Category: Exhibits

“No documents. No history”

Joan Wallach Scott, “Women’s Archives and Women’s History”

In her speech to celebrate the opening of Christine Dunlap Farnham’s Archive at Brown University, feminist historian Joan Wallach Scott reflected on the lack of attention to women’s personal collections and archives that memorialize their lives.¹ The exhibit “Social Media Networks in the 19th and 20th Centuries: The Albums of Esmeralda Cervantes, Teresa Puelma de Orrego, Luz de Sagaceta, María Enriqueta Camarillo,” recently installed in Rare Books and Special Collections (Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame), seeks to build on Scott’s insights by highlighting women’s friendship albums and scrapbooks as vital historical documents that deserve a place on display.

Curated by members of the upper-level Spanish course “Women’s Culture in 19th Century Latin America” at the University of Notre Dame, this exhibit focuses on preserving and showing the importance of women’s stories through material culture. In this course, we explore the cultural and intellectual contributions of women in 19th- and early 20th-century Latin America, examining how gender shaped ideas of citizenship, sexuality, and education in post-independence societies. Among our study of literature, periodicals, and other women’s public interventions, albums emerge as a novel object for understanding 19th- and 20th-century sociability.

19th century albums were typically blank books that served as repositories for various collectible objects and writings. ​​For women, in particular, albums were a crucial medium for engaging with writing and visual culture, shaping identity, and creating bonds outside the domestic sphere. Pages within the albums vary in content, including personal letters, poetry, pieces of artwork, and autographs, among others. Each album serves as a tangible representation of the illustrious life of the woman who curated it. 

As part of the coursework, we were also introduced to the fascinating world of Rare Books and Special Collections, a space that allowed us to work hands-on with the friendship albums and scrapbooks of four women from the 19th and early 20th century Hispanic world held at the Notre Dame’s archives: Esmeralda Cervantes, Luz de Sagaceta, Maria Enriqueta Camarillo, and Teresa Puelma de Orrego. 

Researching them revealed a challenging but fruitful journey. We found that women’s stories were poorly cataloged or entirely absent from historical archives, while the information on similar works of male counterparts from their time were easily accessible through a simple Google search. This lack of documentation is not accidental but rather revealing of a greater theme: the historical discrimination of women in academic spaces and historical accounts, even among elite women. Traditional academia has undervalued their work, and left it outside of the literary canon. Our research, however, reveals the profound importance of their activities in shaping the culture and politics of their era. By reconstructing women’s stories through their friendship albums and scrapbooks, objects often dismissed as trivial or not relevant outside the private sphere, we engage in an act of recovery and critical analysis. Each page becomes evidence of an intellectual world that has always existed but was never fully recognized. Our goal is not simply to display their work but to restore women’s historical presence by centering the very objects and writings that belonged to them.

The album belonging to Clotilde Cerdá (1861–1926), better known by her artistic name, Esmeralda Cervantes, meticulously documents her highly publicized Latin American tour between 1875 and 1877. Born in Barcelona, she had achieved renown across Europe as a prodigious harpist by the age of fourteen. The prominent selection of “Esmeralda” rather than “Clotilde” to be hand-embroidered on the album’s center signifies her wish to delineate her professional trajectory from her private identity, asserting that she be primarily remembered for her musical accomplishments. Though the velvet cover has faded with time, the enclosed collection of drawings, poems, and dedicatory letters—all paying homage to her—preserves the intellectual and artistic worldview she cultivated through her art.

The album of Teresa Puelma de Orrego, who was born in Santiago de Chile in 1861, offers a glimpse into the upper-class world of Chile during the 19th century. She was the daughter of an aristocratic family and lived most of her life in Chile. Her album contains a collection of letters and signatures from prominent politicians and generals, family mementos, and prayers in French, English, and Spanish. Notable entries include a condolence letter from Chilean President Jorge Montt and a hand-drawn map of the War of the Pacific (1879–1884), fought between Chile and an alliance of Peru and Bolivia and originated from a territorial dispute. The album itself is highly ornate: the cover is made of thick dark green fabric with her name embroidered in gold thread on the front. There is little information about her other than what exists in this album, inviting us to “read” the silences surrounding her as part of the historical record itself, and work to fill in those silences with our own original research. 

Luz Sagaceta was born in 1886 in Mexico City and was eighteen years old when her album was assembled. Through newspapers and the works in her album, we know that she was part of Mexico’s Porfirian elite. As members of this social class, she and her family were well-known enough to be noted in print culture and had the means to travel. Her album reveals the privilege she possessed, a privilege few women enjoyed: the opportunity to create an album, a subtle space of authorship. Luz’s album includes contributions from authors such as Jesus E. Valenzuela, Amado Nervo, Ruben M. Campos, and Jesus Urueta. These authors dedicated poems to her; some were inspired by Luz’ beauty, while others addressed topics of personal significance, such as the important women in their lives. This demonstrates that Luz had sufficient significance for them to offer genuine, personal tributes.

Maria Enriqueta Camarillo, a celebrated Mexican novelist, poet, translator, and educator, used her meticulously kept albums to showcase her multifaceted talents, intellectual collaborations, and commitment to community, offering an analogue to contemporary social media. These collections, filled with her work, scholarly praise, sketches, and photographs, functioned as social connectors, highlighting her versatility, her international image, and the significant professional and personal relationships that were central to her life and Mexican culture. For the modern reader, engaging with Camarillo’s scattered yet beautiful albums provides an invaluable perspective—a welcome into a 19th-century life that otherwise might not have been fully told—and serves as a formative lesson in accepting historical complexity and narrative ambiguity rather than seeking immediate, structured answers.

Exploring the lives of these women through their albums was an enlightening experience. As a class, we were able to travel back in time to learn about their lives and gain insight into the society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first step of this process was reading about our albums from materials provided in class. Then, we had the chance to step outside of the classroom and into Special Collections to work with the physical albums. Working closely with library staff, curators, and specialists allowed us to fully immerse ourselves in the materiality of women’s archives. We gained tangible access to the lives of these women, feeling the texture of the album fabrics and carefully turning their pages. 

Curating the physical exhibit proved equally enriching, as we took ownership of every step: from item selection and display design to writing introductory texts and labels—a long process requiring intensive collaboration with library specialists. This hands-on experience transformed us from simple student observers into the main actors of a historical recovery project, contributing to something larger that the audience would later enjoy.

The influence of these albums is still evident today in the digital tools and platforms we use to curate and preserve our own memories. Digital content, including posts on Instagram and videos on YouTube, effectively creates a personal digital archive—a collection of memories that visually represents an individual’s most significant social ties and interests, essentially acting as a form of “writing with scissors,” as coined by Ellen Gruber Garvey. While the medium has transformed from handwritten cursive to the digital scrapbook, the fundamental purpose—to preserve selfhood and community—endures, allowing these personal archives to leave a lasting impact on all who encounter them. 

The project extended this hands-on approach to a general audience through the “Create Your Own Album Page” activity held on specific dates. This initiative has been a great source of direct and immediate feedback from visitors, including library staff, faculty, and students. Their most frequent reaction has been surprise and delight that the archives are not only part of an undergraduate class but also the inspiration for a collective and participatory project.

With this activity, the archives are truly brought to life. Our proposal of thinking of the albums as the precedent of social media creates a more direct, intimate connection with every visitor: guests are invited to contribute their own unique page to a communal album. Contributions have spanned songs, original poems, verses by renowned writers in various languages, thoughtful collages, dedications to loved ones, and letters—mirroring the rich and diverse content found in the 19th- and 20th-century albums we studied. Visitors of this exhibit become active participants in the enduring legacy of “writing with scissors,” experiencing firsthand the fundamental human impulse to curate and share selfhood.

Bella Barraza, Isabella Cioffi, Ryan Farrell, Meghan Garrity, Luke Grantz, Sophia Hohman, Marshall Horton, Ella Johnson, Kate Kirwan, Elizabeth Larsen, Felipe Nino, Thomas Phillips, Monica Schleg and Jhoseline Trejo, enrolled in ROSP 40790, Women’s Culture in 19th-Century Latin America, taught by Vanesa Miseres Ph.D. (Associate Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures).

Footnotes

1. Scott, Joan Wallach. “Women’s Archives and Women’s History.” Joan Wallach Scott’s comments on the dedication of the Christine Dunlap Farnham Archives, October 10, 1986. https://pembroke.brown.edu/sites/default/files/JWSExcerpt_06957_0.pdf