In her own hand...a small victory in the archives

 

It took ten months, but I've finally located a primary source document written by one of my authors.

Greetings from Sevilla, where I arrived yesterday afternoon, after planning to visit multiple archives here since September.  Sevilla was the first port of call (in one case literally) for most of the authors I'm studying, and they tended to refer to it using terms like "the heart of Spain."  This is the Andalusian city par excellence, known for its flamenco, for its bougainvillea strewn terraces and balconies, its accent "muy cerrado" and its "color especial."  This is the city that ruled the "West Indies" and saw the expansion (and explosion) of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and got rich from the gold of the New World (and also poor since the Spanish imported so much they accidentally devalued the currency of half of Europe, because they didn't understand about absolute value vs. commodity fetish, but whatever).  This is the "Spanish" city which boasts the Roman ruins of Baetica, the (much restored and renovated) Moorish alcázar and the ramped Giralda, the minaret-cum-belltower with its spinning statue ("giraldilla" or little spinner), thought such an architectural wonder that allegedly the medieval conqueror of the city threatened to slaughter every single civilian Sevillano if the city's defenders tried to destroy it before surrendering.  (To their credit, they put the lives of their citizens above their religious principles, and allowed it to be defaced as a church tower.  It must have been tough on them though.)  In any case, Sevilla is the "heart of Spain," and every single one of my authors thought it was iconic.

I've never really liked it.

Partly that's because my heart has always belonged to Madrid, the much maligned mongrel of the high desert.  Partly that's because the first time I visited Sevilla, almost exactly twenty years ago, the city was unpleasantly split between super luxury tourism of the Bruges-Disney variety and really unpleasant poverty.  And partly just because I'm perverse, and hate falling for all the stereotypes about Spain.  But the archives beckoned, and I have to admit, after twenty four hours here, that it's really a very beautiful city, and that there has also clearly been some attempt at intelligent investment and development (and the presence of some normal stores like supermarkets and pharmacies and hardware stores as well as souvenir stores selling overpriced cachivaches).  And bright and early this morning I set out to visit the Municipal Historical Archive, on the trail of Dorothy Peterson that had led nowhere in Málaga in February.


The archive is only ten minutes walk from my hotel, so I arrived in good time, and was directed up two flights of wide white marble steps (everything here is built to be gracious and/or pretentious) around an echoing white marble atrium, past the "hemeroteca" and library, to the archives, where two white coated women asked politely what I wanted.  I explained that I was an investigadora, looking for traces of a writer who had lived in Sevilla in the 1960s, and stammered my request about her certificado de conducta y adhesion al regimen or anything else they might have.  "Wait a moment, because this is an unusual request," said one, occupied with other tasks.  After a moment her colleague took me into the hallway, where we could talk in a normal volume without disturbing other researchers, and asked for more particulars.  "Oh, well if you have an address and a year you can look in the índice de callejeros for that year, and then find the empadronamiento," she said instantly.  "And if she was a journalist you could look in the hemeroteca to see if she published any articles."  It hadn't occurred to me that Peterson might have published articles in Spanish, but it actually struck me that she might have, so the hemeroteca is on tomorrow's agenda, along with the provincial (as opposed to municipal) archive, housed in the same building but with the entrance around the corner to look for her certificado de buena conducta (or more interestingly any "antecedentes" she might have recorded).  She also asked if I had found Peterson's expediente de personal at the university.  I explained (feeling guilty even though I only arrived yesterday which was Sunday) that as the municipal archives are open only in the morning and the university archives in the morning and afternoon, that I had visited them first.  "Pues vas a combinarlo, vale," said the helpful librarian.  "Well, w can start with the certificados de padrón, mi compañera te atiende."

Then I was briskly passed along to fill out a ficha de usuario, and given a temporary "card" (really a piece of paper), and my TIE was photocopied, and then I got a series of call slips and a slim brown leather bound volume labeled 1960, with a list of every single street in Seville.  The listings in the callejero are in chart form, with the street name, the numbers covered, and then a column with the letters I or P or P/I, which I finally worked out stood for "impares" (odd) and "pares" (even) (i.e. which side of the street the houses are on), and then a "signatura" (call number).  You look up the street and house number, and then fill out another call slip with the call number for that house on it, and then one of the librarians brings you a long, fat, delicate, cloth bound volume, in the shape of a ledger (short edge bound), labeled with the year, department and section, as well as a call number.  When you open these volumes (carefully since the pages are long and the bound edge short, so it's easy to rip them, especially since the paper is old and yellowing), you see that they are a bound collection of printed forms, filled in by hand in various blue and black inks, and are indeed the ancestors of the certificado de empadronamiento that I accidentally lost my copy of when I gave it to the Policía Nacional in Aluche along with my other documents for my TIE.  Nowadays of course the records are all electronic (they take up a lot less space and are a lot more portable that way), but these simply involved the "cabeza de casa" filling out a list of everyone who lived at a given address (more specifically in a given apartment), and signing the declaration, along with an "agente" who counter-signed, presumably certifying that the information was accurate involving "who had slept under this roof on December 31 of the given year."  (A fair amount of the top of the form is dire threats about how falsifying or not doing it is illegal and subject to fines of up to 1250 pesetas and imprisonment.)

The forms provide a good deal of information, since they ask not only for the name and birth date of every resident, but also their age, place of birth (province and city if Spaniards, city and country if foreigners), profession (the form specifically says that for women who are housewives one should fill in "sus labores" and specify what grade those listed as "student" are in), and number of years or months they have lived in the current province.  Also whether they are "domiciliado," "residente," or "transeunte."  (I think the difference between the first two is that someone who is "domiciliado" holds the lease or deed, and pays the bills for the property.)  Also (at least by self reporting) whether they can read and write.  (Almost all of the adults listed in the houses I looked at were literate, with the possible exception of a couple of women listed as "sirvienta."  I'm not sure I believe this reporting, but in a fairly upscale neighborhood it's possible.)

I had three addresses for Dorothy Peterson in Sevilla, partly because she tended to get stationery with letterhead once she was settled somewhere, and partly because her correspondence home not unreasonably tends to say things like "I have found a new apartment.  My new address is...." so that her correspondents can write to her.

I drew a blank on the first two addresses.  One of them had no apartment specified, but the apartments in the volume didn't list her.  One of them she gave an apartment number in her letter, but the form is missing for that apartment number, which suggests to me that she didn't fill out the form, 1250 peseta fine or no.  But on the third and final address (the last one in Sevilla, I believe), as I flipped through the pages without much hope, I turned the page from a "comerciante" and his wife and their three children, and found a form for the second floor, "único piso," with just one line written on it.  Printed in capitals under Nombre, Primer Apellido, Segundo Apellido were the words:

DOROTHY PETERSON WHITE

According to the rest of the form (written in script after abandoning capitals), she was born June 21, 1898, in New York City, and was therefore 68 in 1966.  She listed her profession as jubilada ("retired"), and said that she had been "domiciliada" in Sevilla for six years (which fits with her correspondence, starting with a move to Spain in late 1959).

Bingo.

This isn't earth shattering exactly.  After all, I found the record precisely because I already had the address and approximate date.  But it's a nice confirmation that a woman who has seemed almost a ghost in the official records was actually where I thought she would be at the time I thought she would be.  (As I write this it occurs to me that I can go back tomorrow and check out the indices for other years, and see if she managed to show up at her other addresses in any of the years she lived there.  I wonder if I can also go through subsequent years to see exactly when she left Spain.  That actually would be useful since I don't know precisely.)  Plus, it's cool to turn a page and run across a form filled out in Peterson's puño y letra (literally "fist and letter") as they say here.  I have requested an electronic copy, and am assured that it will arrive in my email "in a week or ten days."  So my Fulbright experience has not been in vain.

After celebrating my find with an ice cream, I came back to the hotel to share my good news with my faithful blog readers, because I was pleased to have it.

Now on to proper lunch, and then the university archives, to hopefully find equally kind and helpful librarians and archivists, and ask them to pretty please check for expedientes de personal for one Dorothy Peterson (White) who was a language teacher at such and such dates.  Fingers crossed.