Museum Matters

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.

“This exciting new volume gathers penetrating new studies on the formation of Mexico’s national collections, from antiquities to natural history specimens. The volume is essential reading for anyone interested in the formation of museums, particularly how such institutions participate in the production of knowledge over time. Filled with strikingly original and important contributions, the volume will be widely read by scholars in history, anthropology, museum studies, art history, archaeology, and other related fields.”—Joanne Pillsbury, The Metropolitan Museum of Art “Museum Matters mines the vast collections of material culture in Mexico’s museological archipelago. Through its focus on objects—some fake, some lost, some devalued or deaccessioned over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the volume lays the groundwork for new directions in Mexican history while also complicating discourses that view the museum as a totalizing instrument of state authority and control. Rather than focus exclusively on Mexico’s spectacular collections of archaeology and fine art, this volume emphasizes other material domains, such as human remains, taxidermy, glass models, and natural specimens, to name only a few. The essays are generative as they mine the archives of Mexicanidad, offering critical insights, new horizons, and even radical opportunities for revaluing or intervening in how the nation displays and constitutes its museological patrimony.”—Mary K. Coffey, author of How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State