My Summer as a Research Intern in the Archives of the Texas General Land Office
By: Christina Marie Villarreal, PhD Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin
Interning at the Texas General Land Office (GLO) has been an incredibly rewarding experience. As a PhD Candidate in history, I wanted to use my summer to study primary source material, hone my translation skills, and engage in public history. The internship in the GLO’s Archives and Records Program offered these experiences and more! Most importantly, I got to spend my summer working with documents related to my own research interests: Spanish and Mexican Texas.
The GLO has a sizeable Spanish Collection, which is composed largely of titles and land records collected from the various empresarios and land commissioners operating in Mexican Texas before 1836, but it also includes material on Native Americans, politics, and property rights in Mexican Texas. The agency added most of the latter records to its archive in 1846, when it was gathering documents from the Bexar Archives to secure them from a possible Mexican attack on San Antonio.[1] Today, this original correspondence form “the most valuable collection of original documents for the history of the settlement of Texas during the period 1821–1835.”[2]
My dissertation research is focused on slavery in eighteenth-century Texas-Louisiana borderlands. This summer, I was asked to pick one of several topics outlined in the Catalogue of the Spanish Collection Part II as a translation and interpretive project. I selected “Matters Related to Slavery,” items 1264–1293 in the Catalogue.
The Catalogue included a short abstract about the documents, but there has never been a complete translation or transcription of these items. My project was to transcribe and translate this material. The documents identified as “Matters Related to Slavery,” include a 1789 Royal Decree regulating the treatment of slaves in the Spanish empire, Mexican orders to abolish slavery in 1829, and the requests of Anglo-American immigrants to exempt Texas from abolition afterward. These sources reveal how immigration impacted the laws and economic priorities of the state of Coahuila and Texas after 1821. They also demonstrate how the “peculiar institution” developed in the nineteenth century and contributed to the Texas Revolution. The following excerpt illuminates the economic and political tensions regarding slavery and abolition in the state:
Ramón Músquiz, Political Chief of the Department of Bexar, (October 24, 1829):
“When I received that supreme order, I did not doubt for a moment that its publication and execution shall produce grave misfortunes for the owners of slaves, the state, and for all the federation because it would necessarily agitate the public order and quietude of the new towns of this Department and, consequently, the current circumstances would be very costly to reestablish.”[3]
Most of the documents were handwritten between 1824 and 1834. For the untrained eye, they can be very difficult to read, so I transcribed them first, typing out the abbreviated words and spelling errors exactly as they appear on the page to make the documents more accessible to researchers. Next, I provided an English translation of the text, placing it alongside the original transcript to create a small research volume for interested patrons. Organizing the collection in this way makes it a tool useful beyond its content; individuals can use these translations and transcriptions to learn nineteenth-century paleography or practice translation. One of the goals of this project is to make these volumes available to individuals interested in the subject.
Indeed, I was most impressed by the archive team’s dedication to making the collection accessible to the public. The Management team in the GLO Archives and Records is ever-ready to promote the use of GLO’s collection for research. Dr. Brian Stauffer, the Translator and Curator of the Spanish Collection, modeled the importance of combining expertise and collaboration when engaging the public in historical inquiry. Buck Cole, the Education Outreach Specialist, works with teachers across the state, introducing them to the GLO’s resources, providing them with teaching material, and showing them how to integrate agency tools (like GIS mapping, document analysis, and curated material) into their curriculum. Additionally, the digitization work at the GLO is impressive because all of this material is already online, which made my translating and transcribing even easier. Observing this program’s commitment to the exploration of Texas history was the best part of the summer.
In addition to my duties at the GLO, I visited several archives and repositories around Austin so I could see how archival practices at humanities institutions differ from what happens at the GLO. The Archives and Records Program works with individuals and institutions across the state to share material, create museum exhibits, and encourage historical preservation. For example, the GLO partnered with the Witte Museum and the Bullock Texas State History Museum in the last two years to design exhibits on Texas boundaries, railroads, and maps. As an intern, I got a behind-the-scenes look at some of these sites and met their archivists, museum curators, librarians, and historical specialists. My favorite moments from these field trips included: smelling[4] La Salle’s ship, La Belle, at the Bullock, examining a sixteenth-century map of South Texas at the Benson Latin American Collection, and seeing Stephen F. Austin’s 1829 Mapa original de Texas [5] at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.
On my first day in the office, David Pyle from the surveying team said, “it’s always fun at the Texas General Land Office.” Over the course of the summer, this has proven to be the case. Whether I was learning how to detect mold in documents or prepping t-shirts for a mail out for the Save Texas History program, I was having a great time. This was not a typical intern experience, and I was glad to have this opportunity.
Christina Marie Villarreal is a Ph.D. candidate in the field of colonial Latin American history. Her dissertation examines the political boundaries of northern New Spain and “border crossings” between Texas and Louisiana during the eighteenth century. Her research has received support from the Fulbright Program, Ford Foundation, SSRC-Mellon Mays Program, and the E.D. Farmer International Fellowship. Villarreal holds a B.A. in History and Visual & Dramatic Arts from Rice University. She earned her M.A. from UT-Austin where her master’s report, “Colonial Border Control: Reconsidering Migrants and the Making of New Spain’s Northern Borderlands,” (supervised by Ann Twinam) won the 2015 Perry Prize for Best Master’s Thesis/Report.
[1] While Texas declared independence from Mexico in 1836, fears of Mexican action led Texas officials to take precautionary steps to protect records concerning land. In 1841, county clerk, Thomas H. O’S Addicks forwarded several documents taken from San Antonio de Bexar to Austin. In 1846, the Spanish clerk, George Fisher, compiled “all the land titles and papers having reference to Lands, Colonization, Missions, Empresario Contracts, Orders, Decrees, and laws of Spain, Mexico, and Coahuila and Texas within the limits of Texas proper, and some of Coahuila.” The remaining documents were subsequently returned to the Bexar Archive. See Greaser, Galen D. Catalogue of the Spanish Collection of the Texas General Land Office, Part II: Correspondence, Empresario Contracts, Decrees, Appointments, Reports, Notices & Proceedings. Texas General Land Office, 2003: xi.
[2] Ibid., xii.
[3]Ramón Músquiz, Political Chief of Dept. of Béxar, to Antonio Elozúa, Principal Commandant of Texas, 24 November 1829, Box 129, Folder 12, p. 115, Records of the Spanish Collection, Archives and Records Program, Texas General Land Office, Austin, TX.
[4] Franck Cordes, curator at the Bullock Texas State Museum, explained that the specialists treated La Belle with various chemicals (such as polyethylene glycol) after archeologists recovered it from the muds of the Texas Coast. The chemical treatment, paired with the natural scent of the aged wood, has resulted in the ship’s strong odor. Patrons can detect the smell from the viewing area.
[5]Stephen F. Austin, Mapa original de Texas, Austin: 1829, Map #00917, Map Collection, Archives and Information Services Division, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Austin, TX. Reproductions of this map (GLO Map #76201) are available for sale at the GLO courtesy of TSLAC.
