Mtro. Christian Jesús Martín Medina López Velarde
Although the concept of culture is very broad and covers almost all the areas in which the human being has developed, adhering to the classical forms, the way in which culture has been perpetuated has been through books, for this reason said object has been valued, protected and even feared throughout history, because in books societies of all times have treasured their knowledge, written their traditions and way of life to be able to record it and above all they have been accumulating surprisingly, the knowledge that for millennia has allowed the cultural evolution of our species. Testimony of what is sustained here, is the importance that has been given to libraries throughout history, suffice it to mention, for example, the mythical library of Alexandria, the mysterious libraries of the Benedictine abbeys where, thanks to the labor of the monks, how much or how little Christianity was able to rescue from the ancient world when the different barbarian tribes invaded the then decadent Roman Empire, the elegant Marciana Library founded in 1468 in the city of Venice and other more current ones that continue to be preserved. surprising for the impressive buildings that house them, but above all for the countless amount of culture that they treasure in their thousands and in some cases millions of books, such as the Library of Congress, Washington DC, which has more than 36 million to its credit. of texts.
Taking into account what has been said in the previous lines, it is not surprising that books are treasured, cared for and come to be kept as a precious asset, which must be protected and even become worthy of being feared, and proof of this was the famous Index of forbidden bookswhich was the institutional way in which the Catholic Church called the list of prohibited books, considering them harmful to the conscience of good Catholics, which led to imposing serious penalties and censorship on believers who transgressed the ordinance and kept in If there is a copy included in the Index. Such has historically been the importance and power of these objects that sadly today they are disdained in many homes in our country or are replaced by electronic instruments that connect us with the “web” and make us think, ridiculously, that books are objects outdated and incapable of offering us the information that we can download from the “cloud” in seconds, without realizing that when these devices are obsolete and much information is lost in cyberspace, the books will still be there, on the shelves of public and private libraries offering us the knowledge of the culture that humanity has developed for many centuries.
Surely it is because of everything that has been mentioned here, that until not long ago libraries were one of the most precious treasures of institutions of different kinds, although in this text I want to refer to a specific library that despite its eventful history and the divisions it has suffered, it continues to be a very important piece if we want to know the history of written culture in Aguascalientes, I mean what was formerly known as the San Diego Convent Library.
It was on February 1, 1664 that the Franciscan religious from the province of San Diego in Mexico founded the Convent of the Clean Conception of Villa de Aguascalientes, better known as San Diego, due to the nickname “dieguinos” that the friars received. that inhabited it and that at the same time were called like that because they belonged to the province placed under the auspices of said saint. Thus, and according to what is recorded in the books of the conventual archive, from the moment of its foundation, an important part of the building was the library, a place where year after year the shelves were enriched by the presence of new volumes brought from different parts of New Spain, and even from the Spanish metropolis. Over the years and as the convent grew and became an obligatory place of passage for all the religious who, following the Camino Real, traveled to the north of New Spain in order to reach places like Zacatecas and Durango and the countless missions that are extended as far as Alta California, the library that we are dealing with here was enriched by thousands of volumes brought by said religious, who often appreciated the lodging that their brothers of the order offered them for the time necessary to spend the night and recover from the heavy trip, donating a book of interest to the library, which over time created what would be by far the most important bibliographical heritage that existed in the town of Hidrocálida in New Spain.
When the 19th century arrived and with it the political vicissitudes that cost our country so much instability, the liberal political parties began to promote the secularization of the Religious Orders, an issue that resulted in the promulgation of the Reform Laws and with them the alienation of the convents, a painful issue due to the incalculable material historical heritage that was destroyed in what became known as “La piqueta liberal”, but in the case of Aguascalientes these exclaustrations were not as abrupt as in other places and the civil authorities were kind enough to inform to the friars, days in advance, who would be stripped of their property; and it was for this reason that the Dieguinos decided to clandestinely remove half of their library, especially those volumes that referred to matters of a religious order such as theology, perennial philosophy and sacred history, but what to do with the rest of the library when time ran out?, and so the religious decided to hide it by walling it up and placing a false wall over the books, this with the hope that in a short time their convent would be returned to them and they could rescue those books that belonged to secular subjects such as architecture, medicine, languages and a large number of other subjects.
Time passed and the old convent became the Institute of Sciences and in the 20th century the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes, the Dieguinos became extinct and no one remembered those forgotten books and it was not until just over 30 years ago that thanks to a restoration of the central building of the UAA that the treasure came to light, discovering several hundred books from the 17th to the 19th centuries that were now part of the collection of the Maximum House of Studies of our state and that over time were cataloged, restored and placed in a special place to form the Old Fund of the Central Library of the UAA, while the books that were taken from the convent by the Dieguinos continue to be a fundamental part of the conventual library that in the new convent of San Diego remain until today being part of the historical heritage of the Franciscan Order in Aguascalientes.
Serve these few lines, so that our readers know a little about the history of this important collection of books, which, divided into two and with different destinations, continue to be, to this day, the faithful witness of the importance that books have had. in the historical development of our society.
