Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Saqueo En El Archivo: El Paradero de Los Tesoros Documentales Guatemaltecos

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2837000

1527-1900

Ralph Lee Woodward,

Historical Studies in Latin America

The authors of this brief report have all distinguished themselves by their scholarship on Guatemala, most recently with their collaboration on “Strange Lands and Different Peoples”: Spaniards and Indians in Colonial Guatemala (2013). It is from their research for that brilliant volume that the present work emerged, which focuses on the whereabouts of many of Guatemala's historic manuscripts and archaeological treasures. They observe that much of Latin America's archaeological and documentary records no longer reside in the region itself, having found their way into museums, libraries, and other public and private repositories in Europe and the United States, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They refer in particular to the second and third books of the Cabildo de Santiago de Guatemala, covering the critical period from 1530 to 1553. Their research into this question revealed the extent of the threat to national patrimony and suggested that Guatemala's experience may well be relevant for other Latin American states. The authors discovered that these two record books of the Guatemalan cabildo, long believed lost, eventually ended up with the Hispanic Society of America (HSA) in New York City. They pursued the probable trajectory of these historic works as well as other archaeological and historical treasures. While in many cases it is true that the documents in foreign collections have been better preserved than those that remained in Guatemala, there has been rising resentment among nationals of that country over the loss of national patrimony.Four brief chapters discuss recurrent problems in the Guatemalan archives, with periods of mismanagement when many documents were lost or sold to private collectors. An English version of these chapters appeared earlier in the authors' 2013 article “Pillage in the Archives: The Whereabouts of Guatemalan Documentary Treasures,” published in the Latin American Research Review. Acquisition of such materials by private collectors (both native and foreign) had occurred since the sixteenth century but became frequent by the late nineteenth century. Wendy Kramer, W. George Lovell, and Christopher H. Lutz pay particular attention to the activities of a Leipzig bookdealer and publisher, Karl W. Hiersemann (1854–1928), and his principal customer, Archer Milton Huntington (1870–1955), who was a founder and patron of the HSA in 1904.Two appendixes, not included in the LARR article mentioned above, add much value to the book. The first, a Spanish translation of an essay by Dr. C. (Karl) Berendt (1817–1878) entitled “Colecciones de documentos históricos en Guatemala,” originally published in English by the Smithsonian Institution in 1877 and based on a month's stay in Guatemala City in 1876, describes the archives available at that time. These included the Archivo Nacional, the Archivo de la Audiencia, the Archivo Municipal, and the libraries of the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala and of the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País. Berendt noted the richness of the manuscript and archaeological resources there but wrote that the documentary collections were not well cared for. He recommended that the documents be transcribed before they disappeared.The second appendix lists the 83 entries related to Central America from Hiersemann's catalog of items sold to Huntington and now in the HSA. Other sections of the 563 items in the catalog, not reproduced in this volume, were devoted to Latin America in general or to other regions of South America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. Kramer, Lovell, and Lutz raised the question of why the second and third books of the Cabildo de Santiago de Guatemala and many other invaluable documents are found not in Guatemala or Mexico but rather in repositories of the United States or Europe. Their work should be considered as a preliminary answer to that complex question as well as a valuable research tool.