Archive Nightmare

In August 1865, Javier Angulo Guridi arrived in Santo Domingo carrying four loads of documents from the Restoration War—crossing swollen rivers by broken canoe, over fifty leagues of trail with no inn in sight. Within a year, those archives had vanished—one of many such losses this book sets out to understand. Drawing on a wealth of published and unpublished documents and rare images, from nineteenth-century archives to modern metro maps, this book reveals that what gets erased and who gets silenced was rarely left to chance—offering a new lens for understanding how institutions of memory across Latin America have been built as much to suppress as to preserve the past.