YEARS AFTER COLLECTIONS STORED, GONZALEZ, MOLINA REMEMBERED

 By Juan Montoya

A lifetime ago I had returned from attending a Midwestern university and had collected some old newspapers I had found strewn about in the basement of one of the old houses where I lodged as a student.

One was an original issue of The Woman's Journal, a collaboration of articles by women suffragettes Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe and H.R. Blackwell and daughter Alice Stone Blackwell, among others. That copy was published in 1876, 100 years after the Declaration of Independence.

I had collected other old newspapers dating back to the early 1800s that featured serial stories by the likes of Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe and other notable authors.

I did not want to keep all these treasures to myself and contacted the late Yolanda Gonzalez, then curator of the John J. Hunter Room at Texas Southmost College.

Gonzalez quickly recognized the historical and research value of the newspapers and we struck a deal. 

She would copy, then laminate the Woman's Journal for me so I could pass on the laminated copy to my three girls, and she could keep the copy and the original newspapers with the serial novels by Verne and the other authors.

As far as I know, they are still in the Hunter Room collection.

Later, while doing research on Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada, the president of Mexico who succeeded Benito Juarez, I came across a book on the shelves of the then-Arnulfo Oliveira Library which had been published in Brownsville in the late 1800s.

Much later we learned that the book may have been a fictionalized account of his presidency by a local writer, but the fact that the historical book (fake as it may have been) was on the shelves, surprised me as much as it surprised Yolanda. She promptly placed it in the Hunter collection.

Years later, after Ms. Gonzalez had unfortunately passed away, I came upon a copy of Jose Luz Saenz' dairy of a World War I Mexican-American veteran. I found the book in a pile of tomes in an alley behind the house that had belonged to Ricardo Molina, a Chicano activist who was a surveyor and at one time also was the acting engineer for the City of Brownsville. 

His family probably got tired of having the boxes of his books mildewing in the garage and heaved them in the alley by the trash.

I thought those old book at might be of interest to local readers and researchers. 

This was the first time I had ever heard of a published diary of a Mexican-American veteran from that war. Just like before, I went to the Hunter room and met Javier Garcia, a UTB-TSC staffer who wrote about historical buildings and local history. I showed him the book and he was ecstatic. So we made a deal. He kept the original and I received a bound Photostat  copy of it and he threw in a disc copy to sweeten the deal.

Later, I learned that Emilio Zamora, a professor in the Department of History at The University of Texas at Austin had translated and edited the diary,  originally published in Spanish in 1933, and explores Saenz’s “thoughts, observations, and interactions” with his fellow soldiers of the 90th Division’s 360th Infantry Regiment. 

Written from wartime notes and letters that Saenz penned while in training and in combat, the diary describes in great detail the trials and tribulations of Mexican Americans as they fought to establish themselves as bona fide members of American society.

Just a few months later after our exchange, Javier told me that several students had already used the original book I had found dumped in the alley to make research papers for their classes. 
The Zamora translation had not been made yet, and there is something unique in reading Spanish as it was written back then that a translation doesn't quite convey.

We have now been told that the Hunter Room Collection – the extensive archive of documents and maps detailing important events in South Texas history – may have a new home, someday.

A story in the local newspaper says that the Brownsville Historical Association was granted guardianship of the collection by TSC. Unfortunately, the BHA lacks the expertise to catalogue or manage such a collection and it remains locked away from researchers, like numerous other unique documents and pictures of local history.

It and the collection was to be included with other valuable archives at Market Square inside the future South Texas Center for Historical and Genealogical Research, including the Chamber of Commerce Archives, the Cameron County Land Deed Records and the A.A. Champion Collection.

The local daily said that Patrick Gonzales, then-associate vice president for marketing and communications, said the University of Texas RGV is currently working with TSC to ensure that access to the collection will be available in the best way possible.

“It’s early enough that nothing has been decided, but discussions are underway between our university librarian, Paul Sharpe, and Mike Shannon, TSC vice president of Student Services,” Gonzales said.

As a promoter of making every available resource accessible to local students and history buffs, I had hoped that it would not limit the access to that trove of data to the hours of operation of the BHA.
And I sincerely hope that TSC will insist that its students be allowed permanent access to the collection whether the BHA or the UTRGV want to or not.

Come to think of it, maybe naming the collections' future new digs after Yolanda or Molina might not be such a bad idea.