Archival Approaches to Remembering, Forgetting, and Excavating Memory RAMS, University of Zadar May 2013 Dr. Kelvin L. White University of Oklahoma, USA

All societies remember and tell about the past.

Memory is not passive Memory is a dynamic social process

History is but one of the memory systems Memory systems share with history the processes of shaping, defining, and perpetuating community cultural memory

Oral narratives, text-based narrative, fixity, and history Some aspects of oral narratives conform with and support current political and social realities of their communities, while others resist revision and remain historically valid, fixed features of orally transmitted memory. The revised and fixed aspects of oral histories are not as oppositional to text- based histories as they might at first appear. They reflect the tendency of oral evidence to provide both immutable and historically dynamic cultural memory.

The primary purposes for creating records are the production, maintenance, and reproduction of culture, bureaucracy, or enterprise. Cultural anthropology tells us that the mode of communication—orality or literacy—influences the characteristics of memory systems.

The Costa Chica

La Costa Chica

Beltran’s estimates of colonial Mexico’s racial composition ( ) Indigenous 3,366,860 (98.7%) 1,269,607 (74.1%) 1,540,256 (62.1%) 3,676,281 (60.0%) African 20,569 (.6%) 35,089 (2%) 20,131 (.8%) 10,000 (.2%) European (Spanish) 6,644 (.2%) 13,780 (.8%) 9,814 (.4%) 15,000 (.2%)

La artesa

El pancho y la minga

La Costa Chica