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The Escárcega family library was built largely by Gildardo G. H. Morales Díaz of Apetatitlán, Tlaxcala, Mexico [b. 1899 — d. 1987]. His father later moved the family to Puebla where he was able to build his wealth during the time of Porfirio Díaz. It was in Puebla, during the Mexican revolution, that the family lost everything, land and home. Gildardo’s father and some of his brothers were hanged by the Zapatistas. The young Gildardo and other relatives survived. The violence of the revolution transformed the young Gildardo and is what led him to dedicate a large part of his life to study and understand the history of Mexico.
The family left Puebla and moved to Mexico City with a few belongings and some books. These were the seeds of Mr. Morales’ collection. He started collecting books on the history of Mexico in the early 1920s, building his library over his lifetime by adding to it important manuscripts and broadsides. In Mexico City, Mr. Morales befriended some of the great thinkers of the period such as Salvador Novo, Julián Carrillo, Gutierre Tibón, and Jose López Portillo. During his lifetime, Mr. Morales took care of his library with great passion. The exlibris in his books reads, “Verba volant scripta manent,” loosely translated as, “the word flies, the written is permanent.” Mr. Morales was a self-taught bibliophile and was a founding member of the Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia.
After his death, his daughter, Lorenia Morales Rodriguez Escárcega, who earned a Ph.D in history, cared for the library. Since his daughter's death, in 2002, it was cared for by one of her sons, the executor of the collection, Alejandro Escárcega Morales. Alejandro and his five siblings, Miguel, Carlos, Rocío, Patricia, and Lorenia were charged with caring for the collection.
Special Collections of the University of Arizona Libraries, has inherited an important responsibility for providing access to this bibliographic treasure. Through this online exhibit one will see selections of what the collection has to offer to students, scholars, and those world-wide. By providing bilingual annotations to the items on exhibit we have broadened the access to the material to a broader audience.
Thanks to a Southwestern Foundation for Education and Historical Preservation grant, a digitization effort has made additional material available online. In addition to what is on display through these exhibit pages, you are welcome to link to additional items that have been digitized thus far and available through our digital repository. The link to the UA Institutional Repository is available at the foot of each of the online exhibit pages.
Through these pages, visitors will experience colonial Mexico’s religious and political life, early national political discourse and battles for independence, as well as nineteenth century political discord and foreign invasion.
The collection included nearly 2,800 books, 80 documents (broadsides and manuscripts), and about 10 photographs. The collection is named the Morales de Escárcega Collection, in tribute to Mr. Morales and his daughter Lorenia, both of whom cared for the collection during their lifetimes.