By Rocío Gallegos / La Verdad Juárez
Translation: El Paso Matters
Spanish
Ciudad Juárez– From indigenous burials and marriage ceremonies to the evangelization of the Franciscans to births and deaths since colonial times, the historical archives of the Catedral de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe capture the history and culture of the region.
For the first time in its more than 360-year history of evangelization in what is now Ciudad Juárez, the Catholic church is displaying the contents of its pastoral archive in a new catalog that houses records from 1662 to 2023.
“We wanted to know what we could find in the archive,” said historian Guadalupe Santiago Quijada, a professor and researcher at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez, who coordinated the catalog. “We wanted to work on our own stories, carry out our own research.”
The project took almost 10 years, Santiago Quijada said during a public presentation of the catalog Feb. 7 in one of the cathedral’s halls. Students in his history courses carried out much of the work as research toward their degree or community service.
The project began in 2009-10 under Ignacio Villanueva Muñoz, the parish priest at the time, who authorized access to the archives. The work continued under Eduardo Hayen Cuarón, the parish’s subsequent priest.
Calling the records “historical documentation of the Catholic Church,” Hayen Cuarón said parishes keep records of all its pastoral, sacramental and administrative activities.
For Leticia Solares Fuentes, president of the Paso del Norte Society of Culture and History, the catalog represents a documentary jewel on the history of northern Mexico.
“It is an invaluable source for understanding the development of the region, of daily life, of its inhabitants, the changes that have marked our historical development as a city,” she said, adding that it preserves a part of history for future generations.
The catalog, edited and published by UACJ, can be accessed online.
The historical archives comprise more than 600 records located in the basement of the cathedral offices, where they remain protected.
Santiago Quijada said it is one of the oldest ecclesiastical archives in northern Mexico and contains records that the Franciscan friars began to collect in the region since the construction of the cathedral began April 2, 1662.
Not all religious people were careful when collecting data and registering the sacraments they administered, so some documents are missing information such as ages or even the cause of death in death records, she said.
“In the case of the first baptism book of the (cathedral), it was found that the name or nickname of people were kept as a surname, and they were assigned a name from the saint’s day,” Santiago Quijada said.
However, the catalog states that this first baptism book (1662-1689) is only publicly available digitally. The book is safeguarded by the religious authorities. Some other documents, including a book containing marriage records, are missing.
“There will be other information that is in other archives that is in other libraries,” Santiago Quijada said, “but this is all there is (in the cathedral) and that was also our purpose to show what we could find.”
Santiago Quijada said the catalog contains papal records granting permission for the construction of missions and documentation of updated church regulations, among others, as well as records of marital conflicts – including requests for marital separations by women in the region.
Various correspondences are also documented. One of them, dated April 28, 1826, mentions the increased fees that the church charged indigenous people for services and sacraments such as burials and marriages. In another letter, dated Sept. 14, 1929, the government exhorts the church to administer prompt and complete justice to indigenous people, saying that “they are incapable of taking care of themselves.”
José Mario Sánchez Soledad, a businessman and historian, believes that this catalog describes the founding of Ciudad Juárez, of daily life in the community and of the founding of the Catholic Church in the region.
Besides recording sacraments, collections and payments, it documents things such as epidemics and even the organization of kermeses since the 1950s.
The result of this work provides an overview of the city’s history extracted from religious documents that are currently not available for public viewing because they need to be cared for, Salgado Quijada said, adding that she hopes the old archives are preserved.
Hayen Cuarón said there’s more work to be done to preserve older documents, including keeping them in climate-controlled display cases. Some of the books have lost their covers and are mostly loose pages, others have been damaged by humidity and the passage of time.
“The minimum conditions for protection are in place,” he said. “But the ideal situation is to change those conditions.”
