Gabriel García Márquez working on “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Credit: Guillermo Angulo/Harry Ransom Center
As the university wraps up this year’s Fleur Cowles Symposium “Gabriel García Márquez: His Life and Legacy,” it’s worth noting the Libraries (specifically the Benson Latin American Collection and LLILAS Benson) involvement in support of the noted Colombian author’s archive at the Harry Ransom Center.
The Benson’s Mexican materials bibliographer Jose Montelongo accompanied Ransom Center director Stephen Ennis on a trip to Mexico City, where García Márquez spent his final years, to review the archive materials, and upon the announcement of the acquisition, Montelongo responded to media inquiriesproviding perspectives on the importance of the archive to the university and researchers, and on the author’s station in the literary canon.
As the premiere Latin American special collection in the western hemisphere, the Benson will provide the complementary resources and support for researchers who come to Austin to utilize the García Márquez archive, further strengthening the partnership between the two institutions.
The Benson Collection acquired from him a large selection of materials including original posters, lobby cards, still photographs, flyers, and broadsides advertising Mexican films from the 1930s to the 1990s.
These resources have supported publications on the development of Mexican film production including the “golden age,” 1936-1956, and specialty subjects such as posters, fantasy, and horror. Genre films on comedy, history, folklore, mysteries and so on are well represented.
Modern forms of independent publishing like zines owe a debt not only to the likes of Thomas Paine, but also to popular types of cultural or regional publications that emerged from a desire to capture an otherwise oral tradition for both broader diffusion and preservation.
The Brazilian literatura de cordel — literally “string literature” from the way that street vendors suspended the chapbooks — is a notable example of a form that gained traction due to its relatively low impact production requirements and visual appeal.
Mostly in the form of quartos, cordels are small chapbooks or pamphlets containing folk novels, poems and/or songs, and usually decorated by woodcut prints that became prevalent in the 19th and 20th centuries, mostly in the northeastern region of Brazil.
The Benson Latin American Collection recently opened an exhibit of cordel literature drawn from its collections, curated by Julianne Gilland with assistance from Teresa Wingfield and Carla Silva-Muhammad.
Wood, Paper, String highlights the art and history of the Brazilian popular literary. Featuring recent Benson Collection acquisitions, the exhibition explores cordel’s evolution from traditional to contemporary themes and showcases the woodcut illustration that is an iconic visual element of the genre.
Wood, Paper, String runs at the Benson Collection in the second floor gallery space through January 31, 2016, and is open to the public during regular hours.
Herzstein served as lead counsel to Mexico in negotiations over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which went into effect in 1994.
The Benson Latin American Collection holds the Robert E. Herzstein Records of the Mexico–U.S. Business Committee. These materials, consisting of 14.5 linear feet of press clippings, industry testimony, and U.S. government policy advisory reports, document NAFTA’s development and implementation during the years 1991–1996.
LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections celebrated the memory of Dr. Nettie Lee Benson and the achievements and generosity of Dr. Teresa Lozano Long at the unveiling of two bronze plaques in Sid Richardson Hall honoring the influential women on Friday, March 6.
LLILAS Benson director Charles Hale provided a warm introduction to attendees, and UT president Bill Powers followed, remarking with admiration of the late Nettie Lee Benson, a librarian and a scholar, whose vision and tenacity built the Benson Collection into one of the world’s premiere collections of Latin American materials. Powers also spoke to the significant contributions — material and intellectual — that Lozano Long and her husband Joe Long have made to Latin American scholarship and to The University of Texas at Austin.
The Longs shared the ceremony with family and friends, and Benson was represented in attendance by her three nephews, Bill, Doug and Joe Benson.
See more photos of the event from the Austin American-Statesman.
Aegis Trust Youth Ambassador Dydine Umunyana. Photo by Christian Kelleher.
For a little over two weeks in January and February, UT Libraries was the home base for a visit by Rwandan Dydine Umunyana who works with Aegis Trust, a project partner with the Libraries’ Human Rights Documentation Initiative. HRDI project manager and Benson Collection archivist Christian Kelleher sat down with Dydine to ask her about her work in the U.S.
We’re so excited to have you here, Dydine. Can you tell me what brought you to the U.S.?
I came to the U.S. to advocate for young people from my country and to bring awareness to youth internationally as a Youth Ambassador for Peace from Aegis Trust, a nonprofit organization that combats genocide around the world. Aegis is based in England where they run the National Holocaust Center and Museum, and they help manage the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda.
UT Libraries connected to Aegis Trust and the Kigali Genocide Memorial through our partnership to preserve documentation of the 1994 Genocide. How did you first get involved with Aegis Trust?
In 2009, I was selected as one of 30 influential students at my high school and they brought us to the Kigali Genocide Memorial to learn the real history of my country and to go through their peace-building education program. The goal of the peace-building education program is to learn from the past, to help to stop cycles of hatred and be able to build the future. A few years later, as a result of what I had learned from the peace-building education program, I started a nonprofit company Umbrella Cinema Promoters that educates young women in Rwanda to share their own stories through film. We had a workshop in 2013 and launched the organization then, and that’s when I reconnected with Aegis Trust and was appointed a Youth Ambassador.
Tell me more about your filmmaking work!
After my high school I wasn’t able to continue my university studies, as so many young people in Rwanda. I had experience as a singer and songwriter, and I was asked to compose a song for a short film. I had to spend a week in the studio composing the song and learning the story of the film, and I also learned how they were doing things about filming and scriptwriting and I became so much interested in how they were making the film. So I went home and began writing a script for my own short film. In Rwanda you can’t do shooting of a film without permission from the government, so I went to the Ministry of Sport and Culture for a recommendation letter but they refused because I didn’t have a company that I worked for. I got the idea that I probably wasn’t the only young person who had ideas but no organization for support, so I decided I should start my own nonprofit company for that purpose, to encourage and empower young women to tell their own stories. I met some students from USC who were in Rwanda and they asked if I had a project and I took my script and called all my friends and we shot my first short film about the problem of HIV in Rwanda.
What have you done during your time visiting the University of Texas?
I’ve done a lot! I toured UT and it was tiring because of how big it is. I’ve been here for more than two weeks and I have had so many meetings engaging and bringing awareness about what’s going on in post conflict countries. I met with students in the White Rose Society at Texas Hillel and from Amnesty International, and with professors in so many departments like Women’s and Gender Studies and Theater and more. And I’ve spent a lot of time in the library because of the partnership between you and Aegis Trust and the Rwanda Genocide Archive.
And beyond UT, what have been some of the things you’ve done in Austin?
I met with Greg Kwedar who is producer of an amazing film Rising From Ashes about the Rwanda cycling team. I’ve experienced different food like barbecue and how Texans are so proud, and with [retired Vice Provost and Director of UT Libraries] Fred and Jean Heath I visited the Capitol building and learned about La Belle and the history of Texas at the Bullock Museum with the giant star. One day in the night I watched Selma, which was a great film for me to see how you can resolve conflict without fighting and I think it should be screened everywhere in the world, and in the morning went to the LBJ Library and saw how was America at that time. I didn’t even know there were libraries for presidents and I was able to listen to his calls with Martin Luther King and others!
“Libro de professiones y elecciones de prioras y vicarias del convento de San Gerónimo, 1586–1713.” Ink and blood on paper. 8 x 12 inches. Dorothy Schons Papers, Benson Latin American Collection.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695) was one of most illustrious Mexican writers and scholars of the colonial period.
This page from the manuscript “Book of Professions” of the convent of San Gerónimo in Mexico City, which Sor Juana entered in 1669, features a written affirmation of her religious vows, signed by the famous nun in her own blood.
With the Dell Medical School’s inaugural class set to arrive in 2016, it’s only fitting that one of our most innovative archiving projects should get a notable addition from the field of medicine.
The international partners of the digital Primeros Libros project have incorporated the first medical text printed in the New World, Francisco Bravo’s Opera Medicinalia.
Woodcut engraving of Smilax aspera from “Opera Medicinalia.”
The volume — which was printed in 1570, thirty short years after the arrival of the first printing press in the western hemisphere — is composed of four treatises, covering medical topics such as epidemiology (an entire treatise on “tabardete,” thought to be an antecedent of typhus), archaic treatments (bloodletting) and medicinal herbs (the last chapter focuses on Smilax aspera or Sasparilla root, which was prevalent in Mexico and North America), and features remarkable engravings, including a rudimentary diagram of the human circulatory system.
Engraving of the venal system from “Opera Medicinalia.”
The digital iteration of Opera Medicinalia resulted from the only known copy of the original printing still in existence, housed in La Biblioteca José María Lafragua at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla in Mexico.
The Primeros Libros project — of which the University of Texas Libraries and Benson Latin American Collection are founding members — seeks to digitize the first books published in the Americas, focusing initially on works published in Mexico in the 16th century. Each participating member library is entitled to a full set of the digitized exemplars of all partners as part of the project’s innovative preservation and access strategy. The project inventory currently includes over 349 exemplars — contributed by 21 partner institutions — of the 136 titles that are known to have survived to the present day.
The National Institutes of Health’s blog at the U. S. National Library of Medicine has more information on the history and importance of this volume.
Dark clouds gathered in the late afternoon sky in anticipation of the last storm of the summer. Inside, a DJ set the needle down on the 45-rpm version of a Jorge Ben classic just as the rain began to fall. Flecked by the light of a disco ball on the circulation desk, a convivial crowd had gathered to chat, snack, and enjoy the fact that it was almost Friday. The occasion was Field Notes, the fifth annual LLILAS Benson student photography exhibit and competition, held in the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection on the third Thursday in September.
Photo by Ruijie Peng, LLILAS
Photographs from a summer of study, both abroad in Latin America and in Latina/o communities in the United States, hung in the Benson’s first-floor corridor, and visitors took in the images with interest and curiosity. The photos themselves expressed the range of experiences, viewpoints, and settings encountered by the student photographers: Ruijie Peng’s prize-winning photograph, taken in Ecuador, depicts Chinese and Ecuadoran workers standing in hard hats among rocky debris at the site of a hydroelectric construction project; the other prize winner, by Mariana Morante Aguirre, was snapped in Guadalajara, Mexico, outside a hostel along a railroad route used by Central American migrants and transient Mexican nationals alike.
In Mario Mercado’s photo, a trumpeter plays on a San Juan sidewalk in front of exuberant graffiti that invokes the instrument’s brassy sound. In a lovely image by Charles Wight, a lone boat floats on the Rio Negro near Manaus, Brazil. Our gaze turns skyward via the lens of Felipe Fernández Cruz, who photographed airplanes flying in formation against a clear blue sky above the Christ statue in Rio, the wings in identical posture to the outstretched arms of O Redentor. (A history student, Fernández went to Brazil to study how the twentieth-century state built air routes to colonize the interior.) A stunning black-and-white image by MFA film student Álvaro Torres Crespo shows two boys fishing from a pier under a cloudy sky at dusk in Puerto Jiménez, on Costa Rica’s southern Pacific Coast.
Photo by Kaitlin Tasker, Department of Geography and the Environment
Some student researchers encountered roadblocks both expected and unexpected…
Iglesia de Santa María Tonantzintla, Puebla. Caroyln Brown.
The extravagance of the Baroque period in Spanish America is currently on display in an exhibition at the Benson Latin American Collection.
Inside the Baroqueilluminates the splendor and diversity of Mexican arts and letters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their enduring legacy. A selection of photographs by Carolyn Brown accompanies rare books and manuscripts from the Benson’s collections to present the Baroque period’s ornate style as it was manifested in the Spanish colonies of the Americas.
A complementary documentary film by Quin Mathews presents arresting views of Mexico’s baroque churches against a backdrop of life in modern-day Mexico. Mathews traveled with photographer Carolyn Brown in 2008, recording scenes of daily devotional and festive practice, and the film captures the centrality of local churches.
Wedding at Catedral de Zacatecas. Carolyn Brown.
Originating in 16th century Italy as a European Catholic response to the austerity of the Protestant Reformation, the Baroque style found purchase in the art, architecture and music of the period, and made its way to the Western Hemisphere by the end of the 1600s.
Catedral de Zacatecas at dusk. Carolyn Brown.
What made the movement particularly unique as it was expressed in the Americas was the influence of indigenous populations, craftsmanship and resources on the decorative style of religious structures that were erected as monuments to Spanish colonial power in the New World.
The exhibition will be on display through January 31, 2015, in the Benson Second Floor Exhibition Gallery, and is free and open to the public. Check the Benson website for a complete listing of hours.
Concurrently on view in the Benson’s first floor gallery is the 5th Annual LLILAS Benson Student Photography Exhibition featuring photography by University of Texas at Austin graduate and undergraduate students highlighting their expansive research, fieldwork, and volunteer activities within Latin American and U.S. Latina/o communities during the previous year.
