Dying to Be Represented: Museums and Día de los Muertos Collaborations

Some traditions—we think of them as the archive of our memories

—Amelia Malagamba, 2009

Over the last four decades museums and cultural organizations in the United States have used their institutions to introduce Día de los Muertos celebrations to the general public.¹ While these celebrations have become increasingly visible, commercial, and institutionalized—with a growing number of stakeholders—only a handful of examples in the literature examine the specific role museums play in the presentation of Chicano and Mexican American cultural practices through this familial ritual. These include Davalos' exploration of El Día de los Muertos at the Mexican Fine Arts Center in Chicago (2001) and Medina and Cadena's study of Day of the Dead celebrations in Los Angeles (2002). Using these as groundwork for establishing community interests in public Día de los Muertos celebrations in the United States, we expand the discussion to consider the intercultural dynamics at play as well as how Chicano, Mexican American, and Euro-American values are situated and enacted within the museum space.² We take as our primary focus the voices of community guest curators, museum curators, and participants in the annual Día de los Muertos celebrations at the Arizona State University Museum of Anthropology (ASUMA), where for the past ten years the museum has hosted a Día de los Muertos exhibition and celebration, extending an open invitation to anyone who would like to create altares or ofrendas in the gallery.

As we are participants in and organizers of the Día de Los Muertos activities at ASUMA, some of the voices shared here are our own. The underlying purpose of this inquiry is to acknowledge the part these diverse perspectives play in how we negotiate our identity as a museum that operates with and between different cultures and knowledge systems. By centering our analytical framework on the significance of vocality and transformative political if not impolitic performances within museums, we rethink aspects of representational theories and, in particular, their failure to interpret where the lines between the "representation," "presentation," and "self-representation" of culture are blurred. We argue that within representational analyses of museums, the efficacy of politically potent meanings is often diminished, having lost the immediacy of the presenter's voice, and as argued here, these modes of analysis downplay the transformational power of the physical presence of people and objects that come together through performances in the museum space.

We begin with a brief overview of the conventional analyses of museums that are grounded in representational frameworks and the limitations these may present to interpreting events such as Día de los Muertos. In order to develop a more inclusive perspective not wholly reliant on the reading of exhibit meanings, we engage with ideas about performance and transformation (Davalos 2001; Santino 2004; Mitchell 2006) and introduce an analysis based on presentation, highlighting vocality and affective presence in a public space. We follow this with the history of the Día de los Muertos celebrations at ASU and how each year a theme was chosen that allowed explorations of the different aspects of the Chicano and Mexican American experience in the Southwest region of the United States. In the subsequent section we present a series of narratives from curators and community members who were involved in the curation of the exhibits. These narratives come from a panel organized by April Bojorquez, the assistant curator for public programs at ASUMA in 2009-10, who invited three community members and collaborators to discuss the issues surrounding the practice of Día de los Muertos. We present these voices in the first person, imparting primary accounts to demonstrate the heterogeneity of Día de los Muertos celebrations and their meaning within a range of United States contexts and communities. These are followed by a narrative from the ASUMA assistant curator of exhibits in 2006-10, Catherine Nichols, who uses her experiences to think about how Día de los Muertos celebrations transformed her curatorial role and gave her...