Museum Matters: Making and Unmaking Mexico's National Collections

This is a book about objects. Stones, ruins, bones, mummies, mannequins, statues, photographs, fakes, instruments, and natural history specimens all formed part of Mexico’s National Museum complex at different moments across two centuries of collecting and display.

Museum Matters traces the emergence, consolidation, and dispersal of this national museum complex by telling the stories of its objects. Objects that have been separated over time are brought back together in this book in order to shed light on the interactions and processes that have forged things into symbols of science, aesthetics, and politics. The contributors to this volume illuminate how collections came into being or ceased to exist over time, or how objects moved in and out of collections and museum spaces. They explore what it means to move things physically and spatially, as well as conceptually and symbolically.

Museum Matters unravels the concept of the national museum. By unmaking the spaces, frameworks, and structures that form the complicated landscape of national museums, this volume brings a new way to understand the storage, displays, and claims about the Mexican nation’s collections today.

Contributors
Miruna Achim, Christina Bueno, Laura Cházaro, Susan Deans-Smith, Frida Gorbach, Haydeé López Hernández, Carlos Mondragón, Bertina Olmedo Vera, Sandra Rozental, Mario Rufer

 

Miruna Achima is an associate professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa in Mexico City. She is the author of From Idols to Antiquity: Forging the National Museum of Mexico.

Susan Deans-Smith is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the co-editor of Race and Classification: The Case of Mexican America.

Sandra Rozental is an associate professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa in Mexico City. Her research explores national patrimony, cultural property, and conflicting claims generated by the extraction of archaeological objects from local contexts.