One of the most exciting things that we get to witness as graduate assistants is the collections held at Special Collections. As one of my assignments, I created an inventory for the newly acquired addition to the De la Torre family papers. The majority of the collection is in Spanish and includes letters, newspaper clippings and photographs. The original collection is in MS 420 – De la Torre Family papers, 1874 – 1994.
The De la Torre family was a part of the Cristero Movement. This effort was a post-Mexican revolution revolt from devoted believers of the Catholic Church fighting for religious freedom. During this time, it was common for someone to take arms for a cause that they believed in. In 1927, the war was so serious that a substantial amount of citizens of central Mexico fled and relocated to other safer places to live. I myself know of a few people that were forced to relocate to the United States for a short amount of time due to the violence of the Cristero war.
Usually the inventory process is done either in box-level or item-level, depending on the size and what it is needed for. Since the aggregation of the De la Torre family papers was small, I did an item-level inventory of the materials. I learned that doing an inventory is important part of the organization procedure because it provides the person who will process the collection in the future an idea of what is in the collection so they can better strategize how to organize it.
The collection was mostly in Spanish, and since Spanish is my first language, my only challenge in this process was that I had not used my Spanish language skills in months. Through this, I have a greater appreciation of my parents valuing my biculturalism in our household growing up. In being able to speak, read, and write in English and Spanish, I hope to use it to be an advocate for to the Latina/o community in the archival field.
Archivist Apprenticeship 