handled, of finding the images for their exhibit, and the thrill of studying the works. One of the preeminent Anzaldúa scholars in Mexico, Claire Joysmith, who is on the faculty at the Center for Research on North America (CISAN) at the Universidad Autónoma de México, has worked extensively in the Benson archive. Her Spanish translations of Anzaldúa’s poetry and of some selected essays have paved the path for Anzaldúa studies in Mexico. In April 2013, in preparation for a talk I was to deliver at the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas in Austin, I sent an email request to the membership list of the Gloria Anzaldúa Society requesting users’ views and comments about the value of the archive. Several scholars responded including Lauren Espinoza and Claire Joysmith. Because I continued thinking about the archive, I continued to engage with Joysmith on her findings, especially as we worked on the translation into Spanish through 2014. She generously shared her views on the impact of working in the archive and in an email wrote, “For my work in terms of being able, for example, to look at all the poem drafts prior to the ones that got published, [the archive was] very revealing. . . . It gave me an interesting insight into Gloria’s process of revision and writing/re-writing. Very helpful and insightful.”1 Joysmith continued, “The other part is looking at her essays in their different forms, how she used some material for some work and re-wrote and then included in other written stuff.” More specifically, Joysmith identified how Anzaldúa “refined her terminology in different ways and it was through prolonged processes of writing and re-writing, re-contextualizing and re-framing, as well as allowing her terms to have a life of their own, that terms such as Nepantla (among others) became alive, grew stronger and more complex through their shiftings.”2 Joysmith has continued to write about this, and she edited the 2012 volume Nepantla: Liminalidad y transición.3

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Gloria Anzaldúa, details, predraft notes for Borderlands. Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers. © Gloria E. Anzaldúa Literary Trust.

Detail of archival box and folder “Visual arts Aztec exhibit.” Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers. © Gloria E. Anzaldúa Literary Trust.

Despite her glowing review of the Benson’s Anzaldúa archive, Joysmith in an earlier email did have a criticism, one that I have heard from others. She wrote, “Yo encontré muchas cosas anómalas por cierto” (I found many anomalies, in fact).4 Perhaps the discrepancies are due to unfamiliarity with the work or with the initial work done on the archive by Anzaldúa’s friend in California before the material was transferred to Austin. Others were surprised at the easy access and what they perceived as a lack of control of materials, with security and handling restrictions seeming more relaxed than they have experienced elsewhere. Joysmith, who published Anzaldúa’s last essay in her book One Wound for Another (2005),5 continued in the email, It has also helped me, I mean my research at the Nettie, to gather info on Gloria’s particular ways of gathering and regrouping her material for specific aims/articles that have been published. This is the case, in particular something I have worked on, of her essay in “One Wound for Another,” which I am translating and creating some minimal glossary for.6

So, the archive has helped scholars in many ways to produce outstanding scholarly work on Anzaldúa and on borderlands studies. Aside from the wonderful scholarship that the archive has nurtured, others have also found inspiration and information that has translated into various media including film and art. For the Italian literary critic Paola Zaccaria the archives provided evidence for much of what she gleaned from her interview with Anzaldúa in the late 1990s. Zaccaria and her son, Danielo Basilio, created a documentary biography of the borderlands scholar who so touched Zaccaria’s own work and life. Altar: Cruzando fronteras (2009),7 a montage of video and still imagery with music and voice, is a tribute to Anzaldúa; its creators went beyond the archive and its treasures to the living archive in the communities where Anzaldúa lived and worked—Austin, San Antonio, the Valley of South Texas, and California. The documentary is the subject of a chapter in Diana Bowen’s dissertation, whose purpose, she stated, is to “derive Anzaldúa’s theory of social change.”8 The Chicano installation artist Josh T. Franco, of Marfa, Texas, now working for the Smithsonian Institution, has also found inspiration in the Benson for his work. His art draws from the Anzaldúa archive to achieve

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Detail, Coyolxauhqui, undated artwork by Gloria Anzaldúa. Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers. © Gloria E. Anzaldúa Literary Trust

engaging installations. Inspired by Yoko Ono’s Telephone Piece, Franco’s Teléfono Piece (Para las Veteranas, con respeto y amor) taps the robust correspondence in the archive.9 He and fellow performance artist Valerie Goodnow set up a recycled red public phone booth where the “audience” could dial in and listen to Franco read letters addressed to Anzaldúa by scholars, friends, and students. In the description he explained that the “letters are sourced from the many personal correspondences available in the Anzaldúa archive at the UT Austin’s Benson Collection.” In another installation piece, titled In Tlilli, in Tlapalli: Three Tejanos in Red and Black, Franco, assisted by Maya Cueva, has created art using texts from the Anzaldúa archive in addition to published texts by renowned Chicana author Sandra Cisneros and the Marfa-based artist Donald Judd.10 One of my own interests has been the writing workshops that Anzaldúa conducted, so I consulted some notes from one particular folder at the Benson that was labeled “Correspondence”; however, it contained not letters but students’ biographical information and essays.11 In it I found that several women friends had been in her workshop, such as the Puerto Rican author Aurora Levins Morales. Workshop participants were to fill out the standard information: name, address, date of birth. Then they were asked to briefly write in response to the following prompts:

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Topics I hope to explore in this workshop Areas I hope to see addressed in this workshop What I hope will happen in my writing What else my instructor needs to know about me to facilitate my writing What I hope to learn

This intake form, and how the participants responded in filling out the forms and writing brief responses to the prompts unlocked several ideas for me. The participants addressed Anzaldúa directly, of course, as she was the one conducting the workshop, but they also were introspective and reflective in their answers. One wrote, “you smile at us and say writing is easy. I wish I felt that way . . . to me writing is such a mystery. I don’t believe in muses and having a room of your own and mystical gods who live inside typewriter keys. Perhaps that makes it sound too unreachable and it’s already that way for me. So I hope writing will be less mysterious and threatening.” I intuitively deciphered that the strange numbers handwritten next to the date of birth on the student papers meant that Anzaldúa was practicing numerology. For example, this is what appeared in one student’s paper: “dob—feb 15, 1950 = 2, 6, 6 = 14/5.” Obviously, Anzaldúa arrived at the key number, 5, by adding the digits as is the practice in numerology. Now, what she did with this information is not apparent from the papers filed, but no doubt she gained insight into the best way to teach or treat the participants in the workshop. Andrea Lunsford’s interview includes Anzaldúa’s teaching and theorizing as part of what Anzaldúa described as her “liberatory goal . . . to create possibilities for people, to look at things in a different way so they can act . . . in a different way. It’s like a freeing up, an emancipating.”12 So using numerology, she could add to her pedagogical toolbox. Alongside the pedagogical practices found in the various files that the Benson archive holds, I am also interested in her writing and Chicana theories, perhaps following her urging that we must find new theories, that we must carve out theories of our own to study our work. Thus, I eagerly read “El desarrollo and future of Chicana theory: the Economy of Self-development” and found affirmation for some of my own theories of how writing is more than just the glyphs on the page. She wrote, “We must first find the system of ‘writing’ within each of us, work it out with our own imagination, with our own dream life, emotional truths, and moral and spiritual values.”13 This more holistic and all-encompassing view of writing—any writing—fit my own thoughts. I noted that she wrote this on “27 October 1988” and remembered a discussion we had about writing around that time in Austin, during one of her visits from California. Another gem in “El desarrollo” is in the section “Transmutation of Art and Theory,” where she asked, “What if writing can be gazed at and not just read?” and

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notes, “Art = into discursive form (transmutation).”14 I felt I had found a lode of rich material for my work; unfortunately, time has not allowed me the luxury of long stretches of time mining the archive. This file, along with several others not available yet for consultation, includes material that I suspect is further developed and elaborated upon in her drafts of a manuscript on the teaching of writing. One frustration many scholars have felt is the inaccessibility of certain materials.15 However, at least one scholar has told me that upon request to the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Literary Trust, she was granted access to look at one particular essay and its many drafts. Austrian scholar Romana Radlwimmer and Spanish scholars like Ricardo F. Vivancos Pérez and Carolina Núñez Puente have worked in the archive, as have a number of other international scholars. Relying heavily on the archive and its treasures, Vivancos and I have prepared a new critical edition of Borderlands.16 I am happy to report that while scholars come from all over the world to consult the Benson’s Anzaldúa archive, the professors and students at UT Austin have also made good use of it. My friend Maria E. Franquiz, current dean of the College of Education at the University of Utah, brought elementary schoolchildren into the archive with tremendous results as the children marveled at the children’s books in draft form and at the entire archival enterprise. At least one doctoral student has focused her scholarship exclusively on the archive; Gloria Anzaldúa, ca. 1991. Photo by Diana Isabel Bowen’s dissertation, “Visuality and the Archive: The Gloria Annie F. Valva. Gloria Evangelina Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers as a Theory of Social Change” (2010), brings Anzaldúa Papers. to the forefront the archive itself. Bowen posited that “the diverse array of images argue [sic] that Anzaldúa’s theory continue [sic] to evolve.”17 Manuscripts may be the most useful materials for scholars either using Anzaldúan thought or analyzing her writing, but the holdings in the Benson’s Anzaldúa archives include more than manuscripts and texts. While the archive at the Benson houses the T-shirts, her altares (altars) reside in California. Twenty-five boxes and a roll box hold the rattles, candles, altar cloths, masks, figurines, and other objects used by Anzaldúa in her altares.18 But where are her Virgen de Guadalupe earrings? And the lagartijo pin? The hats? If as Bowen argues the Benson’s Anzaldúa archive is alive and in its multiple images continues to theorize Latina social change, then these too could form part of the whole picture. The Anzaldúa archive is many things: letters, drafts of poems, essays, creative work, including science

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fiction and children’s stories, and artwork—scribbles and doodles as well as paintings; the archive is all of this and more. It is an immense repository of a woman thinking, creating herself as she delves into the innermost parts of her being, carving her own image through words and creative expression. Like the proverbial blind men defining an elephant, the archive is many things to many people—the artists, the researchers, the children, the lesbian-community scholars, the teenager looking for affirmation, the Italian looking for a theory that speaks to her experience of borders. These and others will find that the archive feeds their many hungers, and as it is ever changing and ever evolving—the film Altar was added to the archive, for example—it will be there for generations to come as the field of Chicana studies grows, as we continue excavating in the rich mine for that rarest of elements—ourselves.

Notes

1. Claire Joysmith, email to the author, November 17, 2014. 2. Ibid. 3. Claire Joysmith, ed., Nepantla: Liminalidad y transición; escritura chicana de mujeres (Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2012). 4. Claire Joysmith, email to the author, April 17, 2013. 5. Claire Joysmith, One Wound for Another / Una herida por otra: Testimonios de Latin@s in the U.S. through Cyberspace (11 de septiembre de 2001–11 de marzo de 2002), Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2005. 6. Claire Joysmith, email to the author, November 17, 2014. 7. Danielo Basilio and Paola Zaccaria, dirs., Altar: Cruzando fronteras, film (Regione Puglia, Universitá Degli Studi di Bari, 2009). 8. Diana Bowen, “Visuality and the Archive: The Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers as a Theory of Social Change” (PhD diss., University of Texas, 2010), vii. 9. Josh Franco and Valerie Goodnow, Teléfono Piece (Para las Veteranas, con respeto y amor), installation, University of Texas at San Antonio, 2011, joshtfranco.com/telfono-piece/ vwsuom8f5vzbtaxxivmjju9onwqtyj. 10. Josh Franco, In Tlilli, in Tlapalli: Three Tejanos

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in Red and Black, installation, University of Texas at San Antonio, 2013, joshtfranco.com/ project-5/2014/5/7/view-1. 11. Correspondence, box 27, folder 11, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers, 1942–2004 (Anzaldúa Papers), Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin. 12. Andrea A. Lunsford, “Toward a Mestiza Rhetoric: Gloria Anzaldúa on Composition and Postcoloniality,” JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 18, no. 1 (1998): 6. 13. Gloria Anzaldúa, “El desarrollo and future of Chicana Theory,” December 25, 2001, pp. 3–4, box 60, folder 1, Anzaldúa Papers. 14. Ibid., p. 7. 15. Editors’ note: Researcher access to and/or reproduction of some materials has been restricted by the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Literary Trust for a period of time due to concerns about privacy and confidentiality, publication rights, and as requested by Anzaldúa. 16. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands, ed. Ricardo F. Vivancos Pérez and Norma Cantú (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, forthcoming 2019). 17. Bowen, “Visuality and the Archive,” 126–127. 18. The Gloria Anzaldúa Altares Collection is housed in Special Collections and Archives, University Library, University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Crystal City, Texas, student walkout to protest educational inequality, ca. 1969. José Ángel Gutiérrez Papers.

plates

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LULAC magazine cover, October 1980. The photo and article celebrate the new home of the league’s archive at the Benson. LULAC Archives.

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Founding meeting of the League of United Latin American Citizens, Corpus Christi, 1929. LULAC Archives.

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Chelo González Amezcua, Mansión de aves y hadas, 1973. Born in Piedras Negras, Mexico, in 1903 and living most of her life in Del Rio, Texas, the visual artist Chelo González Amezcua became nationally known for her work, especially the intricate pen and ink drawings she called filigranas. The Benson holds González’s papers as well as photographs of her work by Chaca Ramírez. Manuel (Chaca) Ramírez Photograph Collection. © Chelo González Amezcua.

Chelo González Amezcua, El foro de las tres divas, n.d. Manuel (Chaca) Ramírez Photograph Collection. © Chelo González Amezcua.

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First reel and schedule, Latino USA radio program, May 2, 1993. The weekly public radio program Latino USA began in 1993 as a production of UT Austin’s KUT radio station and the Center for Mexican American Studies. Latino USA Records, 1993–2010.

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KCOR television program featuring Lalo Astol (far left). Undated. The actor and radio and television personality Lalo Astol hosted programs in the early days of San Antonio TV station KCOR, which broadcast Spanish-language programming from 1946 to 2014. Lalo Astol Papers.

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Hand-drawn, undated course flyer for two university courses in Mexican American studies taught by Chicano poet Alurista (Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia). Alurista Papers.

A child playing oboe in a school bathroom, ca. 1940s, and a Liga ProDefensa Escolar promotional image. In 1934 Eleuterio Escobar founded the Liga Pro-Defensa Escolar (School Defense League) to expose and address the inadequate conditions of schools in San Antonio’s predominantly Mexican American West Side. The league was active until 1956 and represented numerous organizations in pursuit of equal school conditions in San Antonio. Eleuterio Escobar Papers.

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Scrapbook page with news clippings collected by Ben Garza, the first national president of LULAC, 1929–1930. Ben Garza Collection, Presidential Papers Project, LULAC Archives.

Order of Knights of America Christmas celebration for children, San Antonio, December 25, 1927, and Order of Sons of America members, Corpus Christi, 1927. Materials in the Louis Wilmot Collection and the Oliver Douglas Weeks Collection in the LULAC Archives document the activities of Order of Knights of America (1927–1929) and Order of Sons of America (1921–1929), two of LULAC’s predecessor organizations. LULAC Archives.

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Mexican American World War II veterans and Voces participants Julia Aguillon (top left), Richard Candelaria (top right), and Dennis Baca (bottom, at left). Professor Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez launched the Voces Oral History Project at UT Austin in 1999 to document and celebrate the contributions of US Latinas/os during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Voces Oral History Project Archive.

José de la Luz Sáenz at a meeting of the American Legion in San Antonio, 1928. After serving in the US Army in France and occupied Germany during World War I, the South Texas native José de la Luz Sáenz became an early leader for Mexican American civil rights. José de la Luz Sáenz Papers.

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Gloria Anzaldúa, El cenote, undated transparency drawing for a lecture. Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers. © Gloria E. Anzaldúa Literary Trust.

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Arturo Lindsay, Torkwase of Oyo, lithograph, 2001. The Philadelphia-based Brandywine Workshop and Archives supports the creation and preservation of culturally diverse American art and the participation of multi-ethnic artists like the Panamanian American Arturo Lindsay. The Brandywine collection of art prints at the Benson is one of its first satellite archival collections, jointly acquired by the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies and the Benson in 2016 as part of the Black Diaspora Archival Initiative, a collaborative effort of UT Black Studies and LLILAS Benson. © Arturo Lindsay.

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Carmen Lomas Garza, Lotería— Tabla llena, etching, 1972. Carmen Lomas Garza Papers and Artworks. © Carmen Lomas Garza.

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Carmen Lomas Garza, Tabla favorita de Tía Tencha, etching, 1972. Carmen Lomas Garza Papers and Artworks. © Carmen Lomas Garza.

George I. Sánchez, ca. 1930s, and National Conference of Mexican American Issues, Washington, DC, 1966. The educator and scholar George I. Sánchez (1906–1972) was a national civil rights advocate and a professor in UT’s Departments of History and Philosophy of Education for more than thirty years. George I. Sánchez Papers.

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Chaca Ramírez, Texas Farm Workers Union marchers at the Lincoln Memorial, September 5, 1977. Political action by Mexican Americans in the United States was documented by Manuel (Chaca) Ramírez, who studied photojournalism at UT Austin. In the late 1970s he photographed several Chicano activist actions, including this 1977 march to reform Texas and US labor laws. The workers walked from San Juan in the lower Rio Grande Valley to Austin in the spring of that year. The march continued to Washington, DC, ending with this Labor Day rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Manuel (Chaca) Ramírez Photograph Collection. © Estate of Manuel (Chaca) Ramírez.

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Manuscript playbook and company actress, undated. The Carlos Villalongín Dramatic Company gave theater performances across Texas and northern Mexico during the first quarter of the twentieth century and established a base in San Antonio during the Mexican Revolution. Carlos Villalongín Dramatic Company Records.

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Mary Ann Smothers Bruni, photo of Ray Elizondo (top: right) and Tony Vasquez Sr. (top: left) performing as devils, San Antonio, Texas, 1988, and photo of Mathias Palacios (bottom: center) performing as a shepherd, San Antonio, ca. 1997–2000. Bruni took more than 10,000 photographs to document Los Pastores festivals as traditionally performed in San Antonio from the 1980s through the 2000s. Mary Ann Smothers Bruni “Los Pastores” Photographs. © Mary Ann Smothers Bruni.

Yreina Cervantez, UT Austin Chicano Mexicano Art Symposium poster, 1986. Ricardo and Harriett Romo Collection of Mexican American Art Prints. © Yreina Cervantez.

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Raza Unida Party early action, undated. José Ángel Gutiérrez Papers.

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Américo Paredes, undated handwritten score for bolero “Morena,” and Paredes at the guitar, 1997. Photo by Valentino Mauricio. Américo Paredes Papers, 1886–1999.

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Marta Sanchez, undated draft for Men on the Tracks, watercolor and ink on paper. The Chicana artist Marta Sanchez’s Train Yards series reflects memories of her childhood home in San Antonio, Texas. Marta Sanchez Papers. © Marta Sanchez.

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César Chávez (third from left) on the picket line, Austin, February 6, 1971. With him (left to right) are Frank Ramírez, Lencho Hernández, Pancho Medrano (UAW), and Jess González during the Austin Chicano Huelga. The labor activists were supporting the 1968–1971 strike by Local 456 of the Upholsterers International Union to win collective bargaining rights at the Economy Furniture Company plant in Austin. Economy Furniture Company Strike Collection, 1968–1972.

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Sam Coronado, WWII Series—Angel Zavala, serigraph with collage, 2007. The Austin-based artist and printmaker Sam Coronado (1946–2013) was a leader in the Austin arts community and founder of the Serie Project, a nonprofit organization established in 1993 to create and promote serigraph prints by emerging and underrepresented artists. The Benson holds both the Coronado and Serie Project papers. © Coronado Studio.

President John F. Kennedy shakes hands with David Adame, Texas Executive Director of LULAC, at the Rice Hotel in Houston, Texas, on November 21, 1963. Kennedy was made an honorary member of LULAC that evening, just before his fateful trip to Dallas. David Adame Papers, LULAC Archives.

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Pennant from LULAC national convention in Galveston, 1976. LULAC Archives.

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María G. Flores, María Salas, organizadora de la Unión de Tejas, 1976, and N. Texas, 1975. The photographer Maria G. Flores worked in support of farmworkers and the Texas Farm Workers Union in the late 1970s. María G. Flores Papers.

Page from an Idar family bible. Letters, photographs, and artifacts such as this page document the lives of Mexican Senator Federico Idar (1893–1938) and the Idar family of Laredo and San Antonio, Texas. Federico Idar and Family Papers.

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Liliana Wilson, Conjuring a Home, giclée print, 2016. In her work the Austin-based Chilean American artist Liliana Wilson, whose papers are housed at the Benson, explores themes connected to the journeys of immigrants and refugees who seek to integrate themselves into new worlds. Image courtesy of Liliana Wilson. © Liliana Wilson.

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Acknowledgments

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his book is the product of many hours, many minds, and many hands, as is the Benson itself. Adán Benavides gave heart, soul, and knowledge to the undertaking of a Benson book for several years and gave all of these to the institution itself for many more. In both endeavors he was aided by numerous UT Libraries and Benson colleagues, including Sue Fuller, Margo Gutiérrez, Ann Hartness, Craig Schroer, and Christian Kelleher, as well as History Department collaborators Susan Deans-Smith, Bruce J. Hunt, and Matt D. Childs. As the book evolved, Professors Charles R. Hale and Mauricio Tenorio provided the inspiration and wisdom to expand its scope by adding the voices of scholars who have made Benson holdings key to their research. Current UT Libraries Vice Provost and Director lorraine j. haricombe and former Vice Provost and Director Fred Heath have offered the unwavering enthusiasm and institutional support to carry the project forward, as have LLILAS Benson Director Virginia Garrard and Executive Director Heather Gatlin. UT Libraries digital preservation staff, including Jennifer Lee, Wendy Martin, Benn Chang, Joey Marez, Brittany Stratton, and Anna Lamphear, and Benson digital assets manager Robert Esparza have facilitated the book’s splendid images of Benson treasures. Day in and day out, for all of these years, it has been the passion and professionalism of Benson staff that have

made such a project, and such an institution, possible. Since the retirement of Dr. Benson herself in 1975, the library has continued to flourish under the leadership of Laura Gutiérrez-Witt, Ann Hartness, Don Gibbs, and David Block, and with the care of former longtime staff including Jane Garner, Sonia Merubia, Carmen Sacomani, Margarita Alejo, Kelly Kerbow Hudson, and Michael Hironymous. Current staff continue this tradition of amazing expertise, professionalism, and dedication, and they make the Benson the unique and special place that it is. Without them, this book and the institution it celebrates would not be possible, and we offer heartfelt thanks for the work and knowledge they have generously given in support of the project. Thank you, Carla Alvarez, Christina Bleyer, David Bliss, Linda Gill, Melissa Guy, A. J. Johnson, Dylan Joy, Susan Kung, Carmen Mendez, Albert Palacios, Theresa Polk, Susanna Sharpe, Luba Sinclair, Ryan Sullivant, Suyapa Steer, Teresa Wingfield, Rachel Winston, and Brooke Womack.

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Acknowledgments

Contributors

David Block served as associate director for scholarly resources and head bibliographer at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection from 2009 to 2014, culminating a thirty-five-year career in Latin American librarianship. Prior to his tenure at the Benson, he was the Ibero-American bibliographer at Cornell University Library for more than twenty years. A historian of colonial and nineteenth-century Bolivia and the Andes, Block was a student of Nettie Lee Benson when he began his career as a Latin Americanist at UT Austin. Norma E. Cantú is Murchison Professor of the Humanities at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Trinity University and professor emerita at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her work centers on cultural studies, contemporary literary theory, border studies, Chicana/o and Latina/o literature and film, folklore, and women’s studies. She is founder and director of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa and cofounder of the group of Latin@ poets CantoMundo as well as a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop. Richard Graham is Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Texas at Austin. In his works he has explored the social, economic, and political history of Brazil from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. He introduced several generations of students to the depth and breadth of the Benson Collection.

David Montejano is professor of ethnic studies and Chicano/Latino studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His published work has centered on local Chicano and Latino political movements throughout the twentieth century, and his research interests include comparative and historical sociology, political sociology, social change and development, race and ethnic relations, community studies, and ethnographic and historical methods. Barbara e. Mundy, professor of art history at Fordham University, specializes in Latin American art with particular emphasis on indigenous art and cartography of the sixteenth century. Her latest book, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (University of Texas Press, 2015), centers on Tenochtitlan–Mexico City and its transformation from the sacred capital of the Aztecs into the center of Spain’s overseas empire. She is codirector of the website Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America 1520–1820. Tatiana Reinoza is an art historian whose research and writing focus on contemporary Latina/o art. She received a PhD in art history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016. She is a Society of Fellows postdoctoral research associate and lecturer at Dartmouth College. Her writing has appeared in Aztlán, alter/nativas, Diálogo, and Hemispheres. She is at work on a manuscript about the history of Latina/o printmaking. Arturo Taracena Arriola is professor and researcher at the Centro Peninsular en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, in Mérida, Yucatán, and has also taught in Guatemala, Costa Rica, and France. His research focuses on Central American political history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on regional studies, nation-states and citizenship, interethnic relations and social movements, and memory and history. He is currently researching the interactions between Guatemala and the Spanish Republic in exile (1944–1954). Mauricio Tenorio Trillo is Samuel N. Harper Professor of History at the University of Chicago and profesor asociado at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), Mexico City. He is the author of numerous works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican history, with emphasis on the cultural and social history of urbanism. His latest book is Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Eric Van Young, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, focuses on colonial and nineteenth-century Mexican history. His thematic interests include rural history, peasant movements and political violence, cultural history, historiography, and biography. He is researching a biography of Lucas Alamán, nineteenth-century Mexican statesman, entrepreneur, and historian, within the larger context of post-independence political culture.

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Contributors