Other pasts are possible: reflections on the colonial archive

Abstract

The year 1964 marked a milestone in the history of Mexico’s national museum complex. The collection of pre-Columbian antiquities was moved from the National Palace, in the center of the city, to the world-class Museo Nacional de Antropología, built specifically for them, in a modern, up-and-coming neighborhood in Mexico City. Mexico’s prehispanic past left the colonial building, where it had been housed for over a century, to become part of the city’s bid for the future. Across Chapultepec Park from the anthropology museum, the natural history collection also found a new home, in the Museo de Historia Natural, just as it lost its ‘national’ status, the implication being that there is nothing particularly Mexican about ‘nature.’ Colonial art, which, since the 1930s, had shared space with objects of nineteenth-century material and political culture, was reconstituted as the Museo Nacional del Virreinato, and displaced to the lavish, exJesuit convent at Tepozotlán, about 20 miles north of Mexico City. Since the Museo Nacional de México was founded in 1825, as part of a generational wave that saw the emergence of national museums throughout newly independent Latin American countries, silver ores, mammoth bones, mummies, portraits of New Spain’s viceroys, and ‘idols’ had been displayed together, as part of a national collection that many a visitor described as a jumble of things, a cabinet of curiosities. It was not uncommon for the museum to exchange prehispanic antiquities for stuffed birds, for copies of the US constitution, or for prints of the French royal family. But, by the end of the nineteenth century, pre-Columbian antiquities were becoming recognized as ‘the only thing that distinguishes Mexico’s personality,’ as Justo Sierra, Porfirio Díaz’s influential minister of education, argued before congress in 1909, in an attempt to ensure funding for the preservation of antiquities. The 1964 redistribution of Mexico’s national collections, culminating in the creation of the Museo Nacional de Antropología, sealed the symbolic pact between Mexico’s modern state and its lithic preconquest foundation. I bring up these different moments in the history of the Mexican museum complex not as a critique of Mexico’s past or present cultural policies, but to call attention to the ways in which temporal orders which divide Mexican history (but also those of other Latin American countries) into three epochs—prehispanic, colonial, and national/postcolonial (?), corresponding to the ways in which academic specialties have been carved out and defined— are profoundly cartographic, spatial, and material. And they elicit different kinds of affect and regimens of care. Ask any inhabitant of Mexico City to direct you to the ‘national museum’ and they almost certainly will take you to the Museo Nacional de Antropología,