What CIDOC left behind

In a film made near the end of the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC), a staff member remembers being put in charge of the library without knowing how to run one. They learned, handed the job on, and moved through CIDOC’s other departments the same way. By the time the interviewer arrived, they knew enough to supervise the whole centre.¹

The story takes less than a minute. It tells you more about what was at stake when CIDOC closed than the shelf of books its seminars produced. The books were already out in the world. What would become of the people who knew how to make the place work?

Who could decide to stop?

Valentina Borremans was CIDOC’s president; the centre’s last winter catalogue names her first on a seven-member board, with Antonio Arias as director. At Rancho Tetela, intensive Spanish teaching paid the bills. The library, publications, and seminars were what the bills paid for: a place to study the institutions that were remaking life in Latin America.²

Ivan Illich, who founded CIDOC, told David Cayley that by 1973 he thought it had done what he hoped it would. He was also worried: about danger to his colleagues, about American universities moving in, and about whether the language school could go on carrying everything else. In his telling, Borremans and the Mexican staff were the ones who made CIDOC. University money might have kept the doors open and cost them the place they had made.³

The film mentions a proposal to raise fees and the option of taking outside money. The people at CIDOC said no. Illich remembers a different plan: bank the operating surpluses, close when the reserve equalled a year and a half’s payroll, and split it into 63 equal shares. He dates the closing to April 1, 1976, with a party where people from town joined the staff.⁴⁵

What could be carried forward

The winter catalogue spells out what came next. The library, files, and documentary collections were going to El Colegio de México, and most employees had decided to run the language school on their own. Illich later remembered teachers going on to start several schools. Plan and memory come at the same question from two sides: who could carry on the work once there was no centre to carry it for them?⁶

Counterfoil’s catalogue asks how easily a person can stop using a tool. CIDOC turns that around. Can the people who run an institution end it in a way that leaves its books findable, what people learned usable, and room to organize something new? Here the answers were practical. Money went to the people who did the work. The library had somewhere to go. The teaching went on with the people who knew how to teach.

A few years earlier, Illich had written about visiting his friend Carlo Carretto in Algeria. He had known Carretto as a power in Italian Catholic Action. He found him making sandals out of old tires. What moved Illich was the Christian freedom in that: a man willing to give up influence and be misunderstood for it. CIDOC’s ending asked something like that of the people who had built it.⁷

Go back to the library. Someone was trusted with a job they didn’t know how to do, learned it, and then trusted someone else with it. By the time CIDOC had to decide what to keep, that person already knew how to hand work on. I suspect that is the rarest thing an institution can leave behind.

Notes

1. Gordian Troeller and Marie-Claude Deffarge, Kein Respekt vor heiligen Kühen [No Respect for Sacred Cows], broadcast August 23, 1976, documentary, 20:38–21:14, Acervus Illich. ↩︎
2. Centro Intercultural de Documentación, CIDOC Cuernavaca Language School Catalogue, Winter 75/76, 1. ↩︎
3. David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1992), chap. 3, “Cuernavaca.” ↩︎
4. Troeller and Deffarge, No Respect for Sacred Cows, 21:45–22:17. ↩︎
5. Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation, chap. 3. ↩︎
6. Centro Intercultural de Documentación, Catalogue, 1. ↩︎
7. Ivan Illich, “Foreword to Letters from the Desert,” in Carlo Carretto, Letters from the Desert (1972), Acervus Illich. ↩︎