The Foreign Service Journal, April 2020

50 APRIL 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL known as Refugio. Its name changed to Matamoros the following year, in 1826. The department’s records were incomplete and, in some cases, erroneous. They had listed Matamoros and Refugio as two separate consulates, when they were actually one. Fortunately, I was able to work with the Office of the Historian to correct the department’s account of the consulate’s founding. Digging deeper into newspaper archives from the 1800s, consular despatches and declassified department records, I real- ized how remarkable our consulate’s history really was—and how incomplete our knowledge of it had become. For instance, buried in archival records was the fact that in 1862 our consulate had burned to the ground during a siege of the city. This was one of many violent incidents throughout the 1800s and early 1900s in Matamoros, a strategic location during various Mexican revolu- tions. Another fact: the local business community found the con- sulate to be so valuable that its members had helped fight off attempts to close the consulate due to budget cuts twice, in 1948 and in 1995. There were even long-lost photos and original floor plans for the building that housed the consulate between 1872 and 1948. I also discovered plenty of fascinating, and sometimes dis- turbing, drama. A consul in the 1860s cut all the records out of post accounting books before fleeing under a cloud of corrup- tion charges. And in the 1930s, another consul’s teenage son was caught trying to smuggle marijuana into the United States in his own car. The coolest finds, however, were the stories of heroic employ- ees who had been forgotten over the years, like the story of a con- sul who was shot in the cheek in 1851 while helping put out a fire during revolutionary street combat in Matamoros. Or the consul in 1913 who remained valiantly at post while fighting raged in the streets surrounding the consulate building. And another, Consul Richard H. Belt, died an agonizing death during a typhoid fever outbreak while serving in Matamoros in 1844. Because he had never been recognized on the AFSA Memo- rial Plaques, I nominated him to be added, and the nomination was accepted. When I shared these findings with my managers, American Citizen Services Chief Etan Schwartz, Consular Chief Elizabeth Alarid and Consul General Neda Brown, they responded enthusi- astically and supportively. Within a few days, we were developing a Facebook campaign and a brochure about our rich, long-lost history for visitors to the consulate, working to rewrite erroneous information on our post website and integrating historical infor- mation into the consul general’s speeches. We soon found that this project was helping to advance an important policy objec- tive: strengthening the U.S.-Mexico relationship. We also found ways to integrate my project into the every- day work of the consulate. As just one example, the American Citizen Services unit was able to use old newspaper articles and press releases to pinpoint the exact dates and circumstances of a 20-year-old incident as part of a fraud investigation. But the most gratifying moment of my yearlong project came when CG Brown invited me to speak to the entire consulate A copy of the first despatch that came out of Matamoros in 1826. NATIONALARCHIVESANDRECORDSADMINISTRATION