With commencement just around the corner, Special Collections & Archives is thrilled to spotlight Student Assistant Adya Alcalde, NAU Class of 2024. Adya will be receiving a Bachelor of Science in Biology and a Bachelor of Arts in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing this summer.

Adya begin her career as an SCA Student Assistant in fall 2023. She worked collaboratively with Archivist for Discovery Sam Meier and Archivist Sean Evans to process, arrange, describe, and digitize archival materials materials connected to Route 66, including the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona records, the Angel Delgadillo papers, and the Ella Blackwell papers. Adya was awarded the Cline Library Student Employee of the Month Award in November 2023 due to her outstanding work in the department. In March 2024, she had the opportunity to travel with Archivist for Collections Management Melissa Lawton and Sean to Seligman, Arizona, and participate in a collections pick up for the Angel Delgadillo papers.
SCA staff caught up with Adya to ask about her work in Special Collections and Archives and how it will inform her life and career post-graduation.
SCA: You’ve worked on a number of archival collections related to Route 66. Which has been your favorite collection, and why?
AA: I only came in contact with the Angel Delgadillo papers briefly. A majority of my work up until that point had centered around the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona’s records—a nonprofit organization Angel established in 1987 to preserve and restore the stretch of Route 66 through Arizona (and, by extension, the businesses along the road.) By the time I was tasked with processing and re-inventorying his personal materials, I could recognize the slant of his handwriting with resolute certainty, though I could not yet (reliably) pick him out in photos.
Arranging Angel’s papers into intellectual groups—sorting piles of correspondence into date ranges, or by relationship—allowed me to give breadth to the meager understanding I’d made of Angel through only his participation with the Association. Through his letters, accolades, and the meticulous legers he kept of his barbering business, Angel became distinguished even beyond the archetypes of founder, chairman, and volunteer that I had come to know him as. I recognized him as a student of privation, and began to understand the depth of gratitude he held for his older siblings Antonia, Juan, Mary, and Joe, who ate less during the Great Depression so he and the other young Delgadillos could have more.
When his hometown of Seligman was bypassed by Interstate 40 in 1978, Angel returned to this lesson of subsistence his family had imparted upon him, took inventory of his life and work, and in light of the lean years ahead, began to formulate a plan for rebuilding his business and birthplace. I learned of the machinations of his planning, and saw evidence of his frustrations. I read the letters he wrote to highway authorities and historical preservation offices, and noted the absence of any words in response.
Angel Delgadillo’s papers effectively oriented me in the expansive and potentially overwhelming space taken up by Route 66 in both our archive and cultural mythos.
With the evidence of Angel’s life in front of me, I could consult his writings, grant proposals, and interviews as guideposts: situating myself in the history of the road. As I read his pleas for sponsorship, donations, and volunteerism, I began effortlessly to conceive of the highway as a harbinger of change, for better or worse, and to understand the dedication Angel felt toward it as a child born on the Mother Road. When he succeeded in forming the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona in 1987, and the first segment of 66 between Kingman and Seligman was declared historic within a year of their establishment, I cheered for him across decades in 2023.

SCA: What have been the most interesting materials you’ve worked with thus far? Why?
AA: Some of the greatest joys from my time spent in these collections are derived from materials I’ve picked up, set down again in bewilderment, and—after a brief moment of wondering what it is precisely I’ve stumbled upon, and if I’m the only one seeing it—have warranted barreling into the office of archivist and Route 66 historian R. Sean Evans with a list of questions.
Sean, I’ve asked, newspaper in hand, did you ask me to process this collection because you knew I’d find out this trading post owner was known to talk to her mannequins? (Answer: “No,” followed by laughter.) Were you aware she claimed the building her collection was stored in—made of telephone poles—was built by Mormon pioneers in 1873? (Answer:
“Yes,” with more laughter.)
Or, holding a copy of the February 1992 edition of the Route 66 newsletter: Did Pamela Anderson actually get arrested during her Playboy photoshoot at the 1992 Fun Run? (Answer: “No, but there was a strong call for it. Carl and Connie Bohn settled for an apology.”) Can we digitize the photo of her and Jerry Richard (Executive Vice President of the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona) together at his Route 66 Distillery in Kingman? (Answer: “If
you want to, kiddo!”)
SCA: How did your work in SCA connect to your studies at NAU?
AA: Working on materials centered on the Colorado Plateau has inculcated both my writing and ecological studies at NAU with a sense of place they had previously been bereft of. By mere virtue of my desk being located in the closed stacks, my workspace housed between map cases and vertical file cabinets, I’ve come into contact with expedition logs, diaries, and maps of previously uncharted land that I’d otherwise never have encountered. I’ve written about the Bureau of Indian Affairs-run Leupp Boarding School (turned into the Leupp Isolation Center in 1941 to incarcerate people of Japanese descent) for a nonfiction workshop class, braided the history of grazing sheep and cattle on the Baca Grant range land into narratives about industrialization alongside railroads in the American southwest, and suggested geologist friends make appointments to view rolled ribbon maps of rivers long since dissipated.

SCA: How has working in SCA informed your career plans? How might the library shape your life after NAU?
AA: Inventorying documents and oversized materials, creating arrangements where none ostensibly existed before, and assigning call numbers to photographs are all tasks that require strict diligence and close attention. The great invested effort archiving requires, however, is returned immediately.
Upon contact with primary source materials, the bank of knowledge from which anyone may draw expands in terms of linear feet.
It is precisely this awareness of the archive, its ability to impart such abundant information unto researchers, and the skills I’ve gained in navigating it, that I intend to carry with me in my future endeavors. I have certainly learned not to content myself with secondary source material. Fine and well as these books and anthologies may be, there is something far too enriching about doing the work of becoming familiar with a topic yourself to resist doing so.
My compulsion to ensure accuracy in my work to the fullest extent possible (particularly when drafting descriptive notes for full collections like the Ella Blackwell papers) has been fed during my time in SCA in the form of cross-referencing primary and secondary-source material, and by consulting a multiplicity of sources to best describe a given event or individual fairly and objectively. This same curiosity and scrupulousness will no doubt
reappear in my future work—whatever it is that may be.
The staff of Special Collections & Archives thank Adya for her excellent work as an SCA Student Assistant and congratulate her on her upcoming graduation as a member of the class of 2024! We wish Adya continued success (and many future research rabbit holes) in her life beyond NAU, and we encourage her to come back and share what she has learned with us all.