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33 chapter three “Something We Already Know” * * * The chair creaked as I leaned back. Karime looked up at the sound, grinning at the sight of me massaging the kinks out of my sore neck. We’d been in Atlixco’s archives for only two hours, and I was already restless. She knew I preferred to be out in the field—interviewing people or getting hot and dusty digging—but this was part of my job, too. I smiled back as I closed my eyes, trying to clear from my head the images of the poorly preserved eighteenth-century letter I was transcribing. I often found that looking away from the document for a few moments allowed me to easily read what, a moment before, had been completely indecipherable. I doubted it would make much difference this time. The sheet in front of me had suffered a lot of water damage, but it was part of the story I was trying to tease out of the boxes surrounding me. I wasn’t prepared to give up easily. As I opened my eyes and looked down, I realized that my trick wasn’t going to work. The paper was just too damaged—for me, anyway. Looking back across the table at my assistant, I interrupted Karime and asked, “Can you make out anything more?” Thanks to the many hours she’d spent in the archives working on this project, her skills outpaced mine. She stood and came to my side of the table, shaking her head at the condition of the paper. She checked my transcription against the original, finding where I had given up. After a few moments of squinting, she shook her head again, “No, I think this one is a lost cause.” I nodded. It wasn’t a particularly important document, just a note of yet another loan made to 34 • Chapter Three the perpetually money-troubled owner of the Hacienda Acocotla, Francisco Esteben de Malpica Ponce de León. Though we had plenty of documentation about this particular aspect of de Malpica Ponce de León’s life, it was still frustrating to know I was missing a piece of his story. I stood up, stretching again, and moved toward the table on the other side of the room where Natalia sat. The archivist had been unbelievably kind and helpful. She kept an eye out for pertinent documents while conducting her own research and laid them aside until we were next there. Thanks to her, our research was moving more quickly and smoothly than was normal. She smiled in sympathy as I returned the document she had gotten off the shelves for me only a few minutes earlier and stood to get the next document I had requested on my list that morning. While I waited for her to return, I looked at the boxes surrounding me. Those boxes contained the stories of people who were beginning to inhabit my imagination. As I sat in the archives each day, my mind filled in details left out of the records and explored what the emotional experience of these characters might have been. These daydreams are the constant companion of historical research. I saw Lucas Pérez Maldonado, the hacienda ’s sixteenth-century founder, riding up to the indigenous village he was about to cheat out of land. How had the villagers and their cacique greeted him? How had he justified his behavior to himself as he rode home afterward? My brain fast-forwarded 150 years. Francisco Esteban de Malpica Ponce de León, who inherited the hacienda in the early years of the eighteenth century, was lying awake at night, worried about the money he had borrowed again that day. Why was he always so short of money? How did it affect his family? The stories of the hacendados were documented in detail, but others were not so well defined. De Malpica Ponce de León’s daughter Catalina made three brief appearances in the historical record, once and most notably as part of a financial transaction between her father and the convent she was to join when she was sixteen. What had she felt the night before she professed her vows at Santa Catalina ? Did she go willingly, with enthusiasm? Was she trying to escape a difficult relationship with her stepmother? Or was her trip to the convent nothing more than a business arrangement between her father and the convent to which he owed a great deal of...

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