Alcalá de Henares in sunshine and rain

One of the (many) posts I meant to do but didn't, and today's new research adventures

 

Alcalá de Henares in cold March rain

I traveled for the second time to Alcalá de Henares on Thursday (and the third time on Friday), to consult the mysteriously named Archivo General de Administración, which sounds like something from Yes, Minister, and actually appears to be something a bit more sinister and Orwellian.  My quest involved getting up early and taking the cercanías, and then spending three exhausting but fascinating hours in the archives (until they closed at 2:30), and then lunch in beautiful summery weather in an outdoor café, and a brief trip to the Casa-Museo Cervantes.  The sunshine and open museums and general holiday atmosphere outside the archives was a funny contrast to the first time I went to Alcalá, almost exactly one month ago, also for professional reasons, to give a lecture at the university.  I had a productive professional time and a very interesting tourist time there then too, but it was Monday (so many things were closed), and pouring rain, and quite cold.  My poor wet feet were very sad and chilly in March.  The only thing that happened in April was that I wanted to stop and buy a coke before the train home because I was mildly thirsty after walking around in the sun.  What a difference a month makes.

Alcalá de Henares in warm April sun

Faithful blog readers who are curious about the follow up to my adventures at the US embassy should know that I did indeed do a guest lecture, not only at the Complutense (at the request of a professor there), but also at the university of Alcalá de Henares, some thirty kilometers outside of Madrid, for students in a "Anglophone language and civilization" class.  This latter was set up by the embassy cultural section, and actually involved me getting picked up (outside the US embassy on the Calle Serrano, not in my neighborhood) and driven (along with two cultural attachés) to Alcalá de Henares in a black Mercedes with tinted windows and a chauffeur.  Of the two attachés who accompanied me, the Spaniard (thinking like a European that people trust government but dislike its representatives) reassured me with anxious friendliness that the tinted windows and alleged bulletproof glass and so on were for security purposes and a question of official business and absolutely standard procedure (nothing personal), and the American (thinking like an American that people distrust government but like its representatives) assured me with sheepish embarrassment that "we don't normally drive around in Mercedes with tinted windows but all the official cars were out so we had to do a car service."  No idea which is accurate, but the driver was perfectly cheerful and friendly, in any case, and gave his card to the attachés when we arrived in order to call him.

My lecture (the second half of the two that I gave at the Complutense on "The Teaching of Spanish in the United States") went over fairly well I think.  The students were attentive and seemed politely interested, anyway.  The one question, asked in excellent English, was whether the current political climate in the US would affect the increased trend toward heritage language learning.  My one answer was that there is no national standard curriculum in the US, and the states where heritage language learning is a model are furiously fighting the national trends anyway, so in the short term, not much, although in the long term who knows.

After the lecture I said farewell to the tinted Mercedes and my (really very kind) embassy guides who had set up the talk, and walked around Alcalá de Henares and had lunch with friends, who were determined to show me all the best of the Calle Mayor in spite of the fact that it was raining and cold, and who made sure that I saw "El Magistral" (the Cathedral, which is indeed imposingly "magistral"), and took me on a (fortunately by then less raining but still cold) tour of the university, given by a guide who walks backwards and tells you all about student pranks and student life --- when the university was founded in the 16th Century.  If you've been on an American college tour it seems a bit false advertising.  I mean, if you're trying to sell me on completing my PhD at Alcalá de Henares, why mention that students who pass their doctoral defense get to go through the "Puerta de la Gloria" (as opposed to the "Puerta de los burros" reserved for the ignominious failures) and have all the church bells in the town ring to celebrate their achievement and have the streets lined with cheering crowds who acclaim the new "doctor" and then demand to be treated to dinner and beer (as opposed to the ignominious failures, who get booed loudly by the passerby cheated out of free dinner and beer)...and then say that they don't do that anymore?  Why get someone's hopes up?

The facade of the Colegio Mayor San Ildefonso, heart of the 16th Century University

The rest of the tour of the university of Alcalá de Henares consisted largely of explanations about how the Roman name for Alcalá was "Complutum" and "Complutense" is a genitive of Complutum, so really the Universidad Complutense should be in Alcalá, and they were robbed by Madrid, and they should be allowed to be the Complutense again because have they mentioned that Complutense de Madrid is really just the University of Alcalá of Madrid, and they should get their name back.  They lost it in the mid 19th C during the disamortization of Church lands, when some of the property was seized, and Madrid needed a university in an attempt to be less of a backwater -- once its status as a world capital was in decline.  The university only re-opened in the 1970s, post-Franco.  As the university was only founded in 1499 and was closed between 1836 and 1976 or thereabouts, they really don't have a very long history, so the remainder of the tour (not about Complutum or Golden Age curious student customs) was about Cardinal Cisneros, their revered founder.  I find it impossible to think of Cisneros without thinking of the opening of Tariq Ali's novel Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree which does the impressively good trick of making any bibliophile cry from a standing start in the first chapter.  The novel takes some liberties with Cisneros's character (he probably was less of an inculto than he appears in the book), but he did burn the majority of the University of Granada and steal the rest of it to found Alcalá (ahem, the original "Complutense").  Plus the whole violating the terms of the surrender agreement in Granada and provoking the rebellions in the Alpujarras which led to huge misery.  (Granted, probably also the stated policy of the Catholic Monarchs, but he was enough of a villain in his own right.)  In any case, you wouldn't know any of that from the tour of the university of Alcalá, which still reveres its founder, and apologizes for the gigantic cenotaph of him because he was very humble and doubtless wouldn't have liked to have such a big monument, and also doubtless would have liked to be buried in the university he founded, not the "Magistral," and also doubtless would have disapproved of the pretentious gigantic stone university buildings because he was a humble seeker of knowledge, although it's also tragic he didn't see most of them completed because the university was his proudest achievement.  (That plus also being Regent and one of the power players of Spanish politics at the time when Spain was a rapidly rising imperial power.)

Courtyard of the Colegio San Ildefonso.  Note swan (Cisne for Cisneros) motif on well.

I've said this to friends, but the entire Alcalá tour take on Cisneros reminds me incredibly of UVA and their affectionate determination to remain "Mr. Jefferson's university."  Like the good cardinal, "Mr. Jefferson" had a few shades in his character (involving massive expulsion and enslavement of entire populations, in both cases actually) that make him not quite the paragon his partisans imagine, but I suppose it's fair to say that both Jefferson and Cisneros loved "their" universities, so it makes sense that their universities love them back.  Also like UVA, Alcalá's architects seriously overdosed on the Renaissance ideals of classical or neo-classical architecture (though filtered through a quite different sensibility and materials, so there's no physical resemblance).  But all in all, Alcalá's determination to be a bastion of Humanist Enlightenment is somewhat at war with the deeply centralizing and authoritarian instincts of its founder, so while the buildings are beautiful, in a massive and ponderous sort of way, the town lacks the charm of medieval Salamanca, which (as I mentioned in an earlier blog post) surfs cheerfully along on the happy contradiction of being an unashamedly reactionary institution which celebrates its tradition of smart-mouths like Fray Luis de León and Unamuno, those men who innocently spoke truth to what they didn't quite recognize as power.  Cardinal Cisneros did not encourage any such mythology at his new and improved university, and none has taken root.

Given the long association of Alcalá as a repository of power and perhaps de paso knowledge it makes sense that this university town has the imposingly named "Archivo General de Administración del Estado Civil" (not Salamanca which has the controversial and at once radical and reactionary archives of the Civil War, or Madrid, which also can't be relied on to jump one way or the other).  The archive is (as I overheard the friendly archivist Emilio in the "servicio de información" explaining to another user today) the largest in Spain, and one of the fifth or sixth largest in the world, and contains years and years worth of all the things that people nowadays don't bother to print out but that are probably being stored by the trilobyte in a secret facility in the desert somewhere by the US equivalent of the "AGA."  (If any friendly NSA types stop to read this as well as cataloguing it, hi guys!!!!  🙋)

As it says on the side of the building: Archivo General de Administración (del Estado Civil).  Every breath you take, every move you make, they'll be filing it.

I was warned by the researcher who alerted me to the AGA's existence that entering it was something of a production.  This is true, but I must say that everyone was incredibly helpful and welcoming about a stranger, which meant a slight sense of being on a smooth conveyor belt, starting with the security guard at the gatehouse who came out and wished me "buenos días" when I entered (not going into the gatehouse), and then politely asked me to put my bag through a metal detector, and then said "¿es tu primera vez aquí?" and on finding out that it was indeed my first visit took my NIE information and entered it into the computer, and then handed me a little plastic id card with a clip and the word "investigador" printed on it, along with a number.  (I was number 24 Thursday and number 21 Friday.)  Then he directed me down the driveway to the first left, and through the sliding doors, where a concierge also asked me if it was my "primera vez" at the archive, and explained I had to tap the loaned ID card on the turnstile to get in, and then go into the office on the left where I filled out a ficha with my details (name, address, institutional affiliation, and research topic), and received a copy of it, and then was directed down a long hallway to the sala de investigación (the standard reading room with lockers for non-approved materials), where the librarian explained that I couldn't bring my notebook and provided me with scrap paper, and then after filling out the details on my ficha (name and NIE) and asking me for my locker number and assigning me a numbered reading desk, explained that the desk was reserved for me, but that I should now go out of the sala de investigación and through the second door on the left to the servicio de información, to have a consulta with an archivist, who would inspect my ficha and make recommendations about what catalogues to consult.

The hallways leading from the entrance of the AGA to the sala de investigación and sección de información

I followed all the directions as carefully as possible, and met the friendly and cheerful Emilio, who thought that my quest for Richard Wright's specific letter would be difficult because it was too specific, but helpfully checked the databases and informed me that the expedientes (files or reports) from the censorship office were available for all of the translations of his books between 1944 and 1959 (brilliant) and added that the tourism archive was extremely large and extremely ill catalogued, but that I might want to look for "correspondence" or similar, and explained to me how the cataloguing system works (sort of).  There are fondos (that is, different collections, created by different government departments), with what roughly correspond to subject headings, available both on paper ("yo siempre prefiero papel," Emilio admitted, though he was more than competent with the database) and digitized.  Then each fondo has an "índice" of boxes (running into the tens of thousands) also on paper in binders and some of them digitized (some not).  Since I wasn't sure exactly what I was looking for, I happily followed Emilio's advice and looked at the paper copy of the indice for collection (3)49.01 and (3)49.02, the ministry of information tourism and culture division, and the ministry of information "servicio de investigación e información" (i.e. intelligence).

I spent the first day (Thursday) just going through the Index for collection (3)49.01, and making a list of dozens of boxes which are probably not relevant but which might have something.  The Index is amazing, as at a certain point the "legajos" files were transferred from an old to a new ascension number system, and the "signaturas" (box numbers) are literally hand-written in purple ink in the far left column of a table that looks something like this:

Untitled (asignatura, red ink)	Legajos	Indice de remisión	Procedencia	Concepto	Fechas	Bajas	Observaciones
21/2306 21/2313			Dirección General Prensa Secretario Información y Censura	Correspondencia	1953

I didn't take photos of the actual finding aid but it's worth one.  Aside from the unofficial far left column in reddish-purple ink, the "observaciones" column on the far right is sprinkled with handwritten comments in pencil including the following gem:

"¡ojo!  El contenido de las cajas XXXX no tiene nada que ver con su descripción."

The description column is, as you will see above, listed as "concepto."  This can be fairly straightforward ("cuentas" for example are presumably just old checking account books, and "nóminas" are old paystubs).  Sometimes it can be somewhat misleading (as in "correspondencia" described below).  And sometimes someone just threw up their hands.  I declined to note several boxes labeled "varios documentos" and dated "varios años."  Mind you, "various documents" from "various years" counts as catalogued material, as opposed to the uncatalogued material that isn't in the binders or databases.

One of the hardest things is learning the rather specialized vocabulary involved in the filing system here.  I took "correspondencia" to mean correspondence, as in letters, in English, something that Emilio my helpful guide seemed to confirm.  But my inspection of the two boxes above leads me to believe that at least sometimes "correspondencia" means something more like "correspondents" in the sense of journalists, as there are quite a lot of press releases, and also a wonderful series of hour by hour reports from the press office devoted to attempting to censor the wire services in real time.  The Chinese control over Google is nothing, since they can actually have a computer do the algorithm.  These sheets patiently note actual phone calls to editors of various papers, and blanket announcements to all the press about things that must or must not be included.  It's not the kind of "corespondence" I'm looking for, but I spent/wasted a fair amount of time on it Friday because reading the way the headlines of the early 1950s were created and/or suppressed in real time was fascinating.  Similarly, an unexpected example of not only the banality of evil but also the routine of politics came up in the multiple press releases of El Jefe de Estado y General de todos los Ejércitos, Su Excelencia General Franco's speeches, which were carefully reproduced and distributed to all papers with orders to print them in full.  In the 1950s he gave a lot of speeches while traveling around Spain, and most of them read precisely like the pathetic stump speeches of presidential candidates wearily touring the country beginning with "Hello, Teruel/Albacete/Vitoria/Whatever Provincial City!  I'm so glad that I finally have the opportunity to visit your beautiful city which I've wanted to do for such a long time because of your heroic history/invaluable contributions to the war effort/famous local whatever.  Your famous local history/industry is incredibly important to the nation as a whole, and we're all so incredibly privileged to be here and proud of your very valuable contributions...."  Seville is the only place where there is a flicker of genuine emotion about a long-standing "vínculo sentimental" possibly because Franco had actually been to Seville in the past, or had at least heard of it and could plausibly claim to know what some of the local monuments were.  But the Generalísimo's incredible excitement at visiting places like Teruel must have strained even the most credible local patriots. 

Naturally after reading all of this I couldn't help but feel a little dirty.  I would have felt dirty anyhow (mucking around in the self-congratulatory fictions of old fascists does that), but in this particular case I also had completely blue fingers, which I had to repeatedly scrub with soap, as in spite of my attempts to handle documents only by their edges, most of the old press releases and so on are carbon copies on the shiny heat paper that transfers ink to fingers if you look at it.

When I told all of this to one of my friends who is staying with me this week as a guest (who happily wandered around Alcalá de Henares and took the university tour and saw the cathedral and so on while I was in the archive) she condoled with me.  I was a bit surprised, as I had just been thinking that I have the coolest "job" (using the term extremely loosely) ever, and I can't believe I get to root around and do this kind of detective work (with really no pressure if I don't find anything, and an incredible adrenalin rush if I do).  Who doesn't think looking at the old documents of the past is fascinating?  Obviously, lots of people.  But while it is exhausting and I'm afraid that the really careful review of all the possible (poor catalogued or uncatalogued) documents where stuff about my authors might be hiding will take up all the time I have assigned for writing my chapter, and may have to be forgone for a more cursory examination, the thrill of the chase through a vast and jungle-like archive is tremendous fun.  Worth dirty blue-inked fingers.

I will leave off with a youtube clip that is not in and of itself relevant, but that is of a song that I found myself humming as I dug my way through censor's reports, and prohibitions on serving salmon to all hotel and restaurant owners (no idea why the ministry of agriculture reports were in that folder), and General Franco's endless and endlessly copied speeches, and telegrams of reports from the UN.  The words at least are a propos, and the cheery tune sums up my mood:

More adventures from the archives soon....