Saturday, September 30, 2017

Research is like a tango...

...It's important to listen to your partner, and to have good floorcraft.

(To my tango peeps who I know are reading this page, I love of all of you, and I will work with this metaphor, but be warned this is a really nerdy research entry.  I promise a real tango one soon.) 

I know almost everything in life can be compared to a milonga (which after all is why there's a song "La vida es un tango") but it occurs to me that this is really true of doing archival research.  The first important thing to look out for is your partner - the librarian or archivist who's helping you.  Obviously it goes without saying that you should be polite and follow the etiquette of the archive (and accept a break if someone kindly offers you freshly made coffee and chocolates).  But you should also listen carefully to anything the archivist has to say and offer enough information about your project and what you're looking for to let them be helpful.  So basically, be a good listener and clear in your communications -- the heart of being a good tango partner, whether follower or leader.

I thought of this comparison yesterday after spending another very pleasant morning at the erstwhile Residencia de Señoritas, and an hour in the afternoon talking to the current (very knowledgeable) director of the International Institute who spent about 20% of our talk apologizing for not being helpful, and another 70% being incredibly helpful about both potential archives and also published sources that are wonderful background info.  (The other ten percent was me talking, and some socializing.)


I was kindly greeted by the women who had met me on Thursday at the Residencia, and also met the gentleman I had emailed, who greeted me with ¿Eres Rebecca? when I entered, and explained that he had been the person in charge of emailing.  They were all very helpful about setting up the database (the program is Knosys Blue, by the way, and based on google they seem to be a Spanish-based database indexer), and I got happily to work.

Sadly, I did not find any hits that were direct smoking guns (though I did forget to run Dubois' name through the database -- not that it's likely but he was so ubiquitous in the US that it's just possible he corresponded with someone at the Residencia).  On the other hand, I did start building up a picture of how the Residencia worked, which gave me a few more search terms.  For instance, once I figured out that there was a lot of institutional correspondence with the Seven Sisters colleges, because they sent students (and also accepted foreign exchange students from Spain), it occurred to me to see if there were any hits from Spelman College.  (There aren't.)  A quick phone google led me to the Wikipedia page for the Historically Black Female Colleges (besides Spelman), and also to the information that many if not most have changed their names over time (from such and such "seminary" or "academy" to "college" frequently, as well as other changes in name and orientation).  So I carefully started searching for locations, since Knosys Blue (bless its indexed little heart) includes lugar de origen and lugar de destinatario as searchable fields.  There were a smattering of letters from Virginia, Washington DC, and Atlanta, but none, alas, related to the schools I was looking for.  Still, the technique is a good way of making sure that you're not missing things.

In the midst of this careful combing and re-combing, María Luisa, the woman who had helped settle me in on Thursday, stuck her head around the door and said that there was coffee "recien hecha" if I would like some.  It seemed rude to say no (and I was sad about not having any success) so I got up, and headed across the hall to the little canteen (even though I had stopped for coffee on the way to the archive in the morning), where there was not only coffee but a lovely selection of little pastries, as well as a dish of chocolates.  María Luisa (who was also having coffee), explained that she had brought in the pastries from a nearby pastelería because she was celebrating having just received "un contrato" (i.e. permanent employment as opposed to per diem) after a year at the Fundación.  She's a librarian by training, and is looking forward to when the library is renovated and re-opened (in 15 months, sob), and also when the building renovations are finished, because the gardens will be so lovely then, which makes it an ideal place to work, aside from that it's within walking distance of her home.  So she was in a very good mood, and when we went back into the office she shares with a colleague and the researcher of the moment people kept sticking their heads around the door to congratulate her.  It's so rare that someone actually achieves contrato indefinido in Spain nowadays that it's nice to be around someone who's living the dream.

We also chatted over coffee a little bit about the research I was doing, and she confirmed that the Residencia involved the super-elite of Spain, and added the interesting factoid that women in Spain were prohibited by law from pursuing university degrees until 1910.  (Today while searching for other stuff I found a decree celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the 1910 law opening universities to women in the online archives of the CSIC, the successor to the Centro de Estudios Históricos where Peterson and the other "señoritas" I'm researching studied.)  This is in some ways rather shocking, and in others makes perfect sense.  You can either have de jure prohibitions or equally effective de facto ones.  And if private colleges simply don't admit women, there's no need for a law.  (The medievalist technique of assuming that any laws passed are passed only because otherwise people would do it seems to hold true for more modern stuff as well.  When the law finally changed in 1910 the Residencia de Señoritas was open by 1917, and by the end of the Civil War in 1939 even the Franco government, which was reactionary in practically every sense of the word, didn't think to ban women from universities or segregate them by sex, which put them paradoxically ahead of much of the Anglophone world --- though the quality of university education under heavy censorship was perhaps dubious.)  Anyway, I explained my interests a little more, and she suggested the International Institute (where I was headed anyway).

By 1:00 my brain was fried and I was getting a headache from reading the very poor and upward sloping handwriting of Homero Serís (the successor to Antonio Solalinde) on a screen, so I thanked María Luisa and her colleagues profusely, and headed out to the gardens of the Sorolla Museum down the block to recuperate a little in the sunshine.  Then I had lunch (in a restaurant, which was an indulgence), and then I wandered around a bit before my appointment at the International Institute.  I ended up sitting on a park bench in the shade on the Castellana, scribbling my ideas out in a notebook.  There's something tremendously satisfying about writing by hand.  I think it's that my mind moves faster than my pencil when I'm writing on paper, so I feel justified in being very telegraphic in my thoughts, and also I manage to cover an entire page incredibly quickly.  I type nearly as quickly as I think, so when I run out of ideas writing on the computer it's pathetically obvious to myself.  Writing by hand is like letting a Youtube video buffer for a while before hitting play.  It seems like it runs much more smoothly.

Meeting with Pilar at the International Institute was also fascinating.  She was, as I said, incredibly apologetic about not having concrete information, but she also was able to point me toward what looks like a fascinating background source (or what will be once I get my hands on it), about the birth of Hispanism in the United States, and she explained that the explosion of students studying abroad at the International Institute and the Residencia de Señoritas starting around 1919 was a side effect partly of increased commercial ties to Latin America, but also of the wave of anti-German propaganda and sentiment during WWI.  Up until the First World War, German had been a major second language choice in American high schools.  When German lost pride of place (in a display of short sighted xenophobia which seems far more typical of the U.S. than the sweet curiosity displayed by the students who wanted to learn about Spain), Spanish took its place.  (I knew that German language instruction plunged in New York City after the Second World War.  I hadn't realized it was already a national phenomenon after the First.)  The increased teaching of Spanish as a second language meant an urgent need for Spanish teachers, hence the wave of Americans who came to study in Spain.  (Pilar also said there were more Americans than French or Germans or English, which nicely supports my thesis theory that Americans are obsessed with Spain.)  I'll need to get written confirmation of all she said (she did also refer me to a thesis from a Complutense grad student, and to her own thesis, which I intend to cite), but this is all super helpful background information for my introduction, I think.

On the one hand, it seems like cheating to sit down and have someone helpfully tell you all the stuff you need to write for your introduction, and give you a list of citations.  On the other hand - in the absence of physical chapter meetings this year - hurray!  The secret to getting people to be incredibly helpful is partly basic courtesy, and a willingness to listen and take notes, and partly listening carefully when they say, "oh, and you should talk to so-and-so."  Which was after all how I got to Pilar, and how from her I may get to a few other people.  It always helps to courteously acknowledge the person who pointed you in the right direction too.  That's what I meant about how research has its one on one component like dancing with a partner....but also its social component like being aware of the entire dance floor at a milonga.  You shouldn't step on your partner (librarian's) toes, but you should also keep an eye out for others on the dance floor who may be researching the same thing, and always speak well of them to other partners.

So, in sum, still nothing definite, but lots of background details are filling in.  On with the dance.  Let joy be unconfined...

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