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Histories of the American West at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

Resources

Federico Gómez de Orozco (1891–1962), a historian and bibliophile originally from Tlalpan, Mexico, was a renowned researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and taught 16th- and 17th-century Spanish colonial history and paleography. He built a collection focused on the history of European colonization in Mexico and California, and gathered pictographs and documents related to Indigenous and European colonial histories in his home in Tizapán, Mexico. 

The Federico Gómez de Orozco Collection includes manuscripts and maps related to the Spanish settlement and colonization of California, New Mexico, and other Southwest territories from 1595–1829. The collection includes many documents on mission expansions in Alta and Baja, descriptions of interactions between Spanish colonizers and local Pima, Ute, Comanche, Moqui, Navajo, and Kumeyaay communities. Importantly, the collection contains various accounts of successful Indigenous anticolonial uprisings.