Session minutes of the Centro Católico de Obreros de Quito(1906-1983)-Conservation, inventory, and documentary description

Santiago Cabrera Hanna (Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Ecuador)

Natasha Sanmartín Monteros (Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Ecuador) 

Data access on Nakala:  http://doi.org/10.34847/nkl.cfce6tvs

Archival description on AtoM
Archival City, “EC-CCO. Fonds of the Centro Católico de Obreros de Quito”, ArchivalCity_RG_0017: http://atom.archivalcity.org/index.php/fondo-del-centro-catolico-de-obreros-de-quito

Abstract

The Centro Católico de Obreros de Quito (CCOQ) is one of the oldest workers’ organisations in Quito. It was founded on March 18,1906 by a group of conservative intellectuals under the principles promoted by the Rerum Novarum (1891) issued by Pope Leo XIII. The CCOQ’s archive contains records of the association’s activities over 116 years, that is from 1906 to 2022 (membership registers, accountancy books, magazines, documents on mutual and cultural activities, posters, etc.). This rich documentary collection has great relevance for the study of the social memory of both Quito and Ecuador. To prevent these archives from damage and risks of natural catastrophes, an action to preserve them has been conceived and will be described in the following pages. It is part of a larger project focused on the recovery of the documentary heritage of workers’ and trade union organizations in the city of Quito.

Keywords: Ecuador, Quito, workers’ associations,  catholic action, private archives

The Centro Católico de Obreros de Quito (CCOQ) is one of the oldest workers’ organisations in Quito. It was founded on March 18,1906 by a group of conservative intellectuals under the principles promoted by the Rerum Novarum (1891) issued by Pope Leo XIII. The encyclical aimed at refuting socialism, denouncing revolution, asserting the values of family and private property, and promoting the creation of Catholic workers’ societies where workers and employers could come together and collaborate in improving workers’ conditions through mutualism and fostering religion (Leo XIII 1931: 13-15).

The CCOQ’s founders were representatives of the city’s elites with conservative political and ideological orientations. They looked for alternatives to the leftist trade union organizations and were inspired by the work of French Catholic centres aimed at developing edifying links between workers (Luna 1986, Robalino 2007, Mauro 2015). Some of them, such as Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño, not only represented the Ecuadorian Conservative Party, but were also intellectuals linked to the Ecuadorian Society of American Historical Studies (SEHAA), which later changed its name to the National Academy of History.

In 1925, the board of directors changed from intellectuals to Catholic workers. Until 1931, the CCOQ published the journal Acción Popular and promoted the creation of other affiliates. The center was not a trade association, but a meeting place of artisans and workers of different trades. Between 1932 and 1938, it faced a highly politicized social context of union and workers’ organizations in Quito. It was the base of other workers’ organizations within the Catholic spectrum, such as the Confederación Ecuatoriana de Obreros Católicos (1938), later renamed Central de Organizaciones Clasistas (CEDOC) (1974) (Luna 1989).

The CCOQ’s archive contains records of the association’s activities over 116 years, that is from 1906 to 2022 (membership registers, accountancy books, magazines, documents on mutual and cultural activities, posters, etc.). This rich documentary collection has great relevance for the study of the social memory of both Quito and Ecuador, since diverse popular actors were grouped under the label “workers” through competing forms of association.

These collections are exposed to natural threats related to hydrometeorological hazards such as heavy rains that jeopardize the preservation of documentary sources that, combined with the vulnerability of the building’s infrastructure, inadequate furniture, storage, the physical state of preservation of the stands and access, contribute to a high and irreversible risk of loss (fig 1 &2).

Fig 1 & 2-Wooden furniture and unprotected documents

To prevent these archives from damage and risks of natural catastrophes, an action to preserve them has been conceived and will be described in the following pages. It is part of a larger project focused on the recovery of the documentary heritage of workers’ and trade union organizations in the city of Quito. This project is supervised by the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, in collaboration with Archival City Project (Université Gustave Eiffel) and the Quito Metropolitan Historical Archive.

The CCOQ is located at the southern limit of Quito’s historic area (fig. 3& 4), established by Avenida 24 de Mayo, and was built in the context of the centennial celebrations of the Battle of Pichincha in the Latin American Wars of Independence (May 24, 1922), when the Jerusalén ravine was refilled (Carcelén, Compte and del Pino 2009, 251). This area has been refurbished on several occasions and is now considered a ghettoized area of the city. It is made up of two of the oldest neighborhoods in the historic center of Quito (San Sebastián and El Tejar).

Fig 3-  Location of the CCOQ in 1914

Fig 4-Location of the CCOQ in 1949

Historically, these neighborhoods concentrate activities related to various trades, working class commerce, and liquor and food sales. The Center is situated on an “ethnic frontier” because the area is home to indigenous people from the provinces of Chimborazo and Cotopaxi (central highlands of Ecuador), neighbors and inhabitants of several generations and, currently, migrants from Venezuela. The CCOQ shares its space with El Robo Chapel, a Catholic church built during the colonial era in the city of Quito (17th century) for the use of the indigenous population. Today the CCOQ is situated in a highly symbolic position, on the imaginary border between the heritage area of the city designated for tourism, and the quarters of the historical center of Quito considered as working class.

Thus, the recovery of COOQ’s archives represents an important step not only to preserve them from natural catastrophes, but also to encourage the recognition of the centre as part of the urban heritage of the city and safeguard Quito’s working-class cultural heritage. The documentary section chosen for the preservation process concerns the minutes of meetings (from 1906 until 1983) as they represent the most important body of documents kept. Two linear meters contained in 3,216 pages were involved. After the processes of conservation, cataloguing and digitization, the minutes of sessions were transferred to the Metropolitan Archive of History for conservation and consultation. In this way, access to the information they contain is guaranteed[1].

Samples of these digitised archives have been deposited in the Archival-City Quito collection on the HumanNum open data platform Nakala. The following alphanumeric code has been chosen for this dataset: ACQ03_NSSC where ACQ stands for Archival City Quito, 03 refers to the 3rd dataset deposited online in the Quito collection and NSSC stands for Natasha Sanmartín and Santiago Cabrera, who co-authored this data paper. Additional letters refer to specific archive units as explained in the finding aid file ACQ03_FA_00_NSSC available on Nakala and as detailed in the following pages.

  1. State of art

The CCOQ archive has been a source for historical research aimed at understanding the labor history of Quito and Ecuador, as well as the organizational processes of the conservative sectors and the Church in the early twentieth century. The historian Milton Luna Tamayo used the minutes of the CCOQ in a study on the functional and organizational configuration of one of the spaces of popular sociability created at the beginning of the twentieth century (Luna 1989). During the first decade of the 21st century, Isabel Robalino periodized the CCOQ’s history (Robalino 2007). Recently, Ruth Natalia Caicedo studied this workers’ organization as a social Catholic alternative to secularization between 1938 and 1940, a highly politicized moment in Quito (Caicedo 2023).

Other works tackled the organizational processes in Ecuador in the context of the paternal authority crisis, as pointed out by Maiguashca, and the emergence of the “grassroots” sectors (Maiguashca 1991). Alexei Páez studied the Ecuadorian labor movement from a historical and political perspective (Páez 1989); Fernando López Romero worked on the role of Quito workers in Compactación Obrera Nacional (López 2015); Ángel Emilio Hidalgo focused on Sociedad de Artesanos Amantes del Progreso in Guayaquil (Hidalgo 2014); and Galo García studied the workers’ guild of Alausí (García 2015). These works show the importance in the recovery of and access to worker organizations’ archives in small towns of the Ecuadorian Sierra. Finally, Alicia Maya Santacruz studied the Sociedad Artística e Industrial de Pichincha (SAIP) through its journals (Maya 2022).

The CCOQ archives, on which most of the above-mentioned works are based, are relevant not only to retrace the organization of Catholic workers; they can also be analyzed to explore members’ integration into local and national workers’ organizations and the role Catholic workers played within them (for example, their participation in workers’ congresses such as that of Ambato in 1938) (Bustos 1992). The artistic facet (music and theater) developed by CCOQ members and reflected in the Center’s collection of movable property (musical instruments and theatrical costumes) has been scarcely studied. Other documents may allow studying workers’ relations with the city through popular religious expressions (devotion to San José Obrero) and mutualism activities (food delivery and commissary).

However, the use of the CCOQ archive is restricted to members only and has been accessed by researchers on few occasions. The Board of Directors is responsible for the administration of these historical documents. Before our intervention, no technical intervention had been carried out on the CCOQ’s archives in terms of preventive conservation, ordering, or cataloguing through adequate archive description systems. This is due to the lack of actions and policies implemented by decentralized governments and the central government. Only one state diagnosis was performed during the National Inventory of Cultural Property (2008-2009), which recorded the archive’s state of conservation as “regular.”

A risk factor for the preservation of these documents is the progressive degradation of the infrastructure of the real estate that houses these documents. In these circumstances, some archival documents have disappeared or are not accessible for historical research due to their physical condition (some have deteriorated media and bindings). Another constraint involves the ownership of this type of archives, since when workers’ organizations were dissolved, many of their documents were often left in the hands of former leaders who privatized them.

The intervention process we have carried out has different objectives, as we believe that the organization of documents, and the classification, conservation, and preservation of information would make it possible to preserve this documentary heritage and facilitate its access and dissemination to the public.

  1. “Sessions minutes”: a documentary body selected for preservation.

As mentioned earlier, the preservation process concerned the CCOQ minutes (fig 5). In quantitative terms, they represent the largest collection of documents that keeps an annual sequence of the different sessions that were held at the CCOQ (2 linear meters). In qualitative terms, these papers contain the most important information about the history of the organization and its relationship with the social and political history of Quito.

Fig.5 – Minutes book, 1909

By periodizing these documents, the studies of Luna (1986) and Robalino (2007) established several phases in the organizational history of Catholic workers. An initial period saw the first conferences of political formation activities (1909) and the first Workers’ Congress, organized by the Sociedad Artística e Industrial de Pichincha (SAIP), as well as the creation of the Unión Ecuatoriana de Obreros (Ecuadorian Workers’ Union).

The intervention project entailed preventive and curative conservation processes  (fig. 6) -the documentation has been processed in 11 storage bodies as shown in  fig. 7; inventory and indexing by archive description systems and computerized means of the documentary series CCOQ Session Minutes from 1906 to 1983, with a total of 3177 sheets (AToM[2]). The documentation was also digitized.

Fig. 6-Reinforcement with Japanese paper and methylcellulose

Fig. 7-Storage

The documentary section selected for archive intervention concerns the minutes of meetings from 1906 to 1983. They are stored in 8 books and 2 folders including:

  • preparatory session minutes
  • opening session minutes[3]
  • board session minutes
  • general meeting session minutes
  • regular session minutes
  • special session minutes
  • funeral minutes
  • general commission session minutes[4]
  • directors’ session minutes
  • auxiliary association session minutes[5]
  • Catholic Worker Center savings fund[6]
  • enrollment records[7]

The documents processed were produced by the general secretary’s section. The Secretariat recorded the minutes of the regular and special meetings, the CCOQ general assembly of members, general commissions, and the night school. Some of these commissions were permanent, others occasional, such as the night school, created to foster elementary education for some of its members during evening hours. The Secretary was in charge of administering the minutes of the meetings, which were drafted by the Secretariat. The Secretariat recorded the resolutions of the General Assembly, the Board of Directors, and the special commissions[8].

Other documents were identified during the technical processing of the CCOQ minutes books, such as night school enrollment records from 1933-1936, and the general ledger of the savings fund section from 1917 (fig.8).

Fig. 8-Saving funds section, 1917

3.Methodology

The need to make manuscript documents available to researchers has allowed for a methodological and planned process, from the first stages of historical research, conservation, cataloging, digitization, and the final disposition of the documents using storage and description technologies. The documentation was processed as follows.

3.1. Curative preservation of documentary supports.

Direct intervention processes were carried out considering the degradations identified in the documentary body shown in table 1:

Table 1 -Degradation Factors of the Documentary Series “Minutes of the Catholic Worker Center of Quito”

Factor Means Cause Mechanisms Degradation
Extrinsic Anthropogenic Manipulation Improper use of documents during consultation,

leading to wear on surfaces due to friction on the surface of the materials.

Tears, folds, wear on covers, spines, etc.
Lack of knowledge Home repairs using adhesive tape and metallic elements that cause surface rusting. Adhesion of repairs and oxidation.
Biological Galleries Due to lack of furniture maintenance and cleanliness of physical spaces. Abrasion and missing supports.
Photochemical degradation Natural light sources Due to natural light sources with cumulative effects due to extended overexposure. Color changes or paper friability (weakening).
Intrinsic Composite materials Ink composition They react to the accumulation of relative humidity in the case of inks with ferrogallic composition; because of their high acidity they tend to perforate the document. Paper transamination, darkening, migration, or perforation.

Drafted by: Natasha Sanmartín Monteros

The state of the documents’ deterioration was established before the document description, according to the papers’ physical, chemical and/or biological conditions. Preservation was based on the implementation of curative conservation measures with direct actions on the documents and bindings to stop the deterioration processes and reinforce their physical structure: surface cleaning, abrasive cleaning, grafting, reinforcing brackets, correcting deformations in the drawings, and reinforcing bindings. Once the condition was improved, the information contained in the bound documents was processed.

3.2. Information description and cataloging

Prior to the description of the documentary collection, section, series, subseries, and single unit, a Document Classification Chart (DCC)[9] was created to define levels of document archive description according to international archive description standards, such as ISAD (G)[10]. A DCC structure was drawn up to establish levels of the institution’s intellectual hierarchy in relation to the information contained in the minutes of the sessions (table 2):

Table 2-CCOQ Document Classification Chart, Documentary Section Secretary.

Source: Minutes & Records of Centro Católico de Obreros. Drafted by Natasha Sanmartín Monteros.

The documents’ description levels were created according to the following structure for registration in the AToM system, with their respective coding. The selected Code corresponds to the initials of the Centro Católico de Obreros de Quito used in this Project to identify this repository and its geographical location:

Fund: CCOQ- Centro Católico de Obreros de Quito

     Section: CCOQ-S- Secretary of Centro Católico de Obreros de                             Quito

           Series: CCOQ-S-A Minutes

                  Subseries: CCOQ-S-A-SP- Preparatory Session

                          Simple Unit: CCOQ-S-A-SP-001 sequential number                                                     designated for each single unit

The binders containing minutes of CCOQ sessions consist of simple documentary units; the temporary identification of the documents was carried out according to the date of the session since not all the minutes are numbered, as is the case for the minutes of 1906, which are numbered from No. 1 (March 11, 1906) to No. 22 (September 16, 1906).

The archive description methodology used the hierarchical levels identified in the CCOQ’s document classification chart:

  1. Description of the documentary sections “Secretary of Centro Católico de Obreros”. This section refers to the participation of the secretary appointed by this trade union in CCOQ meetings to notify, safeguard, and disseminate the resolutions passed by the organization.
  2. Description of minute series: Documents that record the proceedings, agreements, and decisions made at CCOQ meetings, listing the topics discussed at the meetings in accordance with the agenda and identifying meeting participants, date and, in some cases, time.
  3. Description of session minutes subseries: Specific documents that identify the type of sessions held at the CCOQ.

Table 3-Documentary description of simple units

3.3 Preventive conservation processes: digitalization

The documentation was digitized to preserve the information and limit its physical consultation. The digitization was performed on a planetary scanner type V, 300 to 600 DPI resolution, and the files were stored in PDF/A PDF format designed for the long-term preservation of documents (fig. 9).

Fig.9- Digitalization process

Conclusions

The CCOQ session minutes are important documentary records for the historical understanding of the workers’ organization in Quito as they cover almost a century.  Mutualist activities, religious practices, participation in workers’ congresses, their efforts to support basic schooling for their members’ children, help us to understand how Quito’s groups of workers adapted to the city’s urbanization processes and created ways of linking their organizational and religious spaces, trade and food supply, and the school system. These are important aspects of understanding how the popular sectors used their associative organizations to adapt and incorporate themselves into the urban world.

The creation of savings funds and the provision of foodstuffs provide information on the location of CCOQ members’ homes and their involvement in housing projects or land purchase and distribution (an aspect closely related to the city’s population patterns and urban planning). Thirdly, some members were encouraged to join the night school system or to take part in activities aimed at combating so-called “worker’s vices,” such as alcoholism. These activities took place in other parts of the city. The same applies to the artistic participation of Catholic workers in various workers’ congresses. Other avenues for research are related to the internal study of the workers’ organizational structures and their evolution over time. This means identifying the origin of the minutes and the way in which they were drafted.

The database resulting from the intervention process allows for the creation of a digital collection of information on workers in the city of Quito. It provides access to information on the internal functioning of the workers’ organizations, their social dimension and the identification of mutual and beneficiary activities that link the members of the CCOQs to the city of Quito and its changes, through the study of the social uses of urban space.

References

PRIMARY SOURCES

León XIII, “Encíclica sobre la cuestión obrera” (Rerum Novarum). Las enseñanzas sociales de la Iglesia. Rerum Novarum – Quaragessimo Anno. 1891-1931, recopiladas por Horacio Campillo. Santiago de Chile: 1931.

Session minutes of Centro Católico de Obreros de Quito (CCOQ), 1906-1983.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Betancourt Roldán, María Cristina & Orlanda Jaramillo, “Aproximación a la evolución del concepto de Archivística”. Revista Interamericana de Bibliotecología, n.o 44 (January-April 2021): 1-11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.rib.v44n1eIn1

Bustos, Guillermo. “La identidad “clase obrera” a revisión: una lectura sobre las representaciones del Congreso Obrero de Ambato de 1938”. Procesos. Revista Ecuatoriana de Historia, n.o 2 (1992): 73-104.

Caicedo, Ruth. “El Centro Católico de Obreros (1938-1940): una propuesta del catolicismo social ante la secularización” (Master’s thesis of research in History, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Ecuador Headquarters, 2023).

Carcelén, Ximena, Florencio Compte & Inés del Pino, “Ecuador en Centenario de la Independencia”. Apuntes. Revista de Estudios sobre el Patrimonio Cultural, vol. 19, n.o 2 (2009): 236-255.

Delgado Gómez, Alejandro & Cayetano Tornel Cobacho, “Isaar CPF: Descripción y automatización de archivos”. El profesional de la información. Revista internacional científica y profesional.

http://www.elprofesionaldelainformacion.com/contenidos/1998/diciembre/isaar_cpf_descripcion_y_automatizacion_de_archivos.html

García Idrovo, Galo. 100 años de constancia. “Sociedad obreros Alausí” 1915-2015. Alausí: Instituto de Investigación Histórica y Cultura Popular “Nuevo Alausí”, 2015.

Hidalgo, Ángel Emilio. Sociedad letrada y modernidad en Guayaquil (1895-1920). Quito: UASB-E / Corporación Editora Nacional, 2014.

López Romero, Fernando. ‘Dios, patria y libertad’: artesanos quiteños y política (1929-1933). Quito: UASB-E / Corporación Editora Nacional, 2015.

Luna, Milton. “Orígenes del movimiento obrero de la Sierra ecuatoriana: El Centro Obrero Católico”. Cultura, Revista del Banco Central del Ecuador, vol. 26 (July-December, 1986): 285-315.

—. Historia y conciencia popular. El artesanado en Quito. Quito: Taller de Estudios Históricos / Corporación Editora Nacional, 1989.

Maiguashca, Juan. “Los sectores subalternos en los años 30 y el aparecimiento del Velasquismo”. In Las crisis en el Ecuador: los treinta y ochenta, Rosemary Thorp et. al. 79-93. Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional / Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos de la Universidad de Oxford / Instituto de Estudios Avanzados, 1991.

Mauro, Amalia. Albañiles campesinos. Migración temporal de los obreros de la construcción. Quito: CIUDAD, 1986.

Mauro, Diego. “El mutualismo católico en Argentina: el Círculo de Obreros de Rosario en la primera mitad del siglo XX”. Historia Crítica, n.o 55 (January-March 2015): 181-205.

Maya Santacruz, Alicia. “Cultura impresa y gremial en los periódicos de la Sociedad Artística e Industrial de Pichincha (SAIP): El Artesano (1892), El Proletario (1933) y El Pueblo (1941)”. Master’s thesis of research in History, – FLACSO Ecuador, 2022. https://repositorio.flacsoandes.edu.ec/bitstream/10469/18108/2/TFLACSO-2022ANMS.pdf

Páez, Alexei. “Problemas teórico-metodológicos en el estudio del movimiento obrero: una perspectiva histórico-política”. Paper presented at the VII Congress of History and National Reality – IDIS. Cuenca, November 1989. https://www.flacsoandes.edu.ec/agora/62985-problemas-teorico-metodologicos-en-el-estudio-del-movimiento-obrero-una-perspectiva

Quishpe, Marcelo. “Los salesianos y el impulso de la educación técnica en Quito” In La presencia salesiana en Ecuador. Perspectivas históricas y sociales, coordinado por Lola Vásquez, Juan Fernando Regalado, Blas Garzón, Víctor Hugo Torres y José E. Juncosa, 223-264. Quito: Salesianos don Bosco / Universidad Politécnica Salesiana, 2012.

Robalino, Isabel. El Centro Católico de Obreros. Quito: Comisión
Permanente de Conmemoraciones Cívicas, 2007.

WEBGRAPHY

Archival City. https://archivalcity.hypotheses.org/the-project/quito

ISAD(G). https://www.ica.org/es/isadg-general-international-standard-archival-description-second-edition

NOTES

[1] This transfer is the result of an on-going reflection of the current members of the CCOQ on the situation of their archives and the need to transfer their custody so that they can be preserved.

[2] Open source archival description software developed by Artefactual, and compliant with the current international norms of archival description: https://www.accesstomemory.org;  https://www.accesstomemory.org

[3] Some samples of this documentary unit for the years 1906 and 1907 have been deposited on Nakala and are referred to as ACQ03_ACT_img01_NSSC.pdf and ACQ03_ACT_img02_NSSC.pdf, where ACT stands for actas. The content of these digitises archives samples is detailed in the finding aid files ACQ03_FA_02_NSSC and ACQ03_FA_02bis_NSSC.

[4] Some samples of this documentary unit have been deposited on Nakala and are referred to as ACQ03_JG_img01_NSSC.pdf where “JG” stands for “Sesiones de la Junta general”. The content of these archives samples is described in the finding aid file ACQ03_FA_05_NSSC.

[5] Some samples of this documentary unit have been deposited on Nakala and are referred to as ACQ03_SCA_img01_NSSC.pdf where “SCA” stands for “Sesiones del Círculo Auxiliar”. The content of these archives samples is described in the finding aid file ACQ03_FA_06_NSSC.

[6] Some samples of this documentary unit have been deposited on Nakala and are referred to as ACQ03_CA_img01_NSSC.pdf where “CA” stands for “Caja de Ahorros”. The content of these archives samples is described in the finding aid file ACQ03_FA_07_NSSC.

[7] Some samples of this documentary unit have been deposited on Nakala and are referred to as ACQ03_EN_img01_NSSC.pdf and ACQ03_EN_img02_NSSC.pdf, where “EN” stands for “Escuela nocturna”. The content of these samples is detailed in the finding aid file ACQ03_FA_03_NSSC.

[8] The organizational structure of the CCOQ has changed little since its founding in 1906. At its inception, the organization had a Board of Directors composed of one president, two vice presidents, treasurer, and secretary. The regular meetings of this group of officers were: 1) Meetings of the Auxiliary Circle; 2) Meetings of the board of directors; and 3) Meetings of the directors.

[9] Renamed as ACQ03_FA01_NSSC for the on-line deposit on Nakala.

[10] https://www.ica.org/es/isadg-general-international-standard-archival-description-second-edition.


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Annalaura Turiano (13 juillet 2023). Session minutes of the Centro Católico de Obreros de Quito(1906-1983)-Conservation, inventory, and documentary description. Archival City. Consulté le 18 février 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/betr


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