Mario Lopez Feliu – Pieces of History

In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month and American Archives Month, today’s Historic Staff Spotlight is on Cuban-born National Archives intern turned staff member, Mario Lopez Feliu. It’s from Alyssa Moore in the National Archives History Office.

Mario Lopez Feliu was born on March 22, 1918, in Havana, Cuba. In 1946, while heading the preservation department of the National Archives of Cuba (Archivo Nacional de la República de Cuba), Feliu came to the National Archives in Washington, DC on a training fellowship. 

The National Archives sought to prioritize the training of archivists and records administrators from other American republics. To achieve this, they instituted a program in cooperation with the State Department’s Interdepartmental Committee on Scientific and Cultural Cooperation. During the six months Feliu spent at the National Archives, he worked mainly on records preservation in the Division of Cleaning and Rehabilitation.

When Feliu returned to the National Archives of Cuba, he was permitted to take with him reproductions of the World War II surrender documents, which were documents related to Hitler’s May 8, 1945, surrender of Germany. Feliu placed those reproductions, along with a number of other related photographs, in a special exhibition at the Archivo Nacional that began on November 17, 1946. As a token of gratitude, Feliu mailed copies of the printed catalog of the exhibition to the National Archives in Washington, DC.

Feliu eventfully left Cuba permanently, arriving in Miami, Florida, in 1962. Later that year, he came to work in the National Archives as a textual records supervisor in the preservation lab.

By this time, Feliu was an expert on the process of lamination. Lamination was an archival technique that was used to protect damaged or aging documents. Feliu was responsible for preparing the damaged documents, and he was adept at handling sheets of tissue and cellulose acetate and then using heat to bond the material to the paper document.

While this practice is now considered outdated, lamination was then a widely accepted tool in the conservator’s arsenal and was often used at the National Archives. Beginning in the late 1930s, the National Archives laminated thousands of documents. The method later proved to be potentially damaging to old and fragile documents, and National Archives stopped the practice in the early 1980s.

While conservators’ understanding of how to best stabilize fragile and old documents continue to evolve, Feliu was undoubtedly a knowledgeable preservationist who dedicated much of his career to ensuring the longevity of the documents that National Archives stewards for future generations.