From Print to Memory. LACIPI: An Archive or a Digital Repository?

Antonio Vanegas Arroyo and the Tradition of Popular Engraving
If you ask anyone living in Mexico if they have ever read or listened to a calaverita, sung a corrido, or hummed “Las mañanitas”, they would certainly answer yes. These three poetic genres are pillars for Mexican popular culture. Calaveritas (short poems that played with humour and ideas of the death) are associated with the celebrations of the Day of the Dead on November 2; corridos are linked to political and social events such as the Mexican Revolution, and people traditionally sing “Las mañanitas” in birthdays and celebrations as everyone’s name Saint’s day, rondas (parades), and serenatas. These compositions, so lively present in the collective memory, are rooted in old Hispanic tradition, both because of their poetic styles and because of the editorial forms in which they were published: popular prints. 

All three genres are also associated with the images produced by two famous engravers: José Guadalupe Posada and Manuel Manilla, both workers at the workshop of the extraordinary printer and editor, Antonio Vanegas Arroyo (1862-1917), whose prints flooded streets and rural roads in Mexico and in Southern United States and were fundamental for transmitting the songs, stories, and devotions that were of interest for the Mexican population. Among them cancioneros (song books) stood out, targeting a public—as stated in their dedications—formrd by women, “the beautiful sex”. 

The imprint of these materials on Mexican culture has not yet been fully understood, since these hybrid formats allowed the transmission and coexistence of numerous compositions inspired both from books and newspapers, and from oral traditions. These humble papers facilitated the creation and dissemination of the corrido genre, and were also the surface for the so-called calaveritas. 

Popular prints were definitive for Mexican culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but as time went by they gradually lost their presence, due to the ephemeral low-quality paper used and to the new mass media such as radio and cinema. But despite of these conditions, people still remember them in songs, as well as in the images we still use in the Day of the Dead decorations, which have become part of today’s Mexican cultural identity. 

The LACIPI (Spanish initials for Popular Ibero-American Cultures and Prints Laboratory) Adscribed to UNAM’s Cultural and Social Representation Research Unit (UDIR), proposed to use digital technologies to study popular prints based in two main objectives: 
To achieve all proposed goals, complex processes need to be carried out which imply having a deep knowledge of the object of study as well as expertise managing the technological tools necessary. Thus, several questions arise when the digitalization is carried out and a repository is being prepared: How to preserve material heritage? How to catalogue it? How to reactivate it? 

Popular Prints as Multimedia and Multifunctional Objects
For more than six hundred years, popular prints, also known as pliegos de cordel (string pints), had been an important part of Mexican popular culture. These engraves can be printed in a variety of formats: flyers, pliegos de cordel (cordel prints) or booklets consisting of sixteen sheets or more. Prints emerged as an alternative to defray publishers’ expenses in the 16th century and, thanks to the public’s taste, later they became the main tool for various workshops. In these workshops, prints were produced in low quality papers, spending only two hundred and fifty thousand mexican pesos, which was very cheaply priced. Printing these images became a transnational publishing phenomenon until the 20^th century and nowadays this phenomenon still persists in some countries like Brazil. While its contents are focused on the news and humour.  

The various formats were adapted by publishing houses from each different country. It is possible, however, to synthesise three elements conforming their layout: a long title, an image and a text presented in two or three columns. These publications were disseminated by people publicly announcing them. In Spain, blind people, hired for publicity, sang couplets to invite consumers to purchase prints. This resulted in prints using different typographies as notation for the voice (Masera, 2018 and 2022). Likewise, the images were used for very different purposes whether they could be read, kept or stamp in the case of the prints. All this reveals that prints were also multimedia objects.

The variety of prints formats, for multimediality and multifunctionality, was evident in the pliegos de cordel offered by Jean François Botrel:
Once the multimediality and multifunctionality of these objects are understood, we can study some of the processes that are carried out to study prints contained in the digital archive created by LACIPI.

LACIPI: Both a digital archive and repository
Digital humanities technology, in the recent decades, has facilitated access to diverse collections of cordel engraved prints and literature by making these materials digital and organising them into accessible fields in an orderly fashion. The digitalization of these popular printed materials is a complex process that integrates both analogue and digital tools as well as structures, which implies a hybrid transition between both technological systems. 

This process not only replaces analogue  materials with digital, but also creates an interrelation between different types of objects  promoting network creations for: text, images and sound. Therefore, digitalization, as Göbel and Muller (2017) stated, enables the  mobility of these objects, generating more balanced relationships between them and reducing traditional inequalities, such as the historical prevalence of text over images in libraries. In the digitalization of popular print, the process is not simply a substitution of analogue for digital but involves a high degree of hybridity in the transition between different technologies.  

Moreover, through this process, new “digital ecosystems of knowledge” (Göbel & Muller, 2017) emerge and they differ from traditional circuits from both humanities and social science. A complex system is created in the case of a prints based digital archive by which digital objects can be linked in different ways, allowing them to be understood both individually and in its context. 

According to John Miles Foley’s (2002) reflection on the verbal arts, oral poetry or printed art can be seen as the oral tradition roots, where poets choose a path in each performance. 

Therefore, creating a digital archive emulates the process of oral tradition, allowing the convergence of objects and collections from different times and places while facilitating the construction of multiple “routes” which users can follow, such as the “Apparatus” proposed by Foley (2012). In other words, a system that not only includes the traditional literary critical apparatus, but also incorporates multimedia context, would allow the user to have complete contact and experience that resembles a real one.  

Thus, by following an oral poetry expert, you could argue that once the cyberstructure is built, the only limitation to reading through tradition would be the number of versions and songs available in the database. 

Foley’s observations also apply to string literature, since the user makes specific decisions in each interpretation following the path traced by the oral or printed tradition. In this context, the statement can be extended to the creation of a print repository. In this repository, cataloguing and organising materials would show the possible routes or paths to explore. If audio archives or printer’s documents are submitted to this experience, each object aspect would be further enriched, allowing its individual and traditional complex system of production studies. 

In this way, LACIPI, as an inter-institutional place, has as its own object of study: 

More than three thousand three hundred printed materials, so far, have been digitalized (equivalent to more than fifty thousand images); which include numerous textual units and a digital archive or network that allows people to consult individual files and to integrate them into diverse thematic, formal or visual traditions through the use of databases.  

LACIPI is focused on capturing as many elements as possible to facilitate the reader’s integral activation by incorporating multimedia files, such as audio recordings and expanding the search for illustrations. On one hand, this will allow the user to reconstruct the resonances  that the print generated in the consumers at that time. And on the other hand, to create new personal resonances (term used by Harmut Rosa’s in 2019). Rather the selection and use arise from a connection that resonates with that tradition, so it is not a passive choice. 

Final statement: Prints were born to be a collective memory
To set an example, think about  consumers paying twenty cents for a cancionero or a calaverita produced in a booklet or flyer format by Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, we must ask ourselves: What  consumers were looking for? They probably brought it to physically possess the melodies that resonate in their memory; maybe that is what attracted them, they liked it since it allowed them to connect and integrate themselves with an oral tradition.

However, they could have also sought it to integrate themselves into the new trends to become part of an elite, or perhaps they wished to remember old songs which resonate as symbols of a political process surrounding them. Or they savoured typical compositions from Día de muertos. In any case, the intention was always to recreate an experience focused on resonances from multiple levels: hearing, visual, and experiential.

What happened to these songs that have now been transformed into digital objects? What is a user looking for when exploring these lyrics? Digital humanities have created the possibility to bring these prints back to users by putting them back into circulation, now virtually.

All digital prints in LACIPI should ideally be activated as living elements of memory. This stimulates a complex and enriching relationship, both culturally and emotionally by fostering research from humanities exploring resonances in an interdisciplinary perspective.

LACIPI stands as a unique digital humanities project that strengthens the relationship between memory and digital preservation by inviting users from all over the world to learn and experience one of the most important traditions of Mexican culture: Popular prints.

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