Contact: Karen Wentworth, (505) 277-5627 October 26, 2005 SPANISH COLONIAL DOCUMENTS AT UNM Dr. Joseph Sánchez, Director of the Spanish Colonial Research Center at UNM, will speak about the partnership between the National Park Service and the University of New Mexico, a partnership designed to enhance the prominent collection of Spanish Colonial and Mexican Period documents that are located in the Center for Southwest Research (CSWR) in Zimmerman Library . . His lecture, “Spanish Colonial Documents at UNM: An Incomparable Legacy,” will be given on November 2, 2005 at 2 p.m. in the Willard Reading Room of Zimmerman Library. Prior to his career with the National Park Service, Dr. Sánchez was a professor of Colonial Latin American History at the University of Arizona, Tucson. In April 2005 he was inducted into la Orden de Isabel la Católica as Knight Commander by King don Juan Carlos of Spain, one of Spain's most prestigious awards given to a foreigner. The Spanish Colonial Research Center has developed and maintains a database of documents obtained from the national archives in Spain, France, Mexico, Great Britain and Italy. This collection truly complements the heroic efforts in the 1930s and ‘40s made by UNM scholars France V. Scholes, Lansing Bloom, Elizabeth West, George P. Hammond and others to gather copies of documents in Spain and Mexico. When those early researchers retired by the mid-twentieth century, the effort to collect these documents ended. In 1986 the Spanish Colonial Research Center picked up the challenge and has added nearly 100,000 pages of documents and 5,000 copies of maps, plans and sketches to the CSWR collection. Dr. Sánchez is the superintendent of the Petroglyph National Monument and the founder and editor of the “Colonial Latin American Historical Review (CLAHR).” His published works include: “The Rio Abajo Frontier, 1540-1692,” “Spanish Bluecoats: The Catalonian Volunteers in Northwestern New Spain, 1767-1810,” “The Aztec Chronicles: The True History of Christopher Columbus by Quilaztli of Texcoco,” “Explorers, Traders, and Slavers: Forging the Old Spanish Train, 1678-1850, ” “Don Fernando Duran y Chaves's Legacy: A History of the Atrisco Land Grant, 1693-1968,” and “Exploradores, comerciantes y tratantes de esclavos: la forja de la Vieja Ruta Española, 1678-1859.”
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