Public History in Mexico

María Moreno Carranco is a professor in the Department of Social Sciences at UAM-Cuajimalpa. Her research focuses on urban megaprojects, the impact of neoliberal globalization on contemporary cities, the effects of earthquakes on Mexico City’s urban communities, and shifts in urban living during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.Akuavi Adonon Viveros is a professor in the Department of Social Sciences at UAM-Cuajimalpa. Her research focuses on legal anthropology studies, ethno-racial classifications, national building narratives, and urban and territorial memory.Mario Barbosa Cruz is a professor in the Department of Humanities at UAM-Cuajimalpa. His research focuses on social and urban history, history of labor, middle classes in Mexico, and the relationship between history and memory.Maite Zubiaurre is a professor in the Humanities at UCLA. She is the initiator and principal investigator of Forensic Empathy, a multi-pronged interdisciplinary endeavor that looks at migration, migrant death, the ecologies of migrant care, and material culture at the US-Mexico border. She is also an activist and a filmmaker.

“This creatively crafted and wide-ranging book on public history showcases both archival methods and experiential practices to offer a new reading of Mexico’s past and present. Its contributors not only deploy more standard historical approaches, as in a cartographic accounting of the country’s first feminist congress of 1916 in the Yucatan. They also document ethnographic and workshop-based community encounters where a reckoning with the past unfolds in real time through communal dialogues, innovative cultural practices, and active efforts to discursively or visually create awareness of the past and its resonance in the present. Many of these happenings are structured around traumatic memories and events that have impacted a wide range of Mexican cities and its citizens, on scales as local as the neighborhood or plaza. Perhaps most original is the decision to frame the volume as a platform for documenting public history. This requires recognition of untold narratives from a plurality of citizen voices from all over the country, most of whose experiences are routinely relegated to the periphery of officially sanctioned historiography. By allowing those who have been excluded from national narratives to actively insert their presence in the collective Mexican imaginary, a public is born and a new history emerges. A powerful and emotional read.”Diane E. Davis, Harvard University, USA"Public History in Mexico constitutes one of the most original and significant contributions to the field of memory studies in Latin America. Through a variety of political subjectivities and sites of memory, this volume forwards a new understanding of public history in the intersection of the political with the spatial, a first-of-its-kind intervention. Scholars across the humanities and the social sciences will find both bold methodological ideas and radical new understandings on the public in this volume."Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Washington University in St. Louis, USA

• Introduction Memories of the Urban 1. Public History in the Making. The Pueblos Originarios of Mexico City: Memory, Territory, and Legal Status 2. Memories of the Urban Past: The Experience of Metropolitan Histories 3. Stories of El Parián: Public History as an Organizing Tool in Urban Community-Based Processes Periphery and Erasure 4. Memory, Trauma, and Resilience: Stories of the 19S Earthquake 5. Periferia gráfica 6. Creating Memory and the Reimagining of the Edge of Tenochtitlan Exclusion Beyond Mexico City 7. The Self-Taught Border Art of the Deported: Luis Sotero 8. Humanizing Deportation: An Archive of Migrant Knowledge 9. Unveiling Feminist Cartography in Yucatan: From the First Feminist Congress of 1916 to the First Women to Hold Elected Office in 1923 Re-Placing the Museum 10. Relic, Connection, Loss: Public History and Community Narratives in Mexico 11. From Praxis to Production: The Symbolic Displacements of Linguistic Patrimony in Mexico’s Nineteenth Century 12. A Community Museum in the City: Heritage and Public Uses of the Past in Valle de Chalco Solidaridad Intimate Spaces 13. Between Joy and Frailty: Minimal Stories of Dwelling in Mexico City 14. The Invisibles of the Arts: Stories of Performance Artists from Confinement 15. Stuck at Home: A Comic on Covid-19