'Accidental Archivist' Helps Mexican Communities Learn Their History

'Accidental Archivist' Helps Mexican Communities Learn Their History

By Brian Hiro

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Fernando Amador likes to call himself an accidental archivist.

Long before he was an assistant professor of history at Cal State San Marcos, Amador was a doctoral student at New York's Stony Brook University who was doing field work for his dissertation in Mexico. Hoping to comb through the historical archive of the people of Temacapulin, a small town northeast of Guadalajara, he was surprised to learn that they didn't have one. What they had was thousands of documents piled haphazardly into boxes, all too vulnerable to environmental damage in the event of, say, a flood.

Helping to organize the town's historical record wasn't part of Amador's dissertation, but his conscience wouldn't allow him to return to New York with the papers in such disarray. So he gave himself a crash course in archival studies - which traditionally is more the domain of librarians - and, with the aid of some volunteers from the community, he led an effort in 2022 to whip the archive into shape.

During the three months that Amador was in Temacapulin, word of his project spread to neighboring towns. It just so happened that the Indigenous community of San Juan de la Laguna (La Laguna for short) was in the midst of an effort to organize its own historical documents. The people behind it invited Amador to town, and he discovered that this project involved almost twice as many documents (nearly 20,000), stretching back more than a century earlier, to the late 1600s.

"When I saw that this project was a different beast compared to the first one," Amador said, "I knew we needed more resources and more help."

After a hiatus of a few years - during which he finished his dissertation, earned his Ph.D. from Stony Brook and was hired by CSUSM - Amador finally found himself in position to revisit the La Laguna archive. Last spring, he received a $15,000 grant from the Endangered Archives Programmeof the British Library, the largest library in the world and the home of such storied pieces as the original Magna Carta.

Over the summer, Amador spent two weeks in La Laguna, and the funding not only paid for his trip, but allowed him to purchase laptops and hire and train five members of the community as full-time workers on the 10-week project.

"I never imagined I'd end up in this field, but it truly offers incredible opportunities," he said. "I get to meet new people and develop skills in an area where, surprisingly, historians often know nothing about - archives. You'd think that's odd, like chemists not learning about the equipment in their own labs. Now that I'm doing this work, I realize just how striking that gap is between what historians do and the archival side of their profession."

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Amador streamlined and accelerated a process that had progressed in fits and starts since his initial visit to La Laguna three years earlier. In helping gather the materials, he found that many of them were stored in unfavorable conditions, such as sacks, cardboard boxes and bound together with string. Many also were marked with water stains.

As the group surveyed and created an inventory of the documents, they encountered samples both mundane (countless tax receipts) and captivating. One example was a paper record of a legal battle in the early 20^th century between a town resident and an immigrant from Lebanon.

"How did a man from Lebanon end up in this little town?" Amador said. "That whole story sounds fascinating. Discovering history through these documents is, in a way, truly thrilling."

Beyond just the work itself, the biggest challenge that Amador faced was gaining the trust of an Indigenous community that traditionally has had a fraught relationship with the local government and the outside world at large.

"With me coming from the United States, people wondered, 'What are his priorities? Why is he here helping us? What's in it for him?' " he said. "It really came down to open communication - reassuring them that I'm doing this because I love the work and involving them in the process as much as possible."

As the grant-funded initiative wraps up this fall, Amador is considering a return to La Laguna in January to review the finished product in person. And as the domino effect continues, the second project might lead to a third one.

Another nearby Indigenous community heard about the work Amador led in La Laguna and requested his support for its archival project, which features more digitized material instead of old, yellowing papers. For that one, which remains in the preliminary stages, he is coordinating with classically trained archivists, namely Sean Visintainer and Jennifer Ho of the CSUSM University Library. He's also talking with Visintainer and Ho about the possibility of introducing and teaching a history course in archival studies.

"I really did stumble into this type of work. I still am even hesitant to call myself an archivist," Amador said. "I'm learning so much, and there's still so much for me to learn. But it does seem like this is where my career is headed - bringing archival studies and history together in some way."

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