6
Despite my continuing poor health, I have gone to the Customs Office to review the ancient archive of the escribanía de cámara, which is currently a mountain of scrap-paper piled in a room; it has been moved to a large storeroom within the customs house, and the bundles have been placed on skids so that the necessary sorting might begin.1
—Miguel Talavera, Guatemalan archivist, in 1836
In the nineteenth century, the role of escribano changed. While escribanos del número (otherwise known as escribanos de provincia) essentially continued their work as public notaries, certain government escribanos found their work divided and distributed among various officials. In some cases, the position of government escribano was dissolved, to be replaced by a secretary or archivist.2 After 1825, government escribanos were appointed as national escribanos at the federal level or state escribanos at the state level.3 Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, as the colonial bureaucracy was recast and to some extent replaced by the bureaucracies of the federal and national governments, the tasks previously delegated to escribanos fell largely to secretaries, archivists, and notaries. Archives had been nodes of communication in the colonial period. They now became repositories of stationary documents whose only travel would be temporal. Divorced from the processes of creating and moving documents relating to political affairs of the moment, archivists became custodians of the past.
The formal transformation of the escribano position and, more importantly, the changing political boundaries of the former audiencia, left Guatemalan archives in a state of considerable disarray. However, despite the period of chaos caused by the wars for independence, which prevented the smooth transfer of papers from escribanos to archiveros (archivists), continuities of method are evident. Two comprehensive efforts were made to organize the government archives in the Guatemalan capital, the first in the 1830s and the second in the 1840s. These attempts at organization mark the beginning of Guatemala’s national archival system. The early archivists of Guatemala’s national archives both preserved and modified the practices of colonial escribanos. One important continuity was the reliance on document inventories. As late as the end of the nineteenth century, Guatemalan bureaucrats charged with organizing the nation’s paperwork relied on inventories to catalog documents, facilitate access, and improve accountability.
This chapter takes a broad view of the changes that occurred from the late colonial period to the mid-nineteenth century. As Central America separated from Spain and then Mexico, as the provinces of the audiencia became states of the Central American federation, and as the states became independent nations, documentary treasure became national treasure. Disputes over which government had claim to particular documents erupted as states solidified their spatial—and documentary—boundaries. Furthermore, while efforts to consolidate and centralize archives continued, these efforts were systematically undercut by new document forms. No longer composite, documents amassed separately at each node in a correspondence network. Local archives accumulated paper, and central archives stored more fragmented pieces of document conversations.
This chapter also attempts to follow one particular set of documents as it “traveled” from the early colonial period into the national period. The archive inventory of Ignacio Guerra y Marchán, the Guatemalan escribano de cámara in the late-eighteenth century, provides an exemplary archive inventory of official documents ranging from 1600 to 1782. This archive, containing valuable documents from the colonial period, was safeguarded by Marchán until his death. Marchán’s inventory and the inventories of later archivists permit some insight into how one escribano’s domain became the contents of the Guatemalan national archive: how documents traveled safely from the colonial period to the present.
Escribano de Cámara, Ignacio Guerra y Marchán
Ignacio Guerra y Marchán was appointed to the escribanía de cámara in July 1777.4 As the principal escribano in Guatemala City, he had close contact with the highest members of government in the capital and important duties as not only a clerk and archivist but also a disseminator of official information to the provinces. His name and rubric appear on documents well into the early nineteenth century.5 Whether because they had the fortune of being better preserved or because Guerra y Marchán was an escribano of particular diligence, his archive inventories provide some of the most complete accounts of the escribanía’s document collection.6 Guerra y Marchán’s inventory of documents written between 1600 and 1782 provides not only an invaluable sense of which documents his archive contained but also how the escribano conceptualized the organization of his archive. The first several pages of Guerra y Marchán’s two-hundred-page inventory provide two separate tables of contents. On the inside cover of the inventory is a general list of the number of pages pertaining to each category. The categories used in this list, clearly the first place consulted in the inventory, include both regional designations and administrative departments. This brief index bears some similarities with the contemporaneous place-name indexes created by mail officials and described in Chapter 3. Neither are “maps” and yet both fulfill the purposes of a map. While considering archival content rather than geographical locations, the archive inventory was similarly intended to designate “places” within the archive and, more importantly, to facilitate way-finding. As the index corresponds to the ordering of entries within the inventory, Guerra y Marchán would have turned to this page to locate a section on, for example, documents from León (Figure 6.1).
A more detailed table of contents following the brief index divides the documents by administrative department. Separated into numbered bundles (legajos), the documents are listed by date and with reference to how many documents each date range contains.7 The inventory entries following the two tables of contents begin with “indiferentes” or miscellaneous documents and proceed to list the documents for the various regional jurisdictions and departments of the audiencia. Each subsection is ordered chronologically, according to the legajo divisions indicated in the second table of contents. The documents are numbered and then described in two to four lines, giving a sense of the document’s subject and the parties involved.
The structure of the inventory suggests that region and governmental department were both important organizational tools for the escribano’s archive. Guerra y Marchán, in attempting to classify (and afterwards, locate) a document in his archive, would consider either geographical jurisdiction or departmental jurisdiction. The structure of the inventory also suggests a secondary but nevertheless important emphasis on date—or, more precisely, chronology. Once “within” a department or region, Guerra y Marchán would have considered the date in order to find a document, and in some cases he crossed out or inserted document entries that had been previously entered under the wrong year.
The content of the inventory is also instructive. Archive inventories were only one kind of escribano inventory among many. During Guerra y Marchán’s tenure, various logbooks and indexes kept track of the archive’s content. Several libros de conocimientos, or receipt-books, logged document production within his office.8 He kept logbooks of documents provided to audiencia and city council officials, such as the Guatemalan treasurer.9 A register (protocolo) inventoried documents deposited in the archive and placed in the escribano’s care.10 Guerra y Marchán kept a book in which the office’s drafts and notes for a roughly ten-year period were stored.11 And, confirming the point made in Chapter 5 regarding the escribano’s ties to the mail system, Guerra y Marchán also kept inventories of replies received to decrees from Spain that he had copied and sent by circular to the provinces.12 However, none of these various inventories, lists, or logbooks provided a comprehensive account of the escribanía’s content. The inventory listed above was Guerra y Marchán’s effort to account for all of the important documents in his possession, primarily the finished versions of legal instruments. As Kathryn Burns describes in her study of colonial Peruvian archives, the official archive omitted as much as it included. Drafts, accounts, preparatory correspondence, and other supplemental materials were never inventoried and were rarely kept.13 According to Guerra y Marchán’s definition, only a portion of the papers contained in his office qualified as archival materials.
FIGURE 6.1. Ignacio Guerra y Marchán’s archive inventory
Source: Archivo General de Centroamérica. Photograph by the author.
To consider, for example, a selection of documents that should now be familiar, Guerra y Marchán inventoried on six pages the documents in his archive pertaining to the mail system. Beginning with the year 1770, the escribano listed cases involving administrators such as Melchor de Ugalde and Andrés Palomo as well as correos such as José Rivera. Documents pertaining to route revisions, “clandestine” mail, paperwork prepared for the payment of extraordinarios, and the occasional criminal case against a correo are all listed. Among them are documents that clearly remained central to the archive’s collection. Under the year 1774, for example, Guerra y Marchán listed the case pertaining to the transfer of papers from the deceased Melchor de Ugalde to Simón de Larrazábal discussed in Chapter 5. The escribano had previously and incorrectly entered the case of the correo archive under the year 1782 in his inventory, and the cramped entry at the top of the page demonstrates the effort at revision. At the bottom of the same page, listed under the year 1777, Guerra y Marchán made note of the case relating to the “little crate of grapes” carried by the correo Joseph Rivera. The case, discussed in Chapter 4, which caused such controversy over the delivery of encomiendas, remained one of the roughly fifty documents pertaining to the mail administration that Guerra y Marchán preserved in his archive.14
It seems at first perplexing that Guerra y Marchán created no additional inventory during the thirty-odd years that he remained in his post after 1782, but it seems less surprising when the circumstances of the inventory’s creation are considered more closely. During Guerra y Marchán’s time in office, he and other officials in the new capital of Guatemala struggled to restore documents that had been left behind in the ruins of Santiago de Guatemala after the 1773 earthquake. Efforts to fully recuperate all the documents from the former capital apparently took years. In 1780, the officials in the new capital ordered that the long-overdue recovery be immediately effected.
Concerning the fact that the secret archive of the council, the archive of the Office [of the President] and the register-books of deceased escribanos all find themselves still in the ruined city of Guatemala, although it was ordered that these be brought here long ago, because they are needed here in the Capital, where they ought to be: and they should be within sight in order for them to be cared for and so that they do not fall into decay. Let it be made known to the Escribano Mayor . . . so that they might be brought.15
The statement by the crown attorney on this occasion was somewhat more specific, demanding in September of 1780 that “a city councilman, with the assistance of the escribano . . . conduct all the Papers, and archive them according to an Inventory in this capital, providing verification that this has been completed within two months.”16 It appears that the task of recovering the archive and creating the inventory were first assigned to Joseph Manuel de Laparte, the escribano de cabildo, or city council secretary. But in May 1781, Laparte had still not complied with the council’s orders. “The papers still lie abandoned in his office,” the council protested, “and he has several of those belonging to the secret Archive locked away, depriving the Council of access to them.”17 They demanded that Laparte put the orders into effect or designate someone to take his place so that the papers be organized and made available.
Laparte’s eventual reply in November of 1781, more than a year after the initial orders were issued, gives some sense of the difficulties posed by the task of organizing and inventorying the archive. Writing to Councilman Juan Manrique, he stated that he wished to point out to him “the great amount of work that has been done with the papers from the council archive that were brought from Guatemala. You yourself, Sir,” he protested, “saw the lamentable condition in which they were packed and delivered.” The chaotic condition of the papers was due, he explained, to how they had been hauled off of the shelves and packed out of order. Bound documents had come undone, making it difficult to determine how papers corresponded to one another. “Once we had returned,” he wrote, “we began to organize them, putting them into categories in order to gain greater clarity, and we spent the entire winter wading through that confusing labyrinth.”18 Laparte protested that he was doing everything in his power to organize the archive and provide the needed inventory.
In December, the council’s attorney (síndico procurador), Josef Fernández Gil, offered a scathing response to Laparte that gives a clear sense of how Guatemalan council officials envisioned the responsibilities of the escribano in relation to the archive. He summarized indignantly the injury to the public that resulted from withholding archived documents. It was according to the law and in order to preserve good order that “the papers of the secret archive are in the power of the Escribano mayor,” he wrote. “These should be kept under three locks, for which purpose two cabinets were purchased and placed in that office.” But it was not enough to keep them safe, he explained. “At every turn it is necessary to have various documents within sight, and they are required for providing reports concerning diverse matters.” He protested that the difficult work of hauling the papers from the ruins of the former capital and organizing them into topics or subcategories was already complete. “The same cause that necessitated moving the documents to the new seat of the council,” he went on, “necessitates the formation of an Inventory, since being already in bundles, tied and numbered, there can be no doubt that it will be easier to create it.” He was certain that Laparte had no motive for postponing the creation of the inventory other than to waste time, and he demanded that the escribano be fined one hundred pesos if he did not immediately comply.19 Fernández Gil prioritized both the archive’s safety and its ready access to Guatemalan officials, but his emphasis on the escribano’s failure to complete the inventory demonstrates without any doubt that the inventory, not only the recovery of papers from the ruined capital, was thought essential to these objectives.
Later that same month Laparte was duly fined for failing to complete the inventory, but even this was not enough to provoke him into providing the much-sought document.20 The escribano de cámara, Ignacio Guerra y Marchán, signed the orders on Christmas Eve of 1781 to provide Laparte with a final ultimatum. Laparte’s name is signed beside Guerra y Marchán’s, where the escribano de cabildo acknowledged receipt of the papers served to him by his colleague. But why he still did not comply does not form part of the record. Guerra y Marchán was doubtlessly assigned the task that Laparte did not fulfill, because it is his name on the cover of the 1782 inventory. And in 1798, the correspondence documenting Laparte’s signal failure was found among his papers after his death. Guerra y Marchán signed the documents once again to acknowledge their receipt and admit them into his archive.21
The inventory that the Guatemalan officials clamored for so urgently in the early 1780s was seen to serve the purpose of recovery and reorganization. The fact that an inventory was thought essential in 1780 but no revision or new inventory was required during Guerra y Marchán’s tenure suggests that the inventory was considered primarily a tool for periods of transition. In this sense, the inventory might be seen as a kind of “stock” inventory rather than an updated catalog. This does not mean, of course, that the content of the archive managed by Guerra y Marchán and the other escribanos remained stagnant or stable after the creation of the inventory. On the contrary, the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century appear to have been periods of intense paperwork production. The libros de conocimiento and other indexes in Guerra y Marchán’s office kept track of the document content produced after 1782.
An order sent from Spain in 1802 gives some sense of how vast the paperwork of the audiencia and council in Guatemala had grown. Having received news, the orders indicated, that the office of the president in Guatemala required additional employees for its effective management, a new archivero (archivist) position was created with an annual salary of three hundred and sixty pesos per year. The two escribientes, or scribes, in the office had their salaries raised from two hundred to three hundred pesos per year. The orders simultaneously confirmed the appointments of Don Alexandro Ramírez as secretary, Don Miguel Talavera as oficial mayor, and Don José Ramón Barberena as oficial segundo, all of whom were already employed in the office.22 While the creation of the archivero position is significant, it is also important to note that the appointment took place in the president’s office and not in the office of the escribano de cámara, Ignacio Guerra y Marchán.
However, the changes to Guerra y Marchán’s office were not far off. In 1812, the Cortes de Cádiz altered the role of escribanos significantly and, to a lesser extent, modified archival practices. In 1812, the Cortes replaced the office of escribano de ayuntamiento with a general secretary, and they abolished the sale of office for escribanías.23 Existing appointments could be maintained, assuming the escribano passed inspection and met with official approval.24 The Cortes de Cádiz also issued the first regulations concerning the submission of printed materials to a central archive or library.
It is decreed: 1. Printers and Publishers of the Court shall present two copies of all printed works and papers that are printed to the Court Library. 2. These copies shall be presented without fail on their day of publication, under penalty of a fifty ducat fine. 3. The Librarian of the Court shall sign a receipt for the copies he receives. 4. In the Capitals of the Provinces the copies shall be presented by the printer to the Head of State (Gefe Político), and in the other Towns they shall be presented to the District Governor in the same manner and subject to the same penalties. 5. The District Governors will direct these copies with all possible promptness to the Heads of State, and these will forward the copies through their Secretaries of Peninsular Government, who will have them immediately transferred to the Library of the Court. 6. The Heads of State and District Governors will give receipt to the printers of the copies they receive. 7. The Heads of State will remit monthly to the Court . . . a list of the works and papers that they have sent or that remain in their hands due to the failure or delay of the Mail.25
Notably, the preamble to these articles describes the repository to which the copies will be sent as the “Archive and Library.” The orders from the Cortes de Cádiz reflect both innovations and continuities with previous practices. The hierarchical system of communication, the reliance on the mail system, and the use of an inventory (here, “list”) all echo the longstanding methods of bureaucratic communication practiced during the colonial period. However, the emphasis on printed materials is new. Similarly, a distinction might be made between the effort in 1812 to gather exhaustively materials printed throughout Spanish America and the earlier, more circumscribed efforts by the Council of Indies to recoup correspondence and replies to official paperwork. As described in Chapter 5, efforts at consolidation of archives were well under way in the eighteenth century. The attempt in 1812 to centralize in the Spanish library all printed materials regardless of subject or origin seems qualitatively different.
The corresponding changes to escribano offices were not immediate. Despite the 1812 changes, which in any case appear to have had little effect on the escribanía de cámara, Guerra y Marchán continued to maintain his own archive until his death in approximately 1815. It is unclear when Guerra y Marchán died, but in April 1815, the king conceded the escribanía de cámara and the contents of Guerra y Marchán’s office to his widow, María Petronila de la Cerda. The office was granted to her and her children, though at a fourth of its former value (two thousand pesos).26 There is little to document how María Petronila de la Cerda fared as custodian of the escribanía during the following years, but a plaintive appeal made in the 1820s suggests that the political upheavals taking place in Guatemala made effective management of the escribanía difficult. The break with Spain and then with Mexico in the 1820s entailed a rapid reorganization of government, and Cerda complained that the changes had placed a great strain on the escribanía. She asked to be assigned some assistance in maintaining the office and restoring it to order.27 As it happened, the difficulties experienced by Cerda were occurring everywhere in the maintenance of government archives. A few short years and a series of political realignments had served to render the archives almost unmanageable. In the 1820s, the long-term effort to reconcile the historical archives of the audiencia of Guatemala with the paperwork of the administration for the existing state of Guatemala began.
Government Archivists: Victoriano Grijalva and Miguel Talavera
The government of the independent state of Guatemala in the 1820s did not take long to discover that the archives in its possession required urgent attention. One portion of the project was assigned to Victoriano Grijalva, who began the arduous task of sorting through the government archives in 1823.28 Part of the difficulty lay in the fact that there was not one archive but many archives. The newly established state government in Guatemala ordered that the archives of each “department,” corresponding to the former provinces of the audiencia, be reclassified. The orders were to divide each regional archive into three subcategories: político (political affairs), hacienda (domestic or internal affairs), and guerra (defense).29 Correspondingly, Grijalva and his newly appointed assistant, Francisco Flores, were ordered to organize the documents in the state’s capital, creating an “archive of the old administration.”30
Beginning in the 1820s, Grijalva worked to restore the archive of the “old government,” collecting stray documents that were scattered in the hands of individuals and regional offices and creating the all-important inventory that would take stock of the archive’s content. While few traces remain of Grijalva’s work during that period (beyond his inventories), the scant evidence indicates that he was consolidating documents from throughout the former reino. The effort at consolidation initiated in the eighteenth century continued in the nineteenth century, as valuable documents were collected from escribanos, defunct offices, and private individuals. The original documents by Fray Francisco Ximénez documenting the history of San Vicente de Chiapas and Guatemala, for example, were demanded for inclusion in the archive from Francisco García Pelaez, author and later archbishop of Guatemala.31 Documents were collected from the offices of escribanos, who presented their documents to the archivist with inventories.32 Similarly, Grijalva also collected the documents belonging to the former commerce bureau (consulado de comercio), absorbing them into the main archive.33
Efforts at centralization, as distinct from consolidation, were also under way. The newly incorporated state of Los Altos sent its papers to Grijalva, indicating that the archive in the state’s (or federation’s) capital was seen as the suitable depository for documents from regional peripheries.34 An attempt to recover the archives of towns situated on the shores of Lake Izabal in the early 1830s makes evident the motives of this centralization. An official was sent to recover the archives of villages near Lake Izabal and the Polochic River in 1834, and he reported that “he recovered several documents, that is to say the archive of the villages that existed on the shores of the lagoon of Izabal and the river Polochic, and since the History of the State is being written, these might provide some material for it.”35 While the notion of writing chronicles with the aid of historical documents was certainly not new, the emphasis on recovering and centralizing documents for the purposes of writing Guatemalan state history was.
Centralizing colonial documents would be easier than centralizing newly created documents. As discussed in previous chapters, composite documents from the colonial period had an inherently cumulative quality that nineteenth century documents did not. Dissociated conversations in paper resulted in burgeoning local archives that, moreover, remained essential to ongoing local governance. But even the more feasible centralization of colonial documentation was complicated by the shifting location of the region’s centers.36 From 1824 to 1839, there were both states (corresponding roughly to the former colonial provinces) and a Central American federal republic, and centralization occurred at both levels. Once the state boundaries of the Central American federation were determined, for example, orders were issued in 1824 to recuperate all papers pertaining to the state of El Salvador.
The Congress of this State being installed and finding itself prepared to address matters in all aspects of its administration, including civil, military, and ecclesiastical matters, it has been resolved that you [the secretary of the Congress], as a representative of this people and of the national assembly, shall recover from whichever archives in which they might be found and with use of an inventory all the documents and papers in the assembly or Supreme Government, as well as in the subordinate tribunals, that correspond to the stated Congress.37
This was separate from the attempt to centralize papers in the Federation’s capital. As political conflicts erupted throughout the 1820s and 1830s, the appropriate location for particular documents and entire archives came into question. From 1824 to 1834, the Federal capital remained in Guatemala, but in 1834, the capital for the federal republic was forcibly moved to El Salvador. After residing briefly in Sonsonate, it was moved to San Salvador, where it remained until 1839.38 During this period, federal authorities in San Salvador made repeated efforts to transfer whole archives to the new capital. In 1835, for example, federal authorities in San Salvador wrote to the state government in Guatemala ordering that the consulado (merchant tribunal and guild) archive be transported to the federal capital. The letter dated August 6 makes the noteworthy claim that apart from being necessary to the resolution of several administrative matters, the archive “belongs to the federation.”39 The orders indicated that the archive was to be presented to Miguel Talavera in Guatemala, who would then facilitate its transportation to San Salvador.40
Soon after sending for the consulado archive, the federal authorities in San Salvador went even further, requesting all of the archives pertinent to the federal government. On September 11, 1835, Miguel Talavera requested assistance for the massive project of organizing and transferring the archives to San Salvador.
In accordance with orders from the national Government I am commissioned by the Intendancy to arrange and remit to San Salvador all its archives. I have made clear that I cannot complete the arrangement of the archives on my own without the assistance of a person who has knowledge of how to handle documents. And though two have been named, neither assignment has taken effect.
Over the course of the ensuing year, Talavera embarked on a project of reorganization that strained his weak health and met with only partial success. The orders issued from San Salvador required not only a simple inventory and transfer but an internal redistribution of documents. Focusing on the archive of the former captaincy of Guatemala and the escribanía de cámara, the Salvadoran authorities agreed to grant the Guatemalan state’s demands for the “documents that pertain to the towns governed by it.” To effect this division, Miguel Ignacio Talavera was assigned “to inventory all that which belongs to the said archive, making divisions of the documents that pertain to the former provinces, today states, excluding from these divisions those documents in which the national government may have some interest.”41 The somewhat offhand instructions sent by the federal authorities must have struck Talavera as either disingenuous or entirely ignorant: anyone familiar with the archive of the capitanía and escribanía would have known that even to inventory and transport them was an enormous labor. Orders to sift through them, making regional divisions and weeding out the documents pertinent to the various levels of government, would have struck any archivist as nearly impossible.
Talavera’s plaintive reply to these orders implied that this was the case, though he ascribed his inability to complete the orders to other causes. Citing ill-health, Talavera wrote that he doubted whether “I can dedicate myself (for now) to the arrangement of the disorganized voluminous archive of the old escribanía de cámara; since one of the causes of my current illness was a similar task, which I have successfully completed.” Talavera protested that “after completing this extraordinary service, it is not possible for me to begin another even more difficult one which would certainly aggravate my illness.” Citing his forty-seven years of honorable service, Talavera begged to be assigned some task more in keeping with his precarious health. The marks of revision in Talavera’s letter, where he qualified his unwillingness to work on the archive by adding “for now” and replaced “disorganized” with “voluminous,” testify to the delicate line he was walking: on the one hand he could not brush off the authorities’ request, however unrealistic; on the other hand he wished to avoid what he knew to be a nearly impossible task.42 The reply from San Salvador sent only a few days later indicated that Talavera would be granted a two-month respite from his labors so that he might regain his health, but that after the two months ended he was to begin at once upon the inventory and divisions of the archive.43
Talavera replied none too graciously on June 10, writing to the authorities in San Salvador, “As soon as I succeed in recovering from my current illness, I will go to the Tax Office to review the archive of the old escribanía de cámara, the arrangement of which the Supreme Government has seen fit to assign me.” He promised to report on the state of the archive and any necessary resources he would need to begin his work. “This new service that I am willing to offer,” he wrote, “despite my limited strength and weak state of health, shall be a test of my respectful deference and obedience to the commands of the Supreme National Government. And that is all I can reply for now.”44
Realizing, no doubt, that the work at the archive was now inevitable despite his pleas, Talavera visited the archive three weeks later to take stock of the task that lay ahead. On June 30, he wrote the words cited at the opening of this chapter, exclaiming in horror at the state of the precious documents. He went on, saying, “This voluminous archive, which as far as I am able to ascertain ranges from 1600 to the present, finds itself in such turmoil and disorder that its outdated inventories are useless to its current condition.” Talavera stated that he needed “able and intelligent” hands to assist with the archive’s preservation. He mentioned two possibilities, public servants who had experience “handling documents,” and indicated that he, too, would do whatever possible despite his poor health.45 While it is unclear when, precisely, the escribanía archive left the hands of María Petronila de la Cerda, the widow of escribano Ignacio Guerra y Marchán, it is clear that between her request for assistance in 1825 and Talavera’s assessment of the archive in 1836, the documents had been poorly cared for. The various archives found in the Guatemalan capital in the 1830s were numerous enough and substantial enough for Victoriano Grijalva to pursue systematization and consolidation with one portion of the nascent state archive while other portions of it fell into decay and disorder.
In July, Talavera was granted the services of an assistant, and it appears that with his aid Talavera began to make headway with the mountain of paper he confronted. He wrote early in the month to the authorities in San Salvador, making general mention of a new system of organization that he intended to propose as an alternative to the method expected by the federal government. On three pages, Talavera outlined the internal organization that he recommended for the archive, relying on both regions and government offices as categories.
Talavera’s projected organization of the archive is worth considering in detail because it laid the foundations for the structure that would remain in place for the Guatemalan state archive—and that is still evident today at the AGCA. First, he recommended the division of the archival materials into six regional sections: Guatemala, San Salvador, Comayagua (Honduras), Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Chiapas. The separaciones de asuntos, or thematic subdivisions, roughly accorded to the colonial government’s internal organization. Branches of government such as the audiencia and the royal treasury were granted their own sections. And Talavera designated separate sections topically, such as those pertaining to the University of San Carlos, the granting of encomiendas, and the patronato real.46 In his attached letter to the authorities in San Salvador, Talavera explained that the regional subdivisions were essential and that the thematic subdivisions would permit the federal government to identify the documents that were “of interest” to it. By this means, he avoided the thorny task of picking through the entire archive for documents relevant to the federal government’s interests, as the authorities had requested. The recommended organization would create twenty-four subdivisions within the archive.47
FIGURE 6.2. Archive organization recommended by Miguel Talavera, page 1
Source: Archivo General de Centroamérica. Photograph by the author.
Considered side by side, Talavera’s outline and Guerra y Marchán’s index to the archive inventory have much in common as way-finding documents. Talavera’s structure contained twenty-four subdivisions; Guerra y Marchán’s contained twenty-five. Both began with regional subdivisions and continued with thematic subdivisions. And, necessarily, both were self-conscious reflections of the colonial administrative structure. One important difference lies in the emphasis placed upon regional divisions. While Guerra y Marchán relied on a dozen regional designations, separating Ciudad Real from Tuxtla, for example, Talavera reduced these categories to six, framing the divisions around the existing states of the Central American Federation (as well as Chiapas, which by then formed part of Mexico).48 The eighteenth-century political landscape allowed for much smaller regional units; by the time Talavera created the organizational scaffolding for the archive of the Central American Federation, the cities and districts of colonial Guatemala had become more encompassing, bounded states.
Talavera’s proposed method of organization was approved, and the archivist began the long labor of putting the projected divisions of documents into effect. The concerns that occupied him at the beginning of this process give some sense of what the “archive” must have looked like. Lacking even the most basic equipment, Talavera had to negotiate to purchase shelves for the documents, which were lying in piles on the floor. In September 1836 he was able to report that the more well-preserved documents were gradually finding their way, bound and marked in legajos, onto the new shelves, but that the papers he found “eaten through and incomplete and thereby useless, these being even worse than those that are torn and dirty” were still piled on the floor due to an absence of proper shelving and other tools.49 He lacked even basic equipment such as paper, pens, a penknife, and scissors, for which he had to request a small petty cash fund.50 Talavera’s work, as he represented it, was not so much to reorganize the archive but to essentially create it from the ground up.
As the months passed and Talavera continued the slow process of sorting, cleaning, and shelving the documents, the authorities pressed him for the documents “belonging” to each regional government. In December 1836, Talavera found it necessary to explain at length why he was not able to simply turn over the pertinent papers for each state government and the federal government. While the sorting was continuing apace, he wrote, it was simply not feasible to present the archive with a complete inventory as requested.51 As his later correspondence demonstrated, part of the difficulty lay in making what was essentially an artificial distinction between “regional” matters and “national” matters. Talavera must have encountered this problem repeatedly, but in January 1837 he wrote to the federal authorities with concerns about one particularly complicated issue. What was he to do, he asked, with the papers pertaining to the transfer of Guatemala City from Santiago to La Hermita after the 1773 earthquake? On the one hand, “all of those administrative and economic measures were taken by the general government then in power,” but, on the other hand, all of the documents clearly pertained to places and monuments within the new state boundaries of Guatemala. He asked the federal authorities to inform him whether these documents were better set aside for the state’s archive or if they were of interest for the history of the Republic.52 The new spatial and political organization provided a constant, recurring dilemma. Talavera persisted as best he could.
In an undated draft of a letter to San Salvador, Talavera listed the subsections of his archive that would each require an inventory. Allotting one notebook for each subsection, he gave every indication of having completed the first comprehensive effort at organizing the archives of the Central American States. A document from 1838 confirms this; Talavera presented to the Guatemalan authorities an index for the organized archive, which adhered more or less to the structure he had projected in 1836. The index included the number of legajos pertaining to each subsection. As expected, the subsections reflected the colonial administrative structure. The regional divisions into states mirrored the colonial division of provinces, and the thematic division of rentas kept intact the documentary production of colonial government bureaus. The notes appended to the index also mentioned that nearly two hundred legajos remained as yet unsorted. Their poor condition required more intensive cleaning and restoration.53
In 1840, the organizational work performed by Talavera was put to the test when the dissolution of the Central American Federation prompted another relocation of archival documents. The former members of the federal republic had become independent states, and as such the Guatemalan state sought to recover many of the documents that had been sent to San Salvador. While no precise inventory remains of which documents were transported to San Salvador in the 1830s, it seems clear from Talavera’s work that documents pertaining to the former Guatemalan audiencia, which governed the region’s colonial provinces, were considered foundational for the federal republic, which governed the same region in the form of the Central American states. When Guatemala became an independent state, its government had some grounds for claiming that the audiencia had been situated in Guatemala and therefore the audiencia’s documents belonged to Guatemala.
FIGURE 6.3. Talavera’s final table of contents for the archive
Source: Archivo General de Centroamérica. Photograph by the author.
Beginning in May 1840, the Guatemalan government pursued the recovery of archival collections that had been only recently sent to San Salvador.54 In 1841, for example, they requested the return of the consulado archive discussed above. The Salvadoran authorities replied, stating that the question of redistributing the archive was a difficult one, “as it belongs to the entire nation,” but if the president of Guatemala himself promised to take responsibility for responding to any requests for documents that might emerge from San Salvador, they would agree to send the archive back to Guatemala.55 The Guatemalan authorities replied that the archive would be cared for and put “at the service of the other states, so that they may take from it the information that is necessary.”56 As if to clarify this intention, a note was made internally among Guatemalan officials of the solemn obligations of the archive’s custodianship.
The Department of Commerce of this State promises to preserve under its custodianship the archive that it has solicited: in the care of this department it will be subject to national authority, whose orders it will obey, and finally at all times the stated archive will be at the service of the other states so that they may take from it the data and information that they find necessary.57
The comments emphasize the obligation to share the documentary sources among the states. And they make explicit the custodianship of the archive: held by the department of commerce, which answered to state authorities, the archive lay ultimately in the hands of the Guatemalan national government. It hardly requires mention that by this point there was no question of an escribano custodianship; the documents belonged indisputably to the Guatemalan state. This point was made even more explicitly some years later, when the Guatemalan authorities requested additional documents pertaining to general governance. Ranging from the 1750s to the 1830s, the documents were packed in four crates and presented to a representative of the Guatemalan government in 1847 with an appended “Inventory of papers belonging to Guatemala.”58
After 1840, then, it is possible to trace a history of separate archives in the Central American states. As the transfer of documents in the 1840s suggests, many of the colonial audiencia documents that had left Guatemala were quickly restored to the Guatemalan capital. There is no mention of Miguel Talavera after 1840, and it seems likely that at some point during or just after the dissolution of the republic, Talavera succumbed to the illness that had for so long made his work at the archive difficult. The archivist who re-emerged after 1840 is Victoriano Grijalva, who as “archivist of government offices” was not directly involved with the restoration of the escribanía archive but had never entirely vanished from the scene. In 1843, orders were given for all government-related documents to be handed over to Grijalva.59 The Guatemalan state archivist presumably attempted to organize the collections of documents that became his responsibility, but an unexpected difficulty arose. Grijalva was called to offer military service, and several requests were made throughout the 1840s for him to be excused so that the crucial work of maintaining the archive could continue.60 Despite these requests, Grijalva was obliged to serve in 1844.61 His resulting absence appears to have been disastrous for both the archive and the daily functioning of the office in which he was engaged. José Palomo, an official writing to a government minister in July 1845, protested that “the general government archive finds itself in a state of such chaos that it complicates and delays our work, resulting in a grave loss of time and excess work for not only the archivist but the entire office.”62 The state of the archive was due, he went on to explain, to its transfer from its former location to the offices in the government palace and, moreover, to Grijalva’s absence “during the campaign of Jutiapa,” which, as a battalion officer, he was obliged to take part in. The abundance of incoming work served to make matters worse, Palomo wrote, so that day by day the office fell further behind.63 Though the minister conceded so far as to assign Palomo a replacement archivist, Grijalva was not excused from military service, and it appears that during his campaigns the Guatemalan archive fell once again into decline.
Continuities and Changes in the Nineteenth Century
Archival practices in nineteenth-century Guatemala were, necessarily, in some regards different from those that endured throughout the colonial period. While escribanos continued to play a vital role as notaries and official scribes, in some of their duties they were gradually replaced by secretaries and archivists. The tasks performed by these bureaucrats in the national period were not identical to those of the colonial escribano. The most evident change is the division of the escribano office into separate responsibilities for the government secretary and the government archivist. In the nineteenth century, the position of archivist appears to have grown gradually more specialized.
Necessarily, the changing political boundaries of the region led to parallel changes in how document ownership was conceived. As the transfer of documents to and from San Salvador in the 1830s and 1840s demonstrates, document collections were understood to “belong” to federal or state authorities, depending not so much on their authorship but on their content. Talavera consulted the authorities in San Salvador in order to determine whether documents pertaining to the transfer of the capital after 1773 should belong to the state or federal archive, thereby signaling that documents were thought to belong to the government organ they described. The shifting location of the document collections and the accompanying work by Talavera and Grijalva point to a much deeper transformation in the notion of ownership and custodianship. Neither archivist would have dreamed of claiming that the archive “belonged” to anyone but the government. While notaries outside of government may have continued to keep their own document collections, archivists and secretaries in local and national government clearly maintained the archives for the government they served. The days in which a government escribano might tussle over custodianship of “his” archive had passed.
Despite these significant changes, there were also remarkable continuities in the practices of escribanos and archivists. To begin with, many of the individuals who were present in the colonial period continued their work in the national period. Miguel Talavera was assigned a role as government archivist in 1802, and he continued his important work well into the 1830s. This inevitably led to many continuities of method. The understanding of the archive as a storehouse for treasure—documentary and otherwise—continued and evolved over the nineteenth century as well. A document from 1821 discusses the safekeeping of three handkerchiefs marked by María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad, religious relics that the government officials paid to preserve in the archive.64 Equally revealing and no doubt more typical was the treatment by government authorities of the original manuscript by Bernal Díaz de Castillo. In 1853, a publisher was authorized to borrow the manuscript in order to create a printed copy, and in 1872 Guatemalan authorities facilitated the loan of the manuscript to permit the government of Mexico to obtain a copy.65 Over the following decades, the movements of the manuscript were closely monitored as copies were made and researchers—such as Hubert Howe Bancroft—sought to consult it.66 The manuscript was undoubtedly considered documentary treasure, and there could be no question that it belonged to the Guatemala government. Its proper place was thought to be the government archive or, later in the nineteenth century, the national library. Yet the circulation of the manuscript among publishers and copyists indicates a subtle shift in how documentary treasure was preserved. In the nineteenth century there were no complaints and responding strictures regarding the withdrawal of documents from the archive. The repeated injunctions in the colonial period to prevent original documents from leaving the archive appear to fade away by the nineteenth century. The archive remained, clearly, a place to store important documents and a prioritized site of preservation. The efforts of archivists such as Talavera and Grijalva speak to the importance placed on archival maintenance. Protocols developed later in the nineteenth century also testify to the continued sense that document were to be protected. In 1875, for example, two notaries were forbidden from using archival documents for a study of escribanía methods.67 But there appears to have been some relaxation of the rules governing whether and under what conditions documents could circulate. While the sense of the archive as a treasure storehouse and the need to protect its documents continued, practices and customs of archive use were not constant.
One practice that did continue well into the nineteenth century was the use of inventories. Inventories of various government archives were created in every decade until the end of the century.68 The inventory remained a vital tool for taking stock of archival content, and these inventories thereby continue to reflect colonial ways of organizing knowledge. As the recurrence of organizational forms, identification numbers, and document tags indicate, these inventories were composite documents: they relied heavily on the work of past archivists and escribanos. The significant labor required for organizing archival materials created in the inventory a kind of gravitational pull; elaborating an entirely new system and breaking away from the creation of a composite inventory would have compounded the already extraordinary work involved in updating archival contents. So the form endured. In the late nineteenth century, the massive project of inventorying the entire contents of the colonial-era archive was once again attempted. The numerous notebooks created in the process of forming the inventory indicate that a project as large or larger than Talavera’s was in progress. One of the archivists involved—he was likely one of many—left his signature on a draft notebook created over a four-year period.69 The volume created by Eugenio Amaya cataloged a subset of the archive: documents that had been gathered and bound prior to their storage. The documents ranged from 1561 to 1900. Using strips of paper glued to the binding and crossing out his entries repeatedly, Amaya attempted to create a finished catalog of the archive’s collection of bound documents.
The multivolume archive inventory that emerged from these labors accounted for all the documents in the national archive’s collection. Despite being repeatedly abandoned, moved from one state to another and one building to another, many—some unknown proportion—of the documents had survived. Documents that had formed part of the archive inventory by Ignacio Guerra y Marchán more than one hundred years earlier were listed in much the same way. The transfer of the correo archive from Don Andrés Palomo to Don Simón Larrazábal in 1774 was listed as document 2776. On the following page, the 1777 case of the rotted grapes carried by correo José Rivera was listed as document 2781. These numbers, devised at the end of the nineteenth century, correspond to the expediente numbers used today for these documents at the AGCA.70
FIGURE 6.4. Portion of the catalog by Eugenio Amaya of archival collections showing revisions
Source: Archivo General de Centroamérica. Photograph by the author.
The documents were ordered in legajos and identified by date and subject in the inventory. Someone wishing to find a document had only to search by region or subdivision and then by date. Consultations by the government and the public were possible and may even have been common, if a regulation prohibiting the use of tobacco and the wearing of hats within the archive is any indication.71 It would appear that by the early twentieth century, the difficult task of creating a comprehensive inventory for “way-finding” within the archive had been achieved. That the archive remained a vital tool for way-finding of all kinds is evident in a piece of correspondence sent to the Guatemalan archivist in 1902. The secretary of foreign relations in Mexico urgently requested any “documents or titles” pertaining to Mexico and Chiapas in the colonial period. He added that “their acquisition is all the more urgent since, at the moment, we are attempting to fix the borders of this State with the adjoining ones, and the said documents are indispensable.”72 The archive may have found its fixed place in Guatemala, but the borders it helped to create were still uncertain.