Archivo General e Histórico del Poder Ejecutivo de Michoacán

Michoacán’s state archive was created in parallel with the state of the same name in 1824, but was repeatedly ransacked in its first century of existence. Much material was stolen in the insurrections of the 1830s and 1840s. In 1863, during the French intervention, the archive was moved by the state’s liberal government to Uruapan, where it was incinerated in a siege. The collection was reconstituted as the Archivo General y Público de Michoacán by the Aristeo Mercado government under the law of November 30, 1891, and reopened in the Palacio de Gobierno as of January 1, 1892, under its first director, Amador Coromina (1892-1904).

Henceforth the archive began to archive the deeds (hijuelas) of properties created from former communal lands, which were previously held in the Interior Ministry’s working archive. In 1920, more material was lost when the archive was removed from the governor’s palace and dumped in a stable. In the 1930s, the archive’s lithographs and printed materials were stolen, and in the 1950s one state governor sold off most of the archive’s remaining documents to a cardboard factory for pulping. As late as 1979, a study reported that the archive was in “bad conditions.”

A 1985 law, enacted in 1989, finally separated the state’s historical archive from the working (civil registry-based) archive of the Dirección de Archivos del Poder Ejecutivo, and in so doing created the Departamento del Archivo General del Estado with its two sub-departments (secciones), the Archivo General e Histórico del Poder Ejecutivo de Michoacán and the Archivo General de Notarías. Since 1989, the Archivo Histórico del Poder Ejecutivo has existed as a stand-alone entity and slowly become professionalized. Now known as the Archivo General e Histórico del Poder Ejecutivo de Michoacán (AGHPEM), the state-run archive holds approximately 1900 linear meters of documentation, including map, photo, and periodical collections, a library, and the historical archive of the state Interior Ministry. Its most important collections include: the Hijuelas; migration records; and the Registro Público de la Propiedad archive.

Since 2016, AGHPEM has pursued a range of inventory, dissemination, and outreach activities including the founding of a statewide association of municipal historians (a constitutionally mandated post), with an annual congress and select publishing ventures; an itinerant program of training workshops for municipal archivists across Michoacán; and a growing inventory of the holdings of the state’s municipal archives. The support of the state government’s Director of Archives, licenciado Ulises Romero Ruiz, as well as that of current AGHPEM director, Dr. Víctor Manuel Pérez Talavera (a Ph.D. of the state university), have been crucial to these efforts.

Sources:

1. Matthew Butler and David A. Bliss, “Digital Resources: The Hijuelas Collection,” in William Beezley (ed.), Oxford Research Encylopedia of Latin American History https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.618 (online publication, Sep. 2018.).
2. Alicia Venegas González, “Expediente del reparto de bienes comunales en Tancítaro, Michoacán,” Legajos: Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación 7 (2015): 125–154.
3. Elva Edith Ruiz Magaña and Carmen del Pilar Ortega Varela, “El Archivo General del Estado de Michoacán. Problemas y perspectivas de un repositorio documental,” Tzintzun 12 (1990): 163–171.
4. Xavier Tavera Alfaro, “Los archivos en Michoacán,” in Elsa Cecilia Frost, Michael C. Meyer, and Josefina Zoraida Vázquez (eds.), El trabajo y los trabajadores en la historia de México (Mexico City/Tucson: El Colegio de México/University of Arizona Press, 1979), 857–859.
5. Joaquín Fernández de Córdoba, “Michoacán: la historia y sus instrumentos,” Historia Mexicana 2.1 (1952): 135–154.

LOCATION

Calle La Corregidora 680A, Morelia Centro, Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico 58000