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Where Have All the Archives Gone? Yucatán’s Missing and Mobile Municipal Archives

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Published/Copyright: December 5, 2024
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Abstract

During the heady years of the late 1970 s through the early 1990 s, scholars undertaking Indigenous-language research in English-language academia sparked enthusiasm and optimism regarding the impending discovery of many Native language sources. Pioneering works in this vein focused on Central Mexico with its abundant colonial-era (1520s–1820s) Nahuatl texts, with an emphasis on wills, election records, and judicial proceedings. Many hoped to find intact, long-term, extensive records of one locale’s documentation, such as one of the early finds, the Libro de Testamentos of Culhuacan, composed of 83 nearly complete documents from 1580 to 1600, revealing aspects of Nahua society such as the material culture, religious beliefs, and practices of inheritance among Indigenous Central Mexicans in the late sixteenth-century.1 The so-called New Philologists anticipated the recovery of corpuses of multiple Indigenous-language documents, such as Maya for Yucatan and Mixtec and Zapotec for Oaxaca. Though Nahuatl sources approximated the excited historians’ expectations, other Indigenous language corpuses surfaced in less sizeable numbers and more dispersed than anticipated. Yucatan in particular possessed fewer extant, complete community archives than projected. This article examines the variegated historical circumstances behind the decimation of pueblo archives of the Yucatec Maya region, focusing on climate, Spanish rapaciousness, covetous collectors, land expropriation and the loss of associated documents, and, finally, the Caste War of Yucatan. This article examines a different kind of mobility in the archives: the disappearance and ‘flight’ of documents from their communities of origin.

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Published Online: 2024-12-05
Published in Print: 2024-11-28

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Introduction: Archival Crossings – A Mobile Archive Research Cluster
  4. Archives and Research: Situating the Reading Experience
  5. Where Have All the Archives Gone? Yucatán’s Missing and Mobile Municipal Archives
  6. Online Archives and American Studies Pedagogy Abroad: A Case Study
  7. Archival Crossings in Research into Colonial Afro-Andean Histories in Peru
  8. When the Mobile Archive Stops Moving
  9. Articles
  10. The Evolution of a Definite Article in Old English: Evidence from a Filiation Formula in a Runic Inscription from Eyke, Suffolk
  11. Present Indicative in Late Medieval Warwickshire: A Case Study of National Library of Wales, Brogyntyn ii.1 in Comparison with other Sources
  12. The ‘(Neo-)Baroque’ and English Culture: A Categorization and Its Discontents
  13. Coleridge’s Surrogate: An Inquiry into the Identity of the Glossist of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1817)
  14. Gertrude Atherton’s Modern New Women in The Sisters-in-Law and Black Oxen
  15. A Postcolonial Wasteland in the Caribbean Post-Holocene: Katia D. Ulysse’s Mouths Don’t Speak as a Portrait of Haitian/American Implication in Haiti’s Tropical Apocalypse
  16. Reviews
  17. Wendy Scase. 2022. Visible English: Graphic Culture, Scribal Practice, and Identity, c. 700-c. 1500. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 54. Turnhout: Brepols, xix + 408 pp., 28 figures, €110.00.
  18. Christoph Ehland and Jana Gohrisch (eds.). 2020. Imperial Middlebrow. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 258 pp., 5 figures, 3 tables, €120,84.
  19. Elahe Haschemi Yekani. 2021. Familial Feeling: Entangled Tonalities in Early Black Atlantic Writing and the Rise of the British Novel. Hounslow: Palgrave MacMillan, 298 pp., 4 illustr., £44.99.
  20. David Kerler. 2022. British Romanticism and the Archive: Loss, Archives and Spectrality. ANGLIA Book Series 77. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 270 pp. € 124.95.
  21. David Kornhaber and James N. Loehlin (eds.). 2021. Tom Stoppard in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, x+269 pp., 1 illustr., £84.99.
  22. Korbinian Stöckl. 2021. Love in Contemporary British Drama: Traditions and Transformations of a Cultural Emotion. CDE Studies 31. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, x + 294 pp., € 124,95.
  23. Brooke Rollins. 2020. The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida’s Rhetorical Legacies. Classical Memories/Modern Identities. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 230 pp., $ 79.95.
  24. Books Reviewed: Anglia 142 (2024)
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