J. León Helguera’s Library Legacy

 

 

helguera

Professor Emeritus J. León Helguera, a longtime friend of the library, died on April 20. Much of his lifetime was dedicated to collecting and preserving materials about Colombia.  He donated large portions of his collection to the Jean and Alexander Heard Library and the library has purchased other parts of his Colombiana,  making Vanderbilt’s already strong collection one of the nation’s best and attracting scholars from the US and Latin America.  In his retirement he was dedicated to annotating and describing these rare nineteenth-century broadsides and pamphlets that depict the social, political, and economic history of Colombia.  Selections from these unique materials have been digitized by the library for use by students and scholars in Colombia and worldwide and are accessible at Helguera Collection of Colombiana.  The library will be forever indebted to him for this legacy.

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