She’s Mayan. Her face, and the face of her child, are variations on the iconography in Mayan glyphs. She’s in a factory - some raw materials are being processed. I’m not sure what’s in her basket, but political posters are on the wall: Viva Felipe Carrillo, perhaps something about a Mayan cooperative, and one other I can’t decipher at all.

So who is Felipe Carrillo? Felipe Carrillo Puerto was Governor of Yucatán from 1922 until 1924, when he was assassinated, apparently for political reasons. The Mexican Revolution is a really confusing series of events for me, and I’ll have to read up, but he is still celebrated as a hero and a martyr today. Wikipedia doesn’t say much else I can verify, so I turned to my library catalog.

Which gave me ought, so I tried WorldCat, and found his subject heading, “Carrillo Puerto, Felipe”. Nice!

I was intrigued that one of the titles that turned up is in Mayan, for Felipe Carrillo Puerto u kuxtal yetel bix u k’a'ajsa’al tu kaajil Muxupip, only WorldCat includes a record that says it is in Malay.

Catalogers!

I checked which libraries laid claim to this record, and found 6, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, Harvard, The New York Public Library, and Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, affectionately known in my family as “Yuc U”.

So which library put in the wrong country code?

You can usually find MARC records in library’s catalogs because librarians sometimes find them useful to look at. MAchine-Readable Cataloging was invented to transport information about books between libraries, so that they could save on labor costs. Unfortunately, it isn’t very HUman-Readable, so there is a movement afoot to remove MARC displays from library catalogs.

But I’m a librarian, so I went looking for the MARC record to see what I could see. Inconveniently, both Stanford and UC Berkeley are among those taking the newfangled approach of providing HUman-Readable catalog records only. Luckily, my third try, UC Riverside came through:

008    930331s1992    mx a          000 0 may d
040    NYP|cNYP|dOCLCQ|dMXYUC

Here field 008 shows the incorrect language code, ‘may’ (instead of ‘myn’), and field 040 shows, I think, that the New York Public Library created this record, making the mistake theirs.

I checked to see if other libraries copied NYPL’s mistake but haven’t found any yet. Harvard’s catalog includes that both are in Mayan, and Yuc U’s record doesn’t use a language code as far as I can tell.

Google Books has a copy also, and we may yet get to pay to see it what language they think it is in.

In the meantime, I requested two titles on the man via interlibrary loan, Carrillo Puerto, iconografía, which may be hard to get since so few libraries have it, but sounds really exciting to me - iconography is where I started this search from, and maybe it will tell me more about this piece - and Peregrina : love and death in Mexico, the autobiography of Carrillo Puerto’s lover, Alma Reed, an American on assignment from the New York Times to cover Mexico.

Here’s where the story gets incredible, as in, maybe this isn’t credible, but the University of Texas Press says that Reed’s manuscript mysteriously disappeared “immedaiately after her sudden death in 1966″, and it was rediscovered in 2001 inside “an abandoned apartment in Mexico City.” That’s 35 years later. Incredible!

While I wait, I’m reading Reed’s 1923 sensational and sardonic missives on Mexico, which ran weekly in the New York Times Magazine from March 11 to April 15, with two additional articles running May 20 and June 23 in the Sunday Times. Thank you, public library and New York Times Historical.

For the mystery that shrouds the sepulchre of the Conqueror is today the vitalizing spark of Spanish nationalism in the Republic of Mexico. It glows with the high pride of the past, the brooding challenge of the present, the quite but unswerving hope of the future. It is the holy of holies in that temple of memories and issues and traditions wherein colonial aristocracy finds refuge from “expropriated” haciendas. And the billiard players of the Casino Español are its high priests.