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JOSÉ ADRIÁN BARRAGÁN-ÁLVAREZ: My name is José Adrián Barragán-Álvarez. I'm the Curator of Latin Americana here at The Bancroft Library.

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I've been at the job for nine years, starting my ninth year. And I am a UC Berkeley alumni. Worked here as an undergrad at The Bancroft and then came back after completing my PhD at UT Austin.

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So Hubert Howe Bancroft was the 19th-century collector of Californiana materials. He wanted to write a history of California. And so he started to amass a large collection of materials

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for both California and eventually figured out that he needed to collect materials for the entire West. And that included Mexico, Mexican materials, related to both California prior to being becoming a state.

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Later in his life, he wrote some pretty abhorrent materials that I don't think would necessarily fit some of the work that we do here at Bancroft anymore. But what he left was this incredible legacy

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of materials and documents that highlight the histories of not only California but the entire West, including Mexico and Central America. So the way that the Latin Americana Collection

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here at The Bancroft began was through Hubert Howe Bancroft's acquisitions of Californiana material that then included material about Latin America. In the 1860s, Mexico had gone through a series of civil wars

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that forced people to flee the country with their materials. So they took a lot of books and a lot of manuscripts to Europe and sold them at auction there. And so he acquired about 10,000 volumes of manuscript

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and printed materials in auctions in London, Leipzig, and Paris. In that acquisition was the foundation for the work that we have since collected here at Bancroft.

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So what we have is not just the material that we started with, from Hubert Howe Bancroft, but the material that we have since added to, which is a much, much bigger material than what he initially began with.

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The Latin Americana Collection is really important to the research of-- for Mexico and Central America because it contains some of the earliest manuscripts from the Americas and some of the earliest printed

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books from the Americas, up until the very modern period. So we have the material that Hubert Howe Bancroft collected, which includes some of those earliest Mexican incunabula, the first printed books, to materials related to California

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and the movement of peoples. But we also have materials that deal with more current pressing issues, up to the present, where we're collecting books done by artists

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who are right now documenting the life of being people in Mexico. So it really spans that entire period from around the 1500s to the present.

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It's very broad in its understanding. But we are focused primarily on Indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America, social issues, history, and that sort of work.

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So I think this is an attractive collection to everyone because undergraduates could come and look at materials and begin to think about what possibilities they have for a thesis, an undergraduate thesis,

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or if they would like to pursue this in historical work for their dissertation. Also, we certainly have a lot of graduate students and faculty members who come and work at Bancroft

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on all ranges of the collection, from the pictorial material that deals with photographs but also printed material from the José Guadalupe Posada to current documents being produced by artists or folks who are looking at the colonial period.

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And they're looking at manuscript material to tell lives of the people who lived at this period in Mexico and Central America. There's a lot of material.

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I think it's hard to pick something that you really like, something that is your favourite, because you're constantly looking at the material. You're constantly looking at what you're going to find.

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We do a lot of classes where we bring students in and get them interested in all sorts of aspects of the collection. For me, I think I have some personal ones that I've enjoyed. One that I worked with as an undergraduate, an Inquisition

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document, where a woman was accused of witchcraft. She unfortunately passed away during the trial. So we don't really know what happened to her, whether or not she was actually tried.

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We just know that the trial was started. And so we get it. But we get glimpses of lives of people who were just ordinary members of the society who were caught up

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either in some sort of trial, or something happened to them. And they make it onto the historical record. And it includes, like I said, a case on a woman who was tried as a witch.

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There's a case of the Jewish community in Mexico City in the 1590s, who were tried for practicing their faith, but also photographs from the Revolution and material created by José Guadalupe Posada.

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So really, I don't necessarily have a favourite item. I have many items. And I encounter many new items when I teach classes and do workshops to get students in the door to Bancroft

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and to make this a very welcoming space for the collection. So one of the items that I've come to really know and have worked with very closely is the Inquisition case

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of Manuel de Lucena. It is a 660-page document that tells the story of the Jewish community in Mexico City, as it was caught by the Inquisition for--

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and tried for practicing their faith. The Inquisition was a horrible institution. But it kept incredible records about the daily lives of people. And so this document tells us not only who Lucena communed

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with, who he had practised his faith with. But it also tells us about the connections in the community and how people knew each other and how they worked and what they did in their daily life.

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Another item that I also am particularly fond of is the Doctrina Christiana, a item that was-- a book that was printed in 1546. At least our copy was printed in 1546.

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But there are many editions of this item. It's known as the first printed book of Mexico. So it's when the printing press first arrived. This book was printed there by Juan Pablos.

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And this book, the Doctrina Christiana, became a teaching form for helping priests teach the Catholic faith in the New World. A lot of these items are irreplaceable.

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They are unique. That's why we are a special collections library, because they are unique items. So the especially the manuscript items,

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this might be the only copy that exists. Some of the printed books, especially some of the earlier printed books from Mexico, there might only be one or two samples in the entire world.

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So The Bancroft is a very unique collection of materials that tells this history of the period. So these collections are an incredible set of manuscripts and printed items that are available to all.

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And we have a reading room that is open to anyone. And so everyone is welcome to The Bancroft Library to consult these materials.