Nineteenth Century: Dissemination
During the colonial period, many early printed Mexican books were preserved in the libraries and archives of religious orders. As the religious orders fell out of favor towards the late colonial period - and especially after Mexican independence - these collections began what many scholars describe as an "exodus" out of the country and into the United States, England, and other parts of the world.
This dispersal of Mexican books has been described by a number of scholars as one of the great tragedies of Mexican intellectual history. Ernesto de la Torre Villar, referring to the eighteenth century bibliographer Juan José de Eguiara y Eguren, writes "The number of extremely valuable books cited by Eguiara in his works is frightening, but more frightening is that these books no longer exist in our repositories"(119). In her article "Presencia de los impresos mexicanos del Siglo XVI en las bibliotecas del siglo XXI," the Mexican bibliographer Rosa María Fernández de Zamora similarly mourns what she refers to as the exodus of Mexican documentary patrimony. She adds her own voice to that of José Mariano Beristáin de Souza (1796), Juan B Iguíniz, Joaquin Fernandez de Cordoba, Alfonso Reyes, Alicia Perales Ojeda, Jose Miguel Quintana, Salvador Ugarte and Luis Gonzalez y Gonzalez. A passage she quotes from an editorial attributed to the nineteenth century Mexican historian Joaquín García Icazbalceta is particularly enlightening:
... una vez comenzada la decadencia de las ordenes religiosas, las librerías de los conventos, a pesar de las censuras que las resguardan, dieron paso franco a sus tesoros, y sufrieron un verdadero saqueo, lento y oculto, más no por eso menos desastroso. Sus mas (sic) preciosos libros y manuscritos pasaron a poder de particulares, y de allí muchos al extranjero, de donde ahora tenemos que volver a traerlos a gran costa y con mucha dificultad. Nuestras revoluciones ayudaron a la obra de destrucción. Los conventos eran siempre cuarteles y lugares preferidos para las asonadas. Los soldados no respetaban ciertamente las bibliotecas y más de una vez los libros dieron el papel necesario para los cartuchos... A pesar de todo, no es despreciable lo que milagrosamente se ha salvado de tanto naufragio. (11)
Fernández de Zamora explains the exodus of these documents as the legacy of two forces: rising bibliophilia in Europe and the United States, combined with the nationalization of religious libraries. At the time that religious libraries were nationalized after independence from Spain, public opinion was opposed to any memory of the colonial past. Carelessness combined with opportunism, and books were destroyed or sold abroad. The story of the Tlatelolco collection, which ended up in San Francisco, is a perfect example of this (Mathes 9). In other cases, books underwent more heartbreaking fates: Torre Villar describes how the military used religious institutions as barracks, utilizing the leaves of books to make paper cones, to wrap up butter, or to carry gunpowder (Torre Villar, 120). In this context, the sale of books abroad could be understood as a rescue effort. For many scholars and bibliophiles, however, the acquisition of colonial documents by foreign collectors is seen as thievery.
Though the nineteenth century did see the dissemination of Mexican colonial documents abroad, some Mexican bibliophiles dedicated their lives to building libraries of Mexican history. Figures like Joaquín García Icazbalceta, José Fernando Ramírez, José María Andrade, and Genaro García, [and nahuatl intellectual? whatshisname?.]. Follow this path to learn more about nineteenth-century collection and dissemination of the Advertencias.