Visiting Historian Shares Knowledge of Archives on Cross-Border Topics

Prior to his participation in the Clements Center’s spring 2006 symposium, “Consumer Cultures Meet the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” historian Josef Barton, Northwestern University, met with SMU graduate students about doing research in the borderlands. The conversation was so rich we invited him to summarize his ideas. A briefer version appears in the Clements Center's fall 2006 newsletter.
 

Working in Mexican/United States archives on Cross-border Topics

Josef Barton
Department of History
Northwestern University

            In late March 2006, Andrea Boardman invited me to present an informal seminar  for graduate students at the Clements Center on the topic of archival research on cross-border themes.  In response to my request to learn about students’ research, I received fascinating glimpses of their remarkable work.  I then shaped my comments to speak to their varied interests.  In this shortened version of my talk, I have kept the informal tone and present tense, since I make no pretense here to rigorous research in these diverse and challenging fields.

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            I’ll start with three topics in borderlands religious history: José Gabriel Martínez-Serna’s work on Jesuit missions in northern New Spain and Tim Bowman’s on Protestantism and Texas’s incorporation into the United States. Although I am much less familiar the archival sources for Gabriel’s than for Tim’s, I am going to venture some suggestions anyway. I suggest a research strategy that begins with well-known assembling of Spanish documents -- the transcripts of Spanish archival records at Notre Dame and the Catholic Archives of Texas, to mention just two --, moves then to more systematic collections that 19th- and 20th-century Mexican scholars gathered -- I am thinking here of Garcia Icazbalceta’s remarkable research archives now at the Benson Latin American Collection --, and subsequently takes in the extraordinary riches of Spanish documentation assembled at the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia. In this way, I think, you will have sampled -- and only sampled -- the documentary collections that still await systematic work at Saltillo, in the recently organized Archivo Municipal, at Parras, and at the Archivo General. In the case of both Saltillo and Mexico City archives, recent efforts to make detailed inventories widely available -- Saltillo’s municipal archives published a superb inventory between 1984-87, and the Archivo General now has on-line one the best inventories of colonial documentation anywhere. I suggest, too, that Notre Dame’s Vatican Archives and Jesuit houses’ transcripts might offer clues to relevant sources in European repositories. At any rate, this is an exciting project, long overdue, and comes at a moment when historians have reconfigured mission history, whether in Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa or the Native American Midwest and West.

            Tim Bowman’s project on borderlands Protestantism also strikes me as a timely intervention in a field long controlled by denominational historians. With the reorganization of major Protestant denominational archives in the 1970s and 1980s -- Presbyterians, Southern Baptists, and Methodists have all made their central archives much more accessible to historians, with printed and on-line guides -- and new archives of Pentecostal groups -- I am thinking here, for instance, of the powerful Church of God missions along the border, records of which are now at the denomination’s archives in Springfield, Missouri -- a new approach to this important topic is possible. Even though historians most commonly assign agency to Anglo-American missionaries and itinerant pastors, a new story would emerge if scholars began from another vantage and asked “How active were the Tejano and Mexican American laity and preachers?” To do this would require careful reading in the Spanish-language press in the great collections of late 19th- and early-20th-century newspapers at the Bancroft Library, at New Mexico State University, at the Benson Collection, and various other repositories. And then, I suggest, you might move on to scattered collections of the annual reports and journals of local Methodist or Baptist or Pentecostal associations. And, if you are really lucky, you might find traces of an active Mexican American laity in county archives -- congregations, after all, had to incorporate and many bought property --, in county and regional historical collections -- I am thinking here of the almost untouched riches of the South Texas Archives at Texas A & M-Kingsville. And I would also urge you to make use of some great archives of Catholic documentation -- the San Antonio archdiocesan archives, for instance, which stores remarkably revealing bishop’s visitations to Mexican American parishes from 1880 to the 1940s, or the archives of mission orders, like that of Mary Immaculate, in the order’s Southern Province archives in San Antonio. In imaginative use of such resources, I think, you might tell a very different story of Protestant missions in the borderlands that would force a re-examination of this central theme.

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            I’ll move now to another family of topics: law and the regulation of the borderlands. George Diaz is working on smuggling between 1848 and 1933, and Gabriel Martinez-Serna on northern Mexico breweries and Prohibition. The cross-border nature of George’s and Gabriel’s projects, I think, demand a cross-border research effort. In the case of smuggling, I suggest beginning with the Archivo General’s well-organized and easily accessible fondo of Mexico’s Gobernación ministry -- the ministry of the interior. In both the records of federal and state projects to control smuggling, which first got off the ground in the late 1860s, and the huge repository of the archives of rural police forces set up by the Diaz regime after 1876, lie fascinating documentation on the topic of smuggling. On the American side, the Texas Rangers got involved early in policing smuggling, like their counterparts in Mexico, and the well organized records of the Rangers at the Texas State Archives and the Center for American History should prove rewarding. And a trip to both Ft Worth’s National Archives Southwest Regional Record Center and Washington’s National Archives may reveal some good materials, especially in connection with the activity of customs agents in border enforcement. But a deeper study would require research in both state and municipal archives in northern Mexico and in county records on the US side of the border. I mention only a few: on the Mexican side, Coahuila’s state archives very rich collection on the borderland in the second half of the 19th century; on the US side, in the remarkable concentration of county records at the University of Texas-Pan American hold many cases, beginning in the 1860s, that dealt with smuggling of all sorts of goods. Together with the records of Brownsville and Laredo lawyers, of which there are many in various Texas repositories, such research would make possible an innovative understanding of smuggling in this crucial period.

            In connection with Gabriel’s research on northern Mexican breweries and Prohibition, I think that these same archives might yield revealing documentation. And, to my list of suggested archival forays, I would add Nuevo León and the Distrito Federal: Monterrey for state government legal and financial support for the development of breweries, Mexico City for the records of the ministries of Fomento and Public Works in the Archivo General, for systematic efforts to provide a framework for the development of big enterprise in the North.

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            I’ll call a third group of topics Mexican migration and the remaking of the borderlands and beyond. Todd Meyers’s research on consumption and cooperatives, and Eduardo Moralez’s proposed study of Mexican American and Mexican immigration to the Great Lakes fill out this category. Since these topics touch on my own research, I must resist the temptation to go on and on. On Todd’s study of consumption and cooperatives, I suggest that the place to start is with two bursts of cooperative organization, one between about 1910 and 1914, the second in the 1930s. For the first, the sources are available but scattered widely: in the Archivo General in Mexico City, in the Gobernación collection called Revoltosos Magonistas as well as in other sections; in the Silvestre Terrazas collection at the Bancroft Library; and in the files of Spanish-language newspapers. Other leads will turn up in Texas county and state archives, especially in incorporation records, required of cooperatives. And still other hints will crop up in the archives of the Extension Service, of which there are scattered holdings at the Center for American History, the Cushing Memorial Library at Texas A & M-College Station, and the South Texas Archives at Texas A & M-Kingsville. As for the 1930s, I think that I would start with the vast holdings of the Southwest Federal Records Center in Ft. Worth and the National Archives: the reports and records of the Farm Security Administration and its successor agencies, held both in Ft. Worth and Washington; and the almost unexplored records of the Rural Electrification Administration, which built up its rural electrification program throughout Texas on the basis of existing cooperatives. And, finally, I would urge you to think about a kind of archives rarely used for purposes of studying consumption: labor union archives, especially the enormous and superbly organized archives of the American Federation of Labor, housed at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin at the University of Wisconsin, the Texas Labor Archives at the University of Texas at Arlington, and the magnificent oral histories of 1920s and 1930s Texas labor leaders that are now held in the Center for American History. And I can’t resist adding one more suggestion, this about photographic evidence. In great collections of photographs of rural Texas, such as those of the Harry Hunt Ransom Center for the Humanities at the University of Texas and the Farm Security Administration collection at the Library of Congress, there are fleeting but revealing glimpses of the scale and reach of the cooperative impulse along the border.

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Last updated July 17, 2006.