Where Have All the Archives Gone? Yucatán’s Missing and Mobile Municipal Archives

Abstract During the heady years of the late 1970 s through the early 1990 s, scholars undertaking Indigenous-language research in English-language academia sparked enthusiasm and optimism regarding the impending discovery of many Native language sources. Pioneering works in this vein focused on Central Mexico with its abundant colonial-era (1520s–1820s) Nahuatl texts, with an emphasis on wills, election records, and judicial proceedings. Many hoped to find intact, long-term, extensive records of one locale’s documentation, such as one of the early finds, the Libro de Testamentos of Culhuacan , composed of 83 nearly complete documents from 1580 to 1600, revealing aspects of Nahua society such as the material culture, religious beliefs, and practices of inheritance among Indigenous Central Mexicans in the late sixteenth-century. 1 The so-called New Philologists anticipated the recovery of corpuses of multiple Indigenous-language documents, such as Maya for Yucatan and Mixtec and Zapotec for Oaxaca. Though Nahuatl sources approximated the excited historians’ expectations, other Indigenous language corpuses surfaced in less sizeable numbers and more dispersed than anticipated. Yucatan in particular possessed fewer extant, complete community archives than projected. This article examines the variegated historical circumstances behind the decimation of pueblo archives of the Yucatec Maya region, focusing on climate, Spanish rapaciousness, covetous collectors, land expropriation and the loss of associated documents, and, finally, the Caste War of Yucatan. This article examines a different kind of mobility in the archives: the disappearance and ‘flight’ of documents from their communities of origin.