Twentieth & Twenty-first Centuries: Institutionalization
Today, more than sixty exemplars of the Advertencias can be found in private collections and public libraries from Chile to Germany. Each collection has a unique history of acquisition, and each collection situates the book within a unique social context.
This map shows the full distribution of the Advertencias, with brief descriptions of the collections that we have visited personally. An analysis of the map follows below. A larger version of the map is also available.
Three qualities are particularly important to the way we read this map.
Clustering
The map reveals two clusters of books: in and around Mexico City, and along the northeast coast of the United States. This clustering is a product of many factors that are worthy of further exploration, including the circulation of the marketplace and the distribution of public resources and private philanthropic efforts in Mexico and the U.S.
The clustering of multiple copies within a single collection (like the fifteen copies at the Biblioteca Nacional in Mexico City (#4), the ten copies at the Biblioteca Cervantina del Tecnologico de Monterrey (#15), or the six copies at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, USA (#30)) is also intriguing. What compels a library to gather multiple editions of a single text? Perhaps it is a focus on books as artifacts rather than as texts, in which case no two instances are ever the same. Perhaps it is the unintentional consequence of acquisition practices, which frequently involves the consolidation of many similar collections. Or perhaps it is an effort to bring together all cultural heritage items under a single roof.
Contexts
Jeffrey Todd Knight writes, "the parameters of reading and interoperation are frequently established and sometimes imposed by the collectors, compilers, conservators, and curators who in a very literal sense make books" (55). We are interested in the ways that these parameters function to make a single book read differently across multiple contexts. How is the copy of the Advertencias at the San Jacinto National Monument in Houston, Texas (#12) different from the copy at the Biblioteca de Burgoa in Oaxaca, Mexico (#5)? Is it important that the Cushing Memorial Library at Texas A&M (#13) holds the Advertencias as part of a collection on colonial Texan history, while the Biblioteca Franciscana in Cholula, MX (#9) seeks to reconstruct the colonial libraries of the Franciscan orders in Mexico? We hope that our descriptions, which combine affective narratives with context for the collection, point to some ways of reading these archives as interpretive frameworks for the Advertencias.
Trajectories
While this map illustrates a static distribution of Advertencias, it does not necessarily describe the trajectory of the books. As we saw in the last section, for example, many copies traveled out of Mexico into private collections in England and elsewhere, changing hands several times before finally being donated or sold to institutions affiliated with universities, like the Biblioteca Nacional at UNAM in Mexico City, or the Kroch Library at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
This map is also neither complete, nor permanent. Our information draws on data from World Cat and personal communications. Private libraries may not reveal their secrets through these systems of communication. We also know of at least one copy that is currently in the hands of a book dealer in Buenos Aires. The market does not stop.
