Start Year: 2010 – End Year: Ongoing

Organization of documentation of Catalan emigration: the archive of the Benevolent Society of Natives of Catalonia in Havana

Aware of the importance of the documentary heritage generated throughout these 175 years of history, in October 1992 the SBNC institutionally constituted the Pompeu Fabra Archive and began organizing its documentary collection. The archive, currently directed by d’Idania Rodríguez, preserves 41 linear meters of documentation, generated mostly during the first half of the 20th century by the activity of the entity itself and other associations of Catalan emigrants to Cuba that have now disappeared.

In 2010, the collaboration between Archivists Without Borders and the Naturals of Catalonia Charitable Society began. The priority objective has been the digitization of the entity’s historical collection, aimed at guaranteeing the long-term conservation of information, and facilitating its access and dissemination through the deposit of a digital copy in the National Archives of Catalonia for online consultation.

The work to digitize the documentation has focused so far on these three major blocks of documentation:

Correspondence, writings received or issued by the entity between 1914 and 1987, which allow us to obtain an x-ray of the SBNC’s relations with its own associates, with the Spanish and Cuban administration, and with the remaining regional associations of Spanish emigrants, both Catalan and from other regions, inside and outside Cuba.

Socors, documentation of a more serious and administrative nature, generated around the welfare function that articulated the activity of the entity until the second half of the 20th century. Through this documentation we can learn about the personal stories of those who failed in their attempt to make it to the Americas, and understand the power relations and class differences that existed within the emigrant community.

Fons Centre Català, an association that coordinated the cultural activity of Catalan emigration and which, upon its dissolution in 1965, deposited what was preserved of its documentary collection in the archive of the Societat de Beneficència de Naturals de Catalunya.

In total, more than 51,000 digital images have been obtained, representing 40% of the documentation considered of interest, and which is planned to be digitized in the coming years.

These 5 years of cooperation with the Societat de Beneficència de Naturals de Catalunya have allowed us to strengthen ties and establish a constructive relationship that has led to the development of new projects. In 2013, an oral history project on Catalan emigration was launched, which aims to collect the documented testimony of Catalans and descendants of Catalans who emigrated and did not return. Their life stories provide an intimate perspective on the experience of emigration and allow us to transcend the limits of the dynamics of emigrant associations, which are captured by textual documentation, to delve into the personal sphere, with all its facets.