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Pillage in the Archives: The Whereabouts of Guatemalan Documentary Treasures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2022

Wendy Kramer ,
W. George Lovell  and
Christopher H. Lutz
Wendy Kramer
Affiliation:
Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica, Antigua, Guatemala
W. George Lovell
Affiliation:
Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario
Christopher H. Lutz
Affiliation:
Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica, Antigua, Guatemala
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Abstract

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Like many Guatemalan documents referred to by scholars in the past, the Libros Segundo y Tercero del Cabildo de Guatemala (Books Two and Three of the City Council of Santiago de Guatemala) have long been thought to be missing, thereby removing from consultation key sources concerning the events and circumstances of the early colonial period. It turns out that these two tomes, which span the years between 1530 and 1553, are not missing and have been part of the holdings of the Hispanic Society of America for the past century. We discuss how other documentary treasures were taken from Guatemala or disappeared from circulation altogether, identifying the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the period during which national patrimony was most under threat from both internal and external forces.

Resumo

Resumo

Al igual que muchos documentos guatemaltecos a los que los estudiosos han hecho referencia en el pasado, desde hace tiempo se pensaba que los “Libros Segundo y Tercero del Cabildo de Guatemala” se habían perdido, quedando fuera de toda posibilidad de consulta estas fuentes claves para iluminar los eventos y circunstancias del periodo colonial temprano. Resulta que estos dos registros, que cubren los años 1530 a 1553, no están perdidos, sino han formado parte de la colección de la biblioteca de la Hispanic Society of America por un siglo. Nuestra nota de investigación discute cómo otros tesoros documentales pudieron, de hecho, haber sido sustraídos de Guatemala o completamente retirados de circulación, identificando el siglo XIX y principios del XX como el periodo durante el cual el patrimonio nacional estuvo bajo mayor amenaza por parte de fuerzas tanto internas como externas.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , 2013 , pp. 153 - 167
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by the Latin American Studies Association

Footnotes

We thank Sebastián van Doesburg for getting us started on this unforeseen research project, Hector Concohá and Gabrielle Venturi for research assistance along the way, Guisela Asensio Lueg for astute secretarial know-how and translation skill's, and John O'Neill for delivering the goods during our rewarding visits to the Hispanic Society of America. The director of the Hispanic Society, Mitchell Codding, gave us a helpful lead in finding out more about Archer M. Huntington, the founder of the institution, and Ron van Meer did the same with respect to Karl W. Hiersemann, the German book dealer who made available for acquisition a remarkable array of materials a century ago. We benefited from comments and observations offered by Maureen McCallum Garvie, Jorge Luján Muñoz, Arturo Taracena Arriola, and Stephen A. Webre, as well as from three LARR readers who reviewed an earlier draft of our work. B. Traven's The Night Visitor ([1928] 1993) has haunted us throughout. Research funding from the Killam Program of the Canada Council for the Arts is gratefully acknowledged.

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