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About Me

Screen Shot 2024-02-10 at 10.20.28 AMI am a historian of Guatemala during the Spanish colonial period and associate professor of Latin American history at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.A. I’m interested in how people recreate meaning and  community after long migrations and/or in radically changed circumstances.

I’ve published two books about Mesoamerican allies of the Spanish conquistadors in Central America, Memories of Conquest and Indian Conquistadors. I also created the digital archive Náhuatl/Nawat en Centro América with programmer Michael Bannister. I’m currently thinking about the persistence of Mesoamerican material culture in the midst of disaster.

I have a beautiful family that never complains when I disappear into the archive.

You can reach me at laura.matthew@marquette.edu

Please see my statement on the firing of AGCA director Anna Carla Ericastilla and the endangered Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional below, under Dept. of Dislocated Documents.

Research

moc-copy Memories of Conquest, winner of the 2013 Howard F. Cline Memorial Prize and the 2013 Murdo MacLeod Prize, tells the story of thousands of Nahuas and Oaxacans who invaded Guatemala alongside the Spanish in the 1520s. Some remained in Central America as colonists, creating a new ethnic identity for themselves as “Mexicanos.” It was published in Spanish as Memorias de conquista: De indígenas conquistadores a mexicanos en la Guatemala colonial.

indian-conquistadors-copy Other scholars were noticing similar patterns throughout the region. Hence the volume I co-edited with Michel Oudijk in 2007, Indian Conquistadors.

My current research examines interregional commerce and migration at the end of the disastrous sixteenth century, across one of the most important trade corridors of the Mesoamerican world: the southern Pacific coast from modern-day Oaxaca to El Salvador.

In addition to generous support from Marquette, I have received grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies; the American Philosophical Society; the Newberry Library (Evelyn Dunbar and Ruth Dunbar Davee  ’21-22 and Mellon ’05-06 Long Term Fellowships); the U.S. Department of Education (Fulbright-Hays); The U.S. State Department (Fulbright); the Amerind Institute; and the Research Institute for the Study of Man (Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund).

ARTICLES/ESSAYS

Remembering Madre Rosa

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In 1951, at age 33, Maryknoll Sister Dorothy (Rosa Cordis) Erickson graduated from Marquette University’s medical school (now the Medical College of Wisconsin). Ten years later she was assigned to the town of Jacaltenango in the Cuchumatanes mountains of Guatemala, where she was joined in 1963 by Milwaukee native and fellow Maryknoll doctor Sister Jane (Juana) Buellesbach. Other Maryknoll sisters followed, many of them also Marquette alumni, including a graduate of the last Marquette Medical School class of ’71, Sister Mary Annell.

Working together, the community of Jacaltenango and the Maryknolls built a 50-bed hospital, eighteen clinics, and a regional training program for nurses, midwives, and health promoters. By 1987 the hospital had cared for 12,686 inpatients, served 475,889 outpatients, immunized 182,117 children — and had survived the town’s military occupation during the worst years of Guatemala’s civil war.

“Remembering Madre Rosa” is a multi-year undergraduate research project to reconnect the Marquette University community with this history. Inaugural 2017-19 team Janet Peña, Francisco Hernández, Isabel Piedra, Luis Jiménez, and Ricardo Fernández did foundational work at the Maryknoll Mission Archives in New York and in Jacaltenango — see their article here.

2019-20 team members Isabelle Soto, José Ortíz, Marycruz Sánchez, and History graduate student Eddie Godina’s exhibit, postponed due to COVID-19, will be the basis of a bilingual website in development by History graduate student Christopher Micsky.

In November 2020, Soto, Godina, and Marquette’s Engineers Without Borders student chapter president Alex Quiles co-hosted a conversation with Dr. Susan Fitzpatrick Behrens, Marquette community members, and several generations of Maryknolls, “Beyond the White Man’s Burden: What Does Service Really Mean?”

Dept. of Dislocated Documents

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Hat tip to Rudy Girón at antiguadailyphoto.com for this picture of the card catalog at the Fundación Cultural Duane Carter Library in Antigua, Guatemala, above. Many of these card catalogs are still in service, including at the Archivo General de Centroamérica (about which more here). I’m quite fond of them.

UPDATE: The Pardo card catalog at the AGCA linked above, the online portal to the AGCA, and the long-time director of the archive, Anna Carla Ericastilla, were all removed by the Guatemalan government of Jimmy Morales in July 2019. The AGCA itself was erased from the list of institutions safeguarding Guatemala’s “Patrimonio Documental” on the Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes’ website.

I have done research at the AGCA since 1992. During those 27 years until her dismissal, I watched director Ericastilla work with the utmost professionalism to preserve Central America’s historical records and make them available to scholars and citizens alike, under enormously difficult budgetary and political circumstances.

Her firing and the removal of the AGCA’s online card catalog were part of an attempt by the Morales administration to shut down access to the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional. Hidden in an abandoned government property in 1996 (the same year peace accords ended 36 years of internal armed conflict), the police archives were discovered accidentally by the Guatemalan Office of Human Rights in 2005. As director of the AGCA, Ericastilla played an important role in applying professional archival standards to the cataloguing of the AHPN’s records.

In the midst of sensitive trials against high-ranking government and military officials, the Morales government moved against the AHPN. It painted the Guatemalan archivists’ cooperation with international and overseas funding agencies, IT services, and universities as an attack on Guatemala’s sovereignty. The UN-sponsored International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), long an object of these same arguments, was thrown out of the country two months later.

All this is sad testimony to the ongoing corruption that continues to plague Guatemala. The decisions against the AHPN and AGCA were made with the Trump administration’s support and complicity, a significant change from the U.S. State Department’s crucial support of anti-corruption efforts in Guatemala in the past and to which it returned under President Biden.

Public archives are a cornerstone of both history and democracy. Guatemalan archivists have dedicated their lives to safeguarding historical documents and making them accessible and relevant to their fellow citizens. Their contributions should be elevated and fully funded, not destroyed.

CV, Etc.

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