At the end of last year, I watched the first season of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Netflix adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad, and the series more than surpassed my expectations. García Márquez's family demanded a Spanish-language adaptation filmed in Colombia with Colombian actors, but the creators did much more, paying careful attention into every historical detail of the scenery, sets, and costuming. I understand the actors tried to learn Caribbean accents and slang, and I hope the finished product reflects that.
My one criticism is that the mythical town of Macondo was reconstructed in Tolima Department, resulting in a picturesque town nestled in the Andes that has more than a passing resemblance to the setting of Disney's Encanto. I imagine the cafetero region is probably safer and more conducive to tourism than the Caribbean coast, but I picture Macondo like the one-street towns I passed through in Magdalena Department, traveling from Santa Marta to Parque Tayrona. The sun is bright, the humidity is thick, and the landscape is dry and flat, with wide expanses of banana plants surrounding the lonely stretches of road and isolated stores and viviendas. The photographs of Leo Matiz, who was also from García Márquez's hometown of Aracataca, show a population that is more Black and brown than most of Colombia's interior (and Netflix's cast), reflecting centuries of African ancestors who escaped slavery and thrived in el campo.
Nevertheless, One Hundred Years of Solitude does an astounding job of reconstructing Colombia in the late 1800s. There's a fleeting moment near the beginning of Episode 6, "Colonel Aureliano Buendía," where Arcadio Buendía meets in secret with the town pharmacist, who is a secret Liberal guerrilla. As the two characters walk through the pharmacy, the camera pans over shelves of apothecary-style ceramic and glass bottles, small mortars and pestles for grinding prescriptions, the tiny bottles delivered to patients, and even a figurine of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, bearing a staff entwined by a serpent. The narrator recites García Márquez's words: "Dr. Alirio Noguera had arrived in Macondo a few years before with a medicine chest of tasteless pills... and a diploma from the University of Leipzig that he had forged himself... Behind his innocent façade of a doctor without prestige there was hidden a terrorist."
I smiled at this scene, since my late great-uncle was also a physician named Dr. Noguera, and my Dad grew up in Barranquilla working at the pharmacy of his great-aunt, Mercedes Vásquez Cohen de Mejía. My Dad remembers how his great-aunt also ground up medicine with a mortar and pestle, and he would use sand to help clean out all those glass bottles.
Seeing this costeño excellence made me want to go back to Cartagena records to learn more about my grandmother's family, including Mercedes Vásquez de Mejía. Luckily, FamilySearch.org has protocolos, or notarized business records, from Cartagena for most of the 19th century and the early 20th century. All these business deals and legal maneuvers help fill in some details about my costeño ancestors, especially given that the regional civil and church records are often incomplete.
Yet each ledger of protocolos contains thousands of digitized images. I'm grateful these images can be viewed from home, and some years have handwritten indexes, but it was still very time-consuming to go through the indexes, decipher the handwriting of a legion of notaries, find the corresponding entries, and then slowly plod through the years that lacked an index. I imagined that there must be a way that machine learning can visually identify keywords.
Last week, my idle wishes were answered — I realized that FamilySearch's Full-Text Search has expanded to include Latin American records! Using optical character recognition (OCR), the results are astoundingly quick and thorough. It took months and months of slowly combing through protocolos to accidentally stumble across the death record of my British-Colombian ancestor Juan Cohen. Now, if you run a full-text search for "Juan Cohen" and "Colombia," the death record is the second result! I also noticed that the search results standardize spellings. I got far more results looking up "Vázquez," even though my ancestors always spelled their surname as "Vásquez."
Example of full-text search results on FamilySearch.org!
Between my slow, methodical search through Cartagena protocolos, and then the super-charged OCR-powered results, I was able to piece together the story of an interesting member of my Vásquez family: Manuel Joaquín Vásquez (c.1847-1927), who was one of the first pharmacists of Cartagena, opening the Farmacia Vásquez in 1876.
Manuel Joaquín Vásquez was born to a long line of provincial privilege. His great-grandmother, Josefa Bravo de Vásquez (died 1831) was a landowner and slave owner, as was his grandfather, Manuel de la O. Vásquez. Early in his life, Manuel de la O. had a son out of wedlock, Manuel de la Ascención Vásquez, the father of Manuel Joaquín.
Then in 1831, Manuel de la O. Vásquez married Petrona Ruiz (died 1849), and they had nine children. These Vásquez Ruiz children brought the matter of their mother's dowry before a Cartagena notary in 1863, and through that document I learned the insane fact that Manuel de la O. and Petrona named two of their sons Manuel de la O. Vásquez and Manuel de la O. Vásquez! Two sons, same damn name, George Foreman style. They settled in Panama, and I found an 1879 Panamanian newspaper notice about their selling an hacienda, and amazingly their names are listed as "Manuel de la O. Vásquez 2°" [Segundo] and "Manuel de la O. Vásquez 3°" [Tercero]! Their father had at least 18 children by at least 6 women, but to the best of my knowledge no other sons were named Manuel de la O.
Manuel de la O. Vásquez the 2nd and Manuel de la O. Vásquez the 3rd(!) auction off their Panamanian hacienda, 1879.
Speaking of Panama, Manuel de la Ascención Vásquez also came to Panama City, which benefited from the booms of the California gold rush and the French attempt to build a canal. Manuel de la Ascención was a merchant and agent who, according to ads in the Panama Star and Herald, sold many products including beer from New York and rum from Jamaica and Curacao. Cartagena protocolos note multiple instances of him buying and selling houses in Cartagena and land in his hometown of Villanueva.
Perhaps Manuel de la Ascención wanted something bigger for his son, Manuel Joaquín. Through Google, I realized that Manuel Joaquín Vásquez went to higher education in Massachusetts, of all places, and the Massachusetts Historical Society preserved his tintype and carte de visite! And his signature matched his later signatures in Cartagena protocolos!
Top: Manuel J. Vásquez's tintype and signature, c.1870 (Massachusetts Historical Society). Bottom: Manuel J. Vásquez's signature in Cartagena records, 1875.
Manuel Joaquín attended the Allen School, a.k.a. the West Newton English and Classical School, in West Newton, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1870. The school was established by Nathaniel Topliff Allen (1823-1903), a progressive reformer and abolitionist who was involved in the Underground Railroad and women's suffrage movement, and advocated for kindergarten! Incredibly, the Allen School was both integrated AND co-ed, and among its alumni were Rebecca Lee Crumpler (1831–1895), the first Black woman to become a physician in the United States, the Black suffragist Elizabeth Piper Ensley, and Sarah Fuller, a deaf educator who worked with Alexander Graham Bell and Helen Keller.
Students at the Allen School, c.1870 (Massachusetts Historical Society)
A number of foreign students came to Allen School, and a catalogue of faculty and alumni lists at least seven from Panama. The first students from Panama were the brothers Adolfo, Ramón, and Ricardo Arias-Feraud, who graduated in the class of 1866. Ricardo later became the U.S. minister to Panama and had two unsuccessful campaigns to be president of Panama. Another future Panamanian president, Pablo Arosemena, appeared multiple times in Cartagena protocolos as Manuel de la A. Vásquez's legal representative, so it's clear that the Vásquez family was part of a local elite that could entertain the possibility of foreign education.
Manuel Joaquín's very handsome carte de visite is fascinating to look at. From a distance of over 150 years, we see a confident, Black Latin American who was educated in the Reconstruction-era United States. Did he live in Boston after his graduation? Did he have his eyes set not just on Panama City, but the broader world?
Manuel J. Vásquez's carte de visite, c.1870. (Massachusetts Historical Society)
Strangely, the Allen School was under the impression that Manuel Joaquín Vásquez had died young. On the back of his carte de visite is written: "Manuel Vasquez / Lost at Sea 1872? / returning to his home / Panama." The Allen School catalogue said that he died at sea in 1871. Was that an unfortunate mistake, or was this misinformation intentional? In reality, Manuel had returned to Cartagena, married Dolores González Garban in 1872, and was working with a pharmacist, Dr. Vicente A. García, who had opened the city's second pharmacy in 1847.
On February 10, 1874, Manuel and Vicente decided to become business partners, and registered their new company, García & Vásquez, which was worth more than 15,000 Colombian pesos. The incorporation papers read in part, "The partner García will be in charge of accounting, cash, and correspondence, and the partner Vásquez, purchases, sales, and errands, that is to say: that the specialty of one is scribe and the other, the store."
The partnership was not to last. García & Vásquez was dissolved on March 30, 1875, with Manuel and Vicente saying that the business could not support their two families. As said earlier, Manuel branched out on his own, running Farmacia Vásquez at 177A Calle del Colegio in Cartagena, on the same street as the Universidad de Cartagena. It was only the fourth pharmacy to open in Cartagena, which at the time had roughly 10,000 inhabitants.
It seems Vicente and Manuel did not end their friendship. On the first anniversary of Vicente's death, on November 23, 1894, Manuel arranged for a procession to Vicente's grave, and invited many government and medical dignitaries. He did this "as a sign of gratitude to his teacher and protector, to whom he was very close and who had worked for many years in his pharmacy."
Beautiful letterhead from Farmacia Vásquez, 1907.
Manuel J. Vásquez appears dozens of times in the Cartagena protocolos, and much like his father arranged many loans, mortgages, house sales, and land sales. A wonderfully wild reminiscence of Farmacia Vásquez comes from the musician and businessman Daniel Lemaitre Tono (1884-1961), who wrote: "And although Don Manuel Joaquín Vásquez would spend more than half an hour in the back room pounding out those old Latin recipes, to distract the clientele there were always on the counter several large-mouthed jars in which one could see big-headed fetuses submerged in alcohol, giant centipedes, coiled snakes, and there was always one that was especially attractive, the one in which leeches performed fascinating movements of contraction and lengthening."
Pharmacists like Manuel also are a part of Gabriel García Márquez's famed novel Love in the Time of Cholera, which has a fussy Cartagena doctor as one of the protagonists: "In a city like this, it was impossible to hide an illness when the Doctor’s carriage stood at the door. At times the Doctor himself took the initiative and went on foot, if distance permitted, or in a hired carriage, to avoid malicious or premature assumptions. Such deceptions, however, were to little avail. Since the prescriptions ordered in pharmacies revealed the truth, Dr. Urbino would always prescribe counterfeit medicines along with the correct ones in order to preserve the sacred right of the sick to die in peace along with the secret of their illness."
Even though Manuel worked in medicine, it was still an era before many modern advancements, and he lost two wives in 1877 and 1884, probably due to complications from childbirth. Although Manuel was left a single father of five, he did not marry a third time until 1907, when he married Francisca Arnedo in the nearby town of Turbaco.
I wish I could say that Manuel J. Vásquez's career ended gloriously, but the glut of FamilySearch's full-text search results turned up one more bizarre twist in his story. By 1912, the Farmacia Vásquez had closed, according to the guide book Cartagena y sus cercanías. It's possible that Manuel had just disappeared — his wife testified to Cartagena notaries in November 1924 that Manuel was last seen in Turbaco 13 years prior, on October 4, 1911. The following year, Francisca Arnedo de Vásquez got permission to sell her missing husband's house in Turbaco.
Manuel J. Vásquez's signature from (top) Cartagena protocolos from 1897 and (bottom) Ciénaga protocolos from 1919. Note the similarities to the 1870s signatures above.
Oddly, Manuel may have been hiding in plain sight. By December 1912, he appeared in the protocolos of Ciénaga, a town about half the size of Cartagena that was roughly 115 miles away. On a purely business level, the move made sense, since Ciénaga was at the start of its "banana boom." The United Fruit Company's monopoly on bananas drew so many immigrants that the city population would triple in size by 1928 (the year of the Colombian census, and Ciénaga's Banana Massacre).
In July 1916, Manuel appeared again in Cartagena protocolos, acting as a legal representative for a local business. It's clear Manuel opened another pharmacy in Ciénaga, since he sold it to his son, Rafael Vásquez Beltrán, in July 1919. Was Manuel's wife Francisca estranged from the rest of the family? Notarized business records cannot explain family drama, and sources that may have juicy details like newspapers still remain undigitized.
Manuel J. Vásquez's obituary (1927)
There's one last surprise among the full-text search results in Ciénaga protocolos: Manuel J. Vásquez's obituary! It's sandwiched in an unrelated entry from September 1927, but the text itself is undated. What it lacks in precise information, it makes up for with emotion:
"On Saturday afternoon in this city, with the peaceful resignation of a just man, died Mr. Manuel J. Vásquez. Those of us who knew him, who know of the supreme goodness of his heart, know that his relatives and this society have lost one of their most beloved and distinguished members.
"The rare qualities that adorned Mr. Vásquez, among them a modest but vast culture, had cultivated the sympathies that was his object in all of the social circles of this city.
"In mourning the eternal disappearance of the noble and kind old man, we send to all his relatives, especially to his daughter, the distinguished lady Doña Rosa Vásquez, our words of regret."
I'm honored to be able to harness the power of full-text search to piece together the pieces of this beloved pharmacist's life. Manuel J. Vásquez doubtlessly inspired medical careers for his younger half-brother, Dr. Sofanor Vásquez (c.1889-1967), as well as his first cousins: Dr. Alejandro Vásquez Peña (born c.1858), the pharmacist Gabriel Vásquez Marrugo (1868-1956), Dr. Ramón Vásquez Cohen (born 1879), Dr. José Arcadio Vásquez Cohen (1883-1924), the pharmacist Mercedes Vásquez Cohen de Mejía (1885-1963), and Dr. Israel Vásquez Cohen (1891-1947). These medical professionals in turn had children, nieces, nephews, and descendants who also practiced medicine. My Dad, the grandson of Dr. José Arcadio Vásquez Cohen, has practiced psychiatry for over 50 years. Perhaps this story will inspire more Vásquez descendants to take the Hippocratic Oath to the god Asclepius and do their part to help heal humanity.
Questions? Comments? Please email me at ruedafingerhut (at) gmail.com.
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