#Choco colombia serial#

The Centro Nacional de Documentación y Estudios de las Culturas Afrocolombianas (National Centre for the Documentation and Studies of the Afrocolombians cultures, hereafter, CNDECA) at the Technological University of the Chocó (TUC), in this department capital, Quibdó, for the last three years has been locating material in urgent need of preservation throughout the western Colombian Pacific coast. Furthermore, both churches and governmental offices are often the first places to be destroyed in guerrilla or paramilitary attacks.

Clerks often discard these treasures as old papers. Most of the material is held in local churches or municipal governmental back rooms and is at risk from climate, bug infestation, and other damage. The Chocó's extreme tropical climate and the volatile socio-economic conditions of this Colombian region make the preservation of these records urgent. Probably more than in any other place in America, the surviving records in the Chocó are in imminent danger of being lost forever. Although rapidly deteriorating it is still possible to capture and preserve these through digitisation.

Particularly problematic are the ones of the Notary of Buenaventura. At least 5% of the documents overall are in a very advanced state of deterioration, and 50% show some degree of deterioration.

The documents are held uncatalogued and piled on floors or open shelves in rooms without climate or humidity control in churches, and notarial offices in these towns. The archival material is currently dispersed in several places in the Colombian pacific coast including Quibdó, Buenaventura, Nóvita, and Tado. Furthermore, they hold the only available systematic data on African ethnicities in Colombia, information of use for nations in West and West Central Africa who lost populations to the slave trade.

#Choco colombia serial#

The documents that will be rescued represent the longest, and most uniform, serial data available for the study of Afro-Colombians. The history of this population has been, for the most part, ignored in Colombian and Latin American historiography and is waiting to be written. This documentation represents the richest available historical record of the majority of Africans and their descendants in Colombia. In peril are materials dating from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries that hold the memory of the most African region in the Americas, the record of a people largely ignored in Colombian and Latin-American history. There, not only paramilitaries and guerrillas, but also the brutal conditions of the tropical forest in which most of the territory is located, have damaged centuries of church and official records going back to the fifteenth century. The Afro-descendant communities of the Chocó live in one of the poorest and more dangerous areas of Colombia, and of the entire Americas. Thousands of African slaves were forcibly transported to the Chocó to exploit the gold and silver mines in the basin of the Atrato river. This project will recover, catalogue, digitise and make freely available to researchers through the internet, approximately 100,000 ecclesiastic, governmental and personal records of African and Afro-descendant communities in the Chocó region of Western Colombia.

Why you need to protect your intellectual property.

Galleries, Reading Rooms, Shop and Catering Opening Times Vary.