Collecting Mexico: Museums, Monuments, and the Creation of National Identity

Conclusion

177 Conclusion This book is the product of a set of questions that occurred to me as a graduate student in Latin American literature after taking seminars on the processes of Latin American modernization. Material references abounded in the modernista poetry and prose that we read. Particularly interesting to me was the figure of the fictional collector that surfaces in modernista literature, such as José Fernández in José Asunción Silva’s De sobremesa, whose exquisite collections embodied the intersection of (internationally) traversed and (locally) inhabited spaces within the domestic setting of late-nineteenth-century fin de siglo culture. When I turned to real collectors and collections, the museum institution seemed the obvious place to start. Inquiry led me to further questions: what invisible efforts preface the finished display? What hosts of factors converge behind the theaters of national representation that displayed objects embodied? How do objects—or more specifically, collections of objects—come to mean more than the sum of their parts? Flora S. Kaplan’s Museums and the Making of “Ourselves” not only led me to Mexico as a case study for what would become this project but also made clear that far from representing the eternal and intransient values with which nineteenth-century national displays seem to be imbued in civic ceremonies and popular propagandistic literature, there are layers of transactions, negotiations, and ambiguities that all provide access to the far less visible and less stable processes that together enact the effects of meaning making. The dialectical embrace of patrimony and market that lies at the core of nineteenth-century exhibition culture forms the backbone of this study. In the field of the national arts, the tension plays out not only within the Academia as a venue for both the selling and display of 178 · CONCLUSION Mexican works but also in the struggles between the traditional and the more liberal perspectives on what would indeed constitute specifically national painterly themes. One hundred years later, Banamex’s significant collection of nineteenth-century costumbrista paintings further blurs the boundary between public and private. In the museum context, the practice of archeology involved a theatrical staging of ownership in which ancient patrimony was reintroduced into commercial contexts (such as the St. Louis Exhibition of 1904 or the Congreso de Americanistas of 1910) as a product of Mexican scholarship. While contemplation of the individual piece was thought to invigorate latent patriotic feelings , the museum as a whole—through both the contribution to and hosting of international events—continued to provide the grounds for commercial negotiations throughout the nineteenth century. Several of Mexico’s key nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century national monuments , as seen in chapter 3, were direct embodiments of commercial relationships or transactions. Furthermore, the newspaper commentary that circulated around several of these pieces linked them to market interests through their emphasis on process and commercial agendas. The Palacio azteca, as analyzed in chapter 4, was probably the most obvious and direct embodiment of the irreducible mutual dependency of national exhibit and commercial display. Last, the field of national statistics simultaneously presented Mexican cultural consumers with the charts and tables necessary for them to imagine a series of composite visions of the patria and, conversely, enticed foreign investors with suggestions of bounty and abundance that exceeded the gesture of representation altogether. Though each of the venues and institutions investigated here embodies a unique and dynamic connection between national patrimony and the international market, certain general patterns link them. In the example of statistics, archaeology, and world’s fairs, the heavy precedent of foreign scholarship and exhibition culture required that the new collections be rhetorically grounded within a national conceptual framework. A national vocabulary and body of scholarship was thus built within the perimeters of international scholarship, creating a dialectical mode of defining selfness that anticipated the future dialogues that would shape local cultural administration in the era of globalization one hundred years later. Conversely, in the creation of collections CONCLUSION · 179 with little or no national precedent, such as the privately commissioned paintings studied in chapter 1 and the national monuments studied in chapter 3, references to commerce and market possibilities helped cultural critics and administrators reinforce a sense of legitimacy and validation for national cultural expression. In both dynamics, the myths of national patrimony intersect with the exchange values determined by international commercial networks within which the liberal and Porfirian governments negotiated for a position. Currently...