Outreach

Historical archives consultation room opened at the INAOE

Santa María Tonantzintla, Puebla, December 15, 2023. The National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (INAOE), a public center of the National Council of Humanities, Sciences and Technologies (Conahcyt), opened a consultation room for historical archives.
One of the collections that can be consulted is the historical archive of the INAOE, which includes documents and audiovisual materials that allow us to know the institutional history of this research center founded 52 years ago.

In addition, the Royal Fund of Cholula will be available to researchers and the interested public, which is the result of a project to digitize the judicial documents of the two Cholulas that span from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century and that are scattered throughout Europe, the United States and Mexico. Part of this Fund belongs to the Archive of the Court of Justice of the State of Puebla.

The project was developed as a new type of approach to collective memory by researchers from the BUAP, the University of Texas at Austin, the Judicial Council of the Judicial Branch of the State of Puebla and the INAOE.

The Royal Fund is important because Cholula was a city of Indians. In Mexico, during the Colony, there were nine Indian cities, which had a special relationship of justice directly with the king of Spain. Many archives from Indian towns were burned in the Mexican Revolution. However, a large part of these collections was preserved in Europe, Mexico and the United States.

With the Royal Fund of Cholula you can understand what justice was like for the indigenous peoples in this region and what justice was like in the two Cholulas. For the digitization project, funds were obtained from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aimed at rescuing archives at risk of disappearing.
For more information about the procedure for consulting these files, starting in January 2024, you can send an email to Mtro. Alejandro Serrano Núñez at aserrano@inaoep.mx