Vicenta Cortés Alonso

Personal fonds of prominent archivist Vicenta Cortés Alonso (1 March 1925– 4 January 2021), who received her doctoral degree from the University of Madrid in 1952 and began her professional career as an archivist at the General Archive of the Indies in Seville (1954–1957). She was hired in 1957 to work at the General Archive of the Nation in Bogotá, Columbia. While in Columbia, she also taught at the National University of Bogotá and the University of the Andes. She later worked on Hispanic collections at the Library of Congress in the US before returning to Spain in 1962, where she continued her archival and teaching work. She was president of the Spanish Federation of Archivist, Librarian, Archaeologist, Museologist and Documentalist Associations (ANABAD) in 1986–1992. She later became active in the association Archive, Civil War and Exile (AGE), which was founded in 1998 to promote the role of archives in collecting and preserving memories of victims of fascism and the Spanish Civil War, including the experiences of child evacuees during the civil war (the Niños de la Guerra).