One of the eminent nineteenth century collectors of early colonial books and documents was the Mexican historian
Joaquín García Icazbalceta (1825-1894), known for his conservative politics and for his careful research into the history of the Spanish friars who worked as missionaries in sixteenth century Mexico. Known in particular for his 1881
biography of Juan de Zumárraga, Mexico's first archbishop, García Icazbalceta represented a generation of historians who took seriously the value of primary sources as historical documentation. In his introduction to the Zumárraga biography, he wrote,
"Nadie duda que el trascurso del tiempo y la falta ó pérdida de documentos son graves obstáculos para el esclarecimiento de la verdad histórica; pero acaso el mayor de todos es la consistencia que llegan á adquirir ciertos errores, nacidos de la ligereza ó mala fe de algun escritor, y adoptados sin exámen por los que vinieron despues."
García Icazbalceta's historical works sought to fight against the ignorance or falsehoods embedded in the historical record by returning to original sources, especially those that documented indigenous life and the work of the friars in sixteenth century Mexico. The collection of these sources served as an essential aspect of this project, and García Icazbalceta developed a respectable library of early colonial books, manuscripts, archival documents, and indigenous pictorials over the course of his life. He also published a definitive bibliography of sixteenth century Mexican printed books: the
Bibliografía mexicana del siglo XVI: catálogo razonado de libros impresos en México de 1539 á 1600, con biografías de autores y otras ilustraciones.
García Icazbalceta's entry for the Advertencias, the final entry in his collection, is extensive, and includes a biography of the book's author, Fray Juan Bautista. I quote here only his introduction to the text:
Seis ó más ejemplares de las Advertencias he visto, y casi todos presentan diferencias entre si, comenzando por las portadas. Unos las tienen en orden, es decir, cada parte la suya, con el respectivo título de Primera ó Segunda: otros tienen en ambas el título de Primera. Existe además en mi ejemplar una portada suelta de la Segunda Parte, totalmente diversa de las comunes, con otro escudo, y con la vuelta blanca. Parece que no podría aplicarse al tomo correspondiente, porque los preliminares comienzan á la vuelta de la portada, y siendo blanca en esta reimpresión vendrían á quedar truncos dichos preliminares, por faltarles la primera página. Pero el caso es que tampoco en ellos hay conformidad. He visto ejemplares que los tienen repetidos por completo en ambos tomos: otros traen parte en cada uno, y otros no tienen ninguno en el segundo, sino todos en el primero. Esto es lo natural, y para esa clase de ejemplares se imprimió sin duda la nueva portada del segundo tomo, aunque no la he visto en ninguno.
It was García Icazbalceta's confused hand-waving over the title page and front matter of the
Advertencias that inspired this project.
In addition to writing about the
Advertencias, García Icazbalceta held two volumes in his personal collection: a full two-part set, and an additional copy of volume one. The additional copy of the volume one appears in what may be
an original vellum binding with the stubs of leather ties and some kind of ink marking at the top. This volume preserves the book as a historical artifact as well as a document.
In contrast, García Icazbalceta rebound
the original two-volume set of Advertencias in a binding that was consistent with the rest of his personal library. This likely included trimming the edges of the books (a process that removes any
Marcas de Fuego), adding a decorative leather cover with gold inlay, and inserting new marbled end papers. We could argue that this process devalues the role of the book as a historical artifact; it also reincorporates it into an archive of nineteenth century Mexican history with a conservative nationalist agenda. This isn't to say that García Icazbalceta was extraordinarily political, or that he allowed politics to disrupt his research method. Rather, it points to the role that collecting and reframing historical documents always plays in narrating the past. As Michel de Certeau writes, "Thus the past is the fiction of the present."
This becomes more clear when we consider the role the Advertencias played in García Icazbalceta's collection. The Bibliografía mexicana del siglo XVI was the first in a five-part series that García Icazbalceta published on a private press. The rest of the collection is made up mostly of reprints of sixteenth century writers, from the Códice Franciscano del siglo XVI to the Códice Mendieta: documentos franciscanos siglos XVI y XVII. These books, many of which had remained in manuscript form until that point, provided new sources of information for researchers of early colonial Mexico who might not have their own private archive.
There is certainly a single thread running between García Icazbalceta's three projects: writing historical treatises, collecting historical documents, and printing resources for scholars of colonial Mexico. The thread has to do with the where García Icazbalceta locates the center (or perhaps the beginning) of Mexican history: on the mendicant friars in sixteenth-century Mesoamerica, and on the literate indigenous nobility who joined them in producing histories of Mexico's pre-columbian past, and in documenting (and resisting) the events of Spain's colonization. At the heart of the project is the production of written texts.
