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

2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/libraries.4.1.0090

2473-036X

Jose Guerrero,

In 1921 two Texans—one a historian, the other an administrator, and both of the University of Texas at Austin—made an “impulsive” buy at a Mexico City bookstore that led to the purchase of Genaro García's extensive personal collection of books and manuscripts, thus beginning the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. Stories like this take on new meanings 100 years—and one million acquisitions—later. A Library for the Americas records some of the associations between artifacts, collectors, librarians, and historians that have helped make the library a beacon for Latin American/Latinx studies in the United States. Both production—gilt-stamped, cordovan cloth-covered boards, almost 200 color illustrations, and beautifully designed to boot—and content value are high. Editors Julianne Gilland, former Benson director (now deputy director of Colby College Museum of Art), and José Montelongo, Mexican Studies Librarian, attempt to “celebrate the remarkable place for learning that is the Benson collection” without “shying away from the larger questions about what it means to have a monumental library and archive devoted to Latin America and the United States.” The resulting collection of essays sparks much needed dialogue on the circulation of cultural materials.In eight essays as many scholars indulge their “archives story,” recalling anecdotes and personal experiences alongside research and documentary evidence from the Benson's collections. Former associate director David Block's introduction begins with a Colombian scholar's testimony: “I have found data that does not even exist back home.” What is for Block an accolade also casts libraries—especially special collections—as part of a zero-sum game. Genaro García's library is discussed not just as the Benson's bibliographic cornerstone but also as a commodity with a price over which legal battles ensued. Nettie Lee Benson, who lends her name to the library she led for over thirty years, and her scholarship and practice are central to discussions about private foundation grants, acquisitions budgets, and library development.The first five chapters draw on materials from or about Latin America, while the last three reflect on newer programs to document US-Latinx communities; each is followed by a gallery of high-quality images. Concerns about the custodial nature of libraries dominate. In chapter 1 Mauricio Tenorio praises the Benson and dispatches claims of poaching. García's heirs, he points out, gave José Vasconcelos, then director of Mexico's Secretariat of Public Education, right of first refusal. Institutions exercise this right for lack of resources or interest. Refusal thus conditions “complex collecting” throughout the twentieth century, which Tenorio argues is “far removed from any sense of ‘robos,’” or theft of national patrimony. He ultimately proclaims indifference about whether Benson's collections formed “imperially or not.”In contrast, Barbara Mundy's careful reading of the Relacíones Geográficas (chapter 2) traces their movement back and forth across the Atlantic, explicitly identifying empire with material transfers of cultural artifacts. These manuscripts were made by indigenous scribes, sent to Spain, acquired by Mexican historian Joaquín Icazbalceta, and bought from his heirs—“perhaps cash-strapped,” Mundy speculates, a conditioned of many early twentieth-century Latin American scholar-collectors—with “Texas oil money.” Mundy discusses the tlacuilos who composed these works alongside meanings inscribed by later custodians. While all essays describe transformational library experiences, Mundy frankly discusses the accompanying anxiety of “feeling like a well-equipped pretender” when first visiting a reading room. That a librarian helped her research and nerves represents a powerful subtext throughout the volume: relationships between researchers and librarians can profoundly shape the horizons of historical scholarship. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 demonstrate the Benson's reach across formats, geography, and time, from the organizational records of nineteenth-century British mining interests in Brazil to social movement ephemera of political struggles in mid-twentieth-century Guatemala (this chapter, the fifth, is completely in Spanish).Chapter 6 contrasts the Benson and the Barker Texas History Center, who share a campus but supply counternarratives to each other, by examining what ethnic and political divisions “say about the nature of history and history archives.” Chapter 7 captures the Benson's dynamic nature by spotlighting contemporary fine arts collections and their collectors. The final essay on the Gloria Anzaldúa papers is at times a renewal of library romance: “The archive feeds 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 Chicano studies grows, as we continue excavating in the rich mine for that rarest of elements—ourselves.” This metaphor, which characterizes the self as archive, archivist, and fountainhead of wealth, recalls the extractive logic by which special collections grew from esoteric treasure rooms to stores for raw research materials extracted from the periphery. We end where we began, with “complex collecting,” but refigured as interiorized and self-entrepreneurial.Postcustodial theory and practice, “the idea that archivists will no longer physically acquire and maintain records, but that they will provide management oversight for records that will remain in the custody of creators,” per the Society of American Archivists' online glossary, are not discussed beyond a couple of passing mentions. Postcustodialism has been taken up by archivists at UT Austin and beyond who hope to support social justice and rectify asymmetries in access to documentary and cultural heritage. How does this model retain, dissolve, compromise with, or otherwise work through power relations? Though afforded space in other publications, this omission is notable in a volume exploring the work collecting requires and makes possible.A Library presents as a coffee-table book but engages extant, though still sparse, scholarship linking Latin American studies and library history that identify custodianship with politics. The publication, also in 2018, of Bibliotecas y cultura letrada en America Latina, siglos XIX y XX indicates growing interest in an area often overlooked by, but central to, many US academic libraries' histories. Similarly, Michael Taylor's article “The Library of Thomas B. Catron and the Transformation of New Mexico,” published in an earlier issue of this journal, links the expansive network that made possible the relocation of Latin American materials to US private and institutional libraries to New Mexico's bid for statehood. Extraction and knowledge production figure centrally in Ricardo Salvatore's essays, “Libraries and the Legibility of Hispanic America: Early Latin American Collections in the United States,” “Library Accumulation and the Emergence of Latin American Studies,” and “Progress and Backwardness in Book Accumulation: Bancroft, Basadre, and Their Libraries.” The aforementioned complicate and expand A Library's animating concern over “a monumental library and archive devoted to Latin America and the United States,” which we might rephrase as one of “Latin America in the United States.” As the centennial of the García acquisition approaches, A Library is an enticing preview of how varied and animated the discourse on custodial practice has been and will continue to be.