“Mi Barrio Latino América” consists on a short series of biographical articles on people Ramon Hernandez and Karol Carranza are interviewing throughout their travels in Central America and Mexico. The articles highlight personal stories, concerns, opinions and issues in the words of the people interviewed.
Luis Eliazar Morales Marenco and Juana Blanco Mendoza, Granada, Nicaragua, March of 2011.
Archivists Eliazar and Juana have been cataloging and keeping Granada’s most important historical documents since the mid 1990’s. Carefully restoring documents that had once been stored and forgotten in a warehouse, Eliazar speaks to us of how the events and voices recorded in the past by these documents have significant messages for people in both Nicaragua and throughout Latin America today.
Explaining how he became an archivist, Eliazar says, “I was born in Granada in 1952. My parents were coffee growers; I was raised in a hacienda, so the vocation of working the land awoke in me at an early age. When my father died, we lost the land because it was indebted.” Eliazar eventually began working in a plant that processed flour, nutritive pastes and feed for livestock. Having worked there for ten years, he decided to leave because he states, “After the revolution there were many problems with the Sandinista government. The money was devalued and I saw no future here; that is when I decided to go to the United States. I worked washing cars, waiting tables and doing other jobs. However, working without documents allowed me only to subsist so I decided to return to Nicaragua. I went one year without a job, but one day I heard the mayor of Granada, Silvio Urbina, speak on the radio about the lack of forest rangers to help conserve the surrounding ecological parks. From my interest and knowledge of the natural environment I went to inquire about a job, however, unable to offer me a job as a ranger he informed me about the need for an archivist. Therefore, you can say this job fell into my hands.”
The archive came about through the support of Jorge Eduardo Arellano, a famous Nicaraguan writer and director of the National Archives in Managua, who rescued these documents from a warehouse and stored them in a proper location. In these early stages, Eliazar recounts, “Working to save documents filled with dust and mold, I soon developed bronchial problems. Becoming ill and learning the dangers of working with old documents for long hours, I felt like renouncing [my job], but I continued to work with more precaution.” Soon the hard work of those involved resulted in the publication of the archive’s first catalogue. In 1995, the municipal government transferred the documents to their current location in the well-known learning and cultural center named La Casa de los Tres Mundos.
Since then, Eliazar and Juana Blanco Mendoza have dedicated themselves to caring for and cataloging these documents, occasionally coming across documents that spark their own historical interests. For example, Eliazar came across a document with his last name and found out that his great grandfather was a prefect in Granada. The document also described how the city acquired the sword of William Walker after his execution in Trujillo, Honduras on Sept. 12, 1860. He explains, “The government of Honduras decided to give Walker’s sword to Nicaragua’s president Tomas Martinez who decided it rightfully belonged to the city of Granada. The city passed an act that the sword must stay in Granada as an immortal trophy against the oppressor of Nicaragua. However, occurring in the Revolution of 1893 led by Jose Santos Zelaya, a soldier entered the building where the sword was located on horseback and without getting off his horse took the sword down from its display and rode away. Since then the sword has never been found.” Transcribing such documents led to his incorporation into the Academia de Geografia e Historia de Nicaragua (AGHN) in 2006.
Despite these achievements the most rewarding aspect of his job, he explains, is working and dialoguing with the variety of individuals who consult the archives, which range from writers and poets to anthropologists and archeologists. However, he adds because they have to work with individuals from different political leanings, they must remain apolitical. He explains, “Here we get Sandinista, Liberal and Conservative investigators and you have to attend to them equally. True history has to be like this. If the Sandinistas do something good and the conservatives do something wrong it’s here, in the documents. History has to be objective.” In this spirit, Eliazar and Juana send a message to all Granadinos, stating that they would like to see the same initiative found in nineteenth century Granada to improve and take care of their city. They also happily invite all Nicaraguans in the United States to know their history and its connection to their lives.
Asking them on their hopes for the future, they both answer, “We would like to have our own colonial building in Granada to store all historic documents and make them available digitally to keep people from handling these delicate materials directly. Different political parties have promised this in the past but have not fulfilled these promises.”