Today I visited two archives, and did not get as far as I had hoped, or as little as I had feared.
Greetings from sunny and
spring-like Málaga, where the skies are blue, the palms are green,
and the tourists are plentiful, even in winter, when the overbuilt beach isn't usable. I got up with an alarm clock, and have walked at least ten kilometers today (probably more like fifteen altogether) and am exhausted, but certainly have plenty of adventures to write about. I suspect that the blog entries, like my day, will end up being in two parts: the morning in the archives, and the afternoon in Malaga's stunning ruins. So, on to the archives. I started with the one closer to my hotel, on the Alameda Principal that connects the newer part of the city to the headland with the medieval center and cool ruins. These are the municipal archives, of the city of Malaga. They look like this:
The ground floor has a pair of exposition halls, which for some reason are currently devoted to a Slovakian contemporary artist named Godany, and a series of views of Bratislava showing its "spiritual development." (I quote the English text of the exposition.) Both of these could have something to do with the sign outside the Bratislava hall saying "Travel in Slovakia: A Good Idea" which is an ad by the Slovakian tourist board. It's not very grammatical but probably better than "Bratislava: a place to visit if you're afraid Vienna and Prague are too cosmopolitan." The artist Godany was supposedly repressed by the Soviets because of his critique of modern urban environments, though if the later (post 2000) works on display are anything to judge by it's because of the number of crosses in his work. I can only assume that he's very afraid of vampires.
Anyway, having taken a quick look through the ground floor exhibits, and decided that Chagall was smart enough to actually move himself rather than his paintings to the nice climate here, I headed up the stairs to the archival division, which has the friendly and familiar look of many municipal archives in this part of the world:
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| The entry to the municipal archives - light filled and pleasant |
Yes, we have the info. No, you can't have it.
Once inside the beckoning wooden doors I turned the corner and found three librarians (two smiley young ones and one severe older one) sitting at a long desk, who asked (with two big smiles and one polite little one) how they could help me. As I don't know their names (yet, though I may learn them when I go back), I think it is simplest to refer to them as the Moirae. You may henceforth picture me as an epic hero setting forth.
I explained my quest, with a certain pessimism, and was happily stunned when one of them said "oh, well if you have the name and dates, we should have the libros de padrón (the records of the empadronamiento that I wrote about when I first went to Madrid, I think), and maybe other info.
The curly-haired Caribbean-looking Clotho was actually already pulling a fat volume off the shelf when the long-straight-haired Lachesis said, "espera, ¿que es antes del 1930?" I said no, that the date I was interested in was 1931, and Lachesis said, "Oh, well then there's a problem" and Clotho added that "por protección de datos" they were not allowed to let researchers look at any records after 1930. Then the older, grimmer Atropos said that post-1930 searches have to be done by the archive personnel, after the researcher makes a request (solicitud de datos).
I can verify that the person I'm interested in died in 1978 without children, and her companion on this particular trip - Nella Larsen - died in 1964, also childless, but I had the feeling this was more protection of employment for the Moirae than protection of privacy. I said, ok, I'll make a request, and the kindly Lachesis was already pulling out a paper form for me to fill out when the stern Atropos said "solicitud por correo electrónico." (You can tell that she is the oldest and sternest of the Fates because she said "por correo electrónico" and not "por mail" which is what anyone under 35 says, plus me.) I asked pitifully if I couldn't just fill out the form now that I was there, and Lachesis and Clotho would have let me, but Atropos insisted that it would be "más rápido y mejor por correo electrónico." So I sadly left, promising to send an email, and saying that I would be in Málaga until the end of the week and able to return whenever.
As I wasn't sure how much "quicker" it would actually be, I didn't knock myself out trying to connect the tablet to the WiFi, much less fussing with sending an email via my phone. (I sent the email this evening after dinner from the hotel, and will trust that they're not so busy that they'll remember the strange North American who wanted to know about wandering foreign authors in 1931.) I am hoping that in fact they were sufficiently intrigued by my explanation of the quest to do a real search, and that they come up with something.
They did however, explain to me that there are actually three archives, the municipal, the provincial, and the autónoma (the Junta de Andalucía) and that all of them have different records so their holdings "están muy dispersos" as Atropos put it disapprovingly.
I have not yet tracked down the autónoma's archives, but as I was already planning to visit the provincial archives (and in fact had some good hopes of them since one of my sources mentions that Peterson stayed at the "Villa Mercedes" and the only house of that description dating the nineteenth century which Google knows about is actually not in the city of Málaga but in the nearby Torre del Mar), I simply entered the "Archivo Histórico Málaga" into my phone, and allowed google maps and the blue dot to guide me the 1.4 km to the provincial archives, which sit well outside the medieval center, up the hill away from the beach.
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| You wouldn't guess, but the reading room (on the far side of the building behind the trees) is filled with natural light and very cheerful. The archive itself is a nice imitation of the yellow stone fortress motif common here. |
In which I discover I'm researching the wrong thing...
I walked into the (eerily silent) entry hall of the provincial archives and was confronted with a bored security guard, and snack and coffee machines. Having snack and coffee machines is a nice detail. I explained that I wanted to consult a librarian or archivist about an American author who had lived in Málaga, and he called someone named Juan and relayed my request, and then showed me politely into the "sala de referencia," which is set off from the "sala de lectura" by big glass panes, and a nice older lady in a white lab coat asked about my research, and I explained it. (A lot of archivists wear white lab coats at the BNE also. It's not so much an affectation as a reasonable way of dealing with a job where you're supposed to dress more or less professionally - or at least business casual - but also have to deal with extremely dusty materials, and/or those red volumes that rub off and leave a mark on everything they touch.)
The nice archivist here explained that the important thing was to get more specific, and that probably I wanted the archives of the "gobierno civil" and that while they were online, there was also a paper catalogue (hallelujah...I hate going through PDFs unless I'm looking for a specific search term, and in this case I know that Peterson doesn't show up). She promptly showed me the catalogue, indicated a seat, and provided me with a pad (with a cool Junta de Andalucía Archivo Histórico Provincial logo on it), and left me to get on with my work, telling me to just tap on the glass when I was finished. This made me feel a little like a zoo animal at feeding time, but I quickly forgot that in the pleasure of going through the finding aid.
There's a certain special pleasure in trying to guess which boxes in a finding aid where your primary search object does NOT appear are most likely to give you something relevant. It's a kind of guesswork where you have to imagine the interests and intersections of your research target with the institution keeping the records. Since I'm looking only at 1931 I was able to eliminate a lot based purely on dates, of course, but within the 1931 dates I cast a pretty wide net. Obviously "expedientes de asociaciones culturales: teatro y música" was a high priority. But I also noted the box numbers for the "expedientes" (files) of the employees of the civil government, and of the Guardia Civil and the cuerpos de seguridad. It's a long shot, but Peterson was pretty, single, and an exotic foreigner, and she joked in her letters about acquiring a "splendid Arabian boyfriend" during a trip to Tetuan, so one never knows whom she dated in Málaga, and whether hanging out with her showed up in someone's file. (Again, a long shot, but this is the moment where the novelist and the academic intersect. You imagine someone's story, and then check to see if truth is in fact as strange as your particular fiction.) Anyway, I spent a while going through the finding aid, and naturally (given above musings) felt rueful on discovering that I was in the perfect place to do the research I did not do for a couple of novels...namely actually looking at a fair number of records of the Guardia Civil. The number of "prisoners" (presos) is rather grimly demonstrated in the page I took a photo of here. The call numbers are by box, not file folder. There's one box for 1961-64. And five boxes for 1940 alone.
In any case, after my happy time with the finding aid, I filled out an expediente de investigadora (with my name and address and NIE, and so on), and then was given a little call slip, and told to request one box at a time. The provincial archive closes at 1:00, and it was then 12:15 already, so I picked the most likely box (cultural associations: theater and music), put my stuff in the locker, and headed into the brightly naturally lit sala de lectura, where there were a grand total of three other researchers (all elderly men), and handed in my call slip to the archivist there.
I have not yet finished going through this box, but so far there's no luck. On the other hand, it is essentially the record of all the theater and musical groups that wanted to be "asociaciones" (the equivalent of non-profits roughly), and all the associated documentation that the province required at various times, so it's somewhat amusing. The earliest records in the box are from 1902, and are written in copperplate script, on very thick paper which is folded in a certain way, and with elaborate forms of address to "S.E." (su excelencia) and so on. The forms from the mid-sixties include not only membership lists (common to all the time periods I've seen) but also the "certificado de buena conducta" of all the members from the Jefatura de policía. These are obviously form letters, which inevitably end with "Dios le guarde" and a signature. I'm not sure whether "Dios le guarde" is a conventional farewell referring to the "to whom it may concern" recipient of the letter, or whether it's a form regarding the subject of the letter, suggesting that God should continue to keep whoever has good conduct out of trouble. Clearly the form of the letter is supposed to be "So-and-so, born such-and-such-date, son/daughter of Y and X, currently single/married and employed as X/unemployed is of good moral and political conduct, and has no criminal antecedents and X/Y/no political affiliations. Dios le guarde." In other words, it's basically a low-tech version of the criminal background check I had to do to get a visa for Spain. But Málaga was a relatively small town, and the Jefatura de Policía tended to do what anyone filling out a repetitive form does, which is vary one part of the form without considering if the rest still makes sense. So there's one about someone with "good moral conduct though he does have a tendency to drunkenness which has several times led to arrest for creating public scandal, and shows some signs of dementia." The point was obviously to have the piece of paper to submit, not what the piece of paper said. (If the police wanted to screw you over, they refused to issue the certificado at all, or they said you were not of good moral and political conduct. As long as they said the magic "de buena conducta" they could list a rap sheet as long as the page permitted and no one cared.) Old forms of security theater look quaint.
Then there's a letter from an inspector in 1974 saying that he has visited the 50 seat theater opened by one Angeles Rubio, and that while it technically doesn't conform to theater standards, he can testify that it does have two emergency exits and is in a brand new building which was presumably built to the new fire code, so he thinks it should be allowed to continue to operate as a legal theater under and exemption. (That's the rare example of an official trying to do someone a favor. Impossible to tell if it was disinterested and/or justified, since it might indeed have been a kind gesture to a literally underground theater, and might have been justifying a fire trap in exchange for a bribe. More research would have to be done to figure that one out.)
All in all, it's odd the pieces of paper that get kept, and odder still that at the time people probably struggled to get them together and submit them, and worried about getting proper responses and so on. I have a fairly useless (albeit amusing) occupation nowadays, but I like to feel as if reading these documents at least makes them important again for a little while, which maybe justifies some of the work and heartache that went in to creating them in the first place for the nice people who wanted to have music associations and theaters and so on.
At one o'clock I handed in my box as requested, and was told that it would be kept for me for tomorrow. As I have many more boxes to get through I am afraid I will have to hurry up, but at least my morning tomorrow is planned.
I headed out into the sunshine feeling virtuous after my two archives, and wandered back toward the hotel, stopping at the Mercado del Carmen to have tapas for lunch (boquerones en vinagre and tortilla, nothing fancy), and then to briefly rest.
Then in the afternoon, since all the archives were closed and do not have afternoon hours, I was free to do tourism, and thus headed off to the Alcazaba and the Roman amphitheatre, and then along the famous beaches of La Malagueta and La Caleta, and took the equivalent of two rolls of the old film, when film came in rolls of 36, trying to give a sense of these very beautiful places. But that will be an entry for another day, when I have time and patience to upload lots of stunning pictures. In the meantime, let this be a record that I worked today at my thesis, in addition to doing some Complutense advising stuff long distance via email, which totally justifies my long walk through the Alcazaba and along the beach promenade.
The nice archivist here explained that the important thing was to get more specific, and that probably I wanted the archives of the "gobierno civil" and that while they were online, there was also a paper catalogue (hallelujah...I hate going through PDFs unless I'm looking for a specific search term, and in this case I know that Peterson doesn't show up). She promptly showed me the catalogue, indicated a seat, and provided me with a pad (with a cool Junta de Andalucía Archivo Histórico Provincial logo on it), and left me to get on with my work, telling me to just tap on the glass when I was finished. This made me feel a little like a zoo animal at feeding time, but I quickly forgot that in the pleasure of going through the finding aid.
 |
| Records of prisoners. |
In any case, after my happy time with the finding aid, I filled out an expediente de investigadora (with my name and address and NIE, and so on), and then was given a little call slip, and told to request one box at a time. The provincial archive closes at 1:00, and it was then 12:15 already, so I picked the most likely box (cultural associations: theater and music), put my stuff in the locker, and headed into the brightly naturally lit sala de lectura, where there were a grand total of three other researchers (all elderly men), and handed in my call slip to the archivist there.
 |
| The sala de lectura (with the "sala de consultas" through the glass panel in the background left, and nice natural light. |
I have not yet finished going through this box, but so far there's no luck. On the other hand, it is essentially the record of all the theater and musical groups that wanted to be "asociaciones" (the equivalent of non-profits roughly), and all the associated documentation that the province required at various times, so it's somewhat amusing. The earliest records in the box are from 1902, and are written in copperplate script, on very thick paper which is folded in a certain way, and with elaborate forms of address to "S.E." (su excelencia) and so on. The forms from the mid-sixties include not only membership lists (common to all the time periods I've seen) but also the "certificado de buena conducta" of all the members from the Jefatura de policía. These are obviously form letters, which inevitably end with "Dios le guarde" and a signature. I'm not sure whether "Dios le guarde" is a conventional farewell referring to the "to whom it may concern" recipient of the letter, or whether it's a form regarding the subject of the letter, suggesting that God should continue to keep whoever has good conduct out of trouble. Clearly the form of the letter is supposed to be "So-and-so, born such-and-such-date, son/daughter of Y and X, currently single/married and employed as X/unemployed is of good moral and political conduct, and has no criminal antecedents and X/Y/no political affiliations. Dios le guarde." In other words, it's basically a low-tech version of the criminal background check I had to do to get a visa for Spain. But Málaga was a relatively small town, and the Jefatura de Policía tended to do what anyone filling out a repetitive form does, which is vary one part of the form without considering if the rest still makes sense. So there's one about someone with "good moral conduct though he does have a tendency to drunkenness which has several times led to arrest for creating public scandal, and shows some signs of dementia." The point was obviously to have the piece of paper to submit, not what the piece of paper said. (If the police wanted to screw you over, they refused to issue the certificado at all, or they said you were not of good moral and political conduct. As long as they said the magic "de buena conducta" they could list a rap sheet as long as the page permitted and no one cared.) Old forms of security theater look quaint.
Then there's a letter from an inspector in 1974 saying that he has visited the 50 seat theater opened by one Angeles Rubio, and that while it technically doesn't conform to theater standards, he can testify that it does have two emergency exits and is in a brand new building which was presumably built to the new fire code, so he thinks it should be allowed to continue to operate as a legal theater under and exemption. (That's the rare example of an official trying to do someone a favor. Impossible to tell if it was disinterested and/or justified, since it might indeed have been a kind gesture to a literally underground theater, and might have been justifying a fire trap in exchange for a bribe. More research would have to be done to figure that one out.)
All in all, it's odd the pieces of paper that get kept, and odder still that at the time people probably struggled to get them together and submit them, and worried about getting proper responses and so on. I have a fairly useless (albeit amusing) occupation nowadays, but I like to feel as if reading these documents at least makes them important again for a little while, which maybe justifies some of the work and heartache that went in to creating them in the first place for the nice people who wanted to have music associations and theaters and so on.
At one o'clock I handed in my box as requested, and was told that it would be kept for me for tomorrow. As I have many more boxes to get through I am afraid I will have to hurry up, but at least my morning tomorrow is planned.
I headed out into the sunshine feeling virtuous after my two archives, and wandered back toward the hotel, stopping at the Mercado del Carmen to have tapas for lunch (boquerones en vinagre and tortilla, nothing fancy), and then to briefly rest.
Then in the afternoon, since all the archives were closed and do not have afternoon hours, I was free to do tourism, and thus headed off to the Alcazaba and the Roman amphitheatre, and then along the famous beaches of La Malagueta and La Caleta, and took the equivalent of two rolls of the old film, when film came in rolls of 36, trying to give a sense of these very beautiful places. But that will be an entry for another day, when I have time and patience to upload lots of stunning pictures. In the meantime, let this be a record that I worked today at my thesis, in addition to doing some Complutense advising stuff long distance via email, which totally justifies my long walk through the Alcazaba and along the beach promenade.
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