museum history journal, Vol. 9 No.

1, January, 2016, 13–28

The National Museum of Mexico:

1825–1867
Miruna Achim
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Cuajimalpa, Mexico City

The history of the National Museum of Mexico during the first half century after
its foundation in 1825 has been largely ignored. This is partly because at that time
the museum failed to meet contemporary ideals of national museums as reposi-
tories of a nation’s most representative objects and as forgers of meanings about
these objects. This essay argues against reading intrinsic values into the early
National Museum of Mexico and proposes paths for reconstructing its history
as an emerging entity. Focusing on the Museum’s strategies for collecting, exhi-
biting, and studying objects, I suggest that, rather than following pre-established
protocols, the Museum took shape in practice, in the context of volatile national
politics, material limitations, and international competition for collections.

keywords national museums, antiquarianism, natural history, Mexico,

nineteenth-century

The National Museum of Mexico was founded in 1825 by presidential decree, par-
ticipating in the generational tide that saw the establishment of museums in Brazil
(1818), Chile (1822), Argentina and Colombia (1823), and Bolivia (1838). The tran-
sition from colony to independent state in these countries seems to have been closely
followed, in most cases, by plans for a national museum of some sort. Implicit in
these acts was the expectation that national museums would become repositories
of national objects — whatever they might be — and would develop the kind of
stories around these objects that would give meaning and identity to the nation
and teach its people to become citizens. In this sense, a museum is a constitutional
institution: if the paper constitution bears the burden of defining a nation’s legal fra-
mework, the objects of a national museum bear the burden of constituting a nation’s
cultural framework. As Lucas Alamán (1792–1853),1 the powerful Prime Minister
behind the creation of the National Museum of Mexico, declared before Congress,
Mexico’s process of independence would be consummated by institutions of public
instruction, among which the museum was one.2 In this way, the state would, in
essence, produce its citizens, who would then create the state.

© Taylor & Francis 2016 DOI 10.1080/19369816.2015.1118252

14 MIRUNA ACHIM

Despite the elevated rhetoric that went with its foundation, the reality is that the
National Museum of Mexico was, during the first four decades of its existence, a
neglected child of the state. The Museum did not occupy a space especially built
for it but eked out its existence in the very cramped quarters granted to it at the Uni-
versity3 in the centre of Mexico City, and the Museum’s first curators often com-
plained about the lack of space, of the government’s habit of using the Museum
as a military barracks when the occasion presented itself (which happened all too
frequently, given the internecine power plays and wars that marked the tumultuous
history of the early republic4), and of course of the perennial lack of money, which
prevented the Museum from pursuing an ambitious agenda of acquisition, explora-
tion, and research. During this period, the Museum collected an array of taxonomi-
cally diverse things: pre-Conquest antiquities, colonial documents and paintings,
mummies, shells, insects, fossils, silver ores, meteorites, engravings of the French
imperial family and of US presidents, armours, stuffed animals — and some live
ones as well. These all existed in such close proximity one with the other that one
of the Museum’s early visitors exclaimed that the national collection was merely
‘a jumble of fragments’ — a far cry from the embodiment of a unified image of
the nation, even if, perhaps, an appropriate representation of the political conditions
that were prevalent in Mexico during these decades.
As much as they speak of material and logistical issues, the problems that bede-
villed the National Museum of Mexico during its first decades are tied up with a pro-
found crisis in meaning: what defined and gave meaning to a national museum in the
early nineteenth century? Were legislative or presidential decrees enough to ensure a
museum’s existence? Was a museum an assemblage of concrete objects? Or was it a
coupling together of some instituted form and institutionally prescribed content,
marked by the public recognition of the social and symbolic uses of that pairing?
More generally, how should a national museum construct the cultural authority
to claim exclusive rights to collect certain objects and to control the production of
knowledge about them? The answers to these questions have never been self-evident
and were probably even less so in Mexico’s turbulent post-independence years.5
Mexico’s National Museum struggled to find its answers to these questions during
the forty-year period between its foundation in 1825 and the end of Maximilian of
Habsburg’s short-lived Second Empire in 1867.6 Beginning in the 1870s, relative
peace and stability would allow all the elements associated with an operative
museum to came together during the so-called Porfirian era (1876–1910):7 adequate
space, a policy for acquisitions, exhibits, and admissions, and a quantitatively sig-
nificant collection that was backed by the government and recognized as such by
Mexico’s governing classes, followed, perhaps a little less certainly, by the
Mexican public at large. This glorious ending has served to obscure the deeper con-
tingency of the historical process of the Museum’s coming into being. For the liberal
elites of the late nineteenth century, the Museum materialized the alliance between
the Mexican state, state-sponsored archaeology, and the search for narratives that
would endow the liberal state with illustrious genealogies stretching back to pre-
Conquest civilizations.8 Twentieth-century historiography of the Museum, deeply
indebted to nineteenth-century liberal ideologies, has tended to reduce the history
of the Museum to the linearity of a singular narrative, which sees the institution
 THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MEXICO 15

as a coherent entity with intrinsic qualities, launched on a recognizably progressive

trajectory, that would eventually culminate in the creation of Mexico’s world-class
Museum of Anthropology. The early history of the National Museum has been sub-
sumed either as an early stage in a larger evolutionary process or dismissed as a neg-
ligible experiment in trial and error.9 In either case, what is missing is an account of
the Museum as an emerging entity, that is, situated, conflicted, ambiguous, and
contingent.
Reconstructing the early history of the Museum poses serious challenges. Not least
among them is the dearth of archival records concerning its early institutional history.
Of the 400 volumes housed in the Archivo Histórico del Museo Nacional, only half a
volume covers the period between 1824 and 1867. This means that, to undertake an
early biography of the Museum, one would have to leave behind the presumptions of
institutional history and look for the Museum beyond the cramped quarters it occu-
pied at the University or the manuals meant to regulate its day-to-day operations.
Specifically, in the course of this essay, I follow the ‘historical paths’ 10 of people
and objects associated with the Museum to extend my search for it to travellers’
diaries and letters, albums of drawings and photographs, newspaper articles, and
the minutes of scholarly academies, and to places as far off as the Yucatan, Egypt,
the British Museum, and the Louvre. The picture that begins to emerge shows that,
far from following previously scripted operational protocols, the Museum’s strategies
for collecting, preserving, displaying, and studying objects developed through impro-
visation, in practice, and were mediated by interpersonal relationships, private ambi-
tion and greed, competition for objects and collections, market and intellectual trends,
national and regional claims, and imperialist ambitions.

Collecting for the nation

One of the more tenacious clichés about the formation of national museums in Latin
America imagines a definitive break between colonial and post-independence collec-
tions. Contrary to this view, the legacy Spain’s colonial regime left to independent
Mexico played an important role in the making of the Museum: that legacy came
both in the form of material objects, as the national collection inherited objects
from colonial (private and state) collections, and in the form of expertise, as the
Museum’s first curators and patrons had received their training in viceroyal insti-
tutions and participated in the late Enlightenment social and intellectual spaces
that promoted the gathering and exchange of collectibles. In fact, one of the more
important challenges for the new Museum was how to adapt (and override) Enlight-
enment models of collecting to the new formations of economic and social power
both in Mexico and in the transatlantic world. The Museum began, in a sense, as
an experiment: could Mexico collect and exchange objects in the name of an abstract
entity called ‘the nation’?
The answer was at best ambiguous, as shown by the government’s early collecting
efforts. On 6 October 1826, Prime Minister Sebastián Camacho (1791–1847),
vowing that the Mexican government would put, like its colonial predecessors, its
full support behind the production of knowledge about antiquities and natural
16 MIRUNA ACHIM

history, wrote to state governors, asking them for information about objects that
could be of interest to the Museum.11 For the most part, local officials simply
acknowledged receipt of Camacho’s letter.12 The governor of Chihuahua penned
a promising answer, writing that his state possessed interesting samples of silver
ore. The Museum conservator, Isidro Icaza (1783–1834), followed up on this lead
and asked Camacho to purchase ‘four stones of virgin silver, with little extraneous
matter in them’, from Batopila, Chihuahua, insisting that ‘curious examples of the
mineral kingdom deserve singular appreciation in all well-organized cabinets’; con-
sidering that Mexico owed its fame to the richness of its mines, Icaza thought the
absence of ‘such productions’ in the Museum was unpardonable.13 It was state offi-
cials in California who took Camacho’s pleas most seriously, sending the Museum
‘curiosities’ obtained through the trade along the Pacific North-west: a feather-lined
tunic, manufactured by the ‘Coriakas’ (could he have referred to the inhabitants of
Kodiak island?), and an ‘exquisite’ leather belt; the model of a canoe with rowers
and huntsman, a harpoon handle, and an impermeable shirt of bear intestine, all
used for hunting sea otters; and a bow, strung with nerve fibres, and arrows, used
by the Indians of California.14
Just as indicative of the state of cooperation in Mexico — as the struggle between
the federalists and the centralizers became a larger issue for the new state — were
non-enthusiastic responses by state governors in Yucatán and Tlaxcala. On 16 Feb-
ruary 1827, José Tiburcio López (1790–1858) of Yucatán wrote that no pre-
Conquest objects were left there because the Spanish soldiers ‘possessed by the gros-
sest ignorance’, on one hand, and missionaries, seeking to extirpate ‘idolatry and
necromancy’, on the other, ‘threw into indifferent flames, statues, paintings,
ciphers, and characters [codices?]’.15 Nor did López send in naturalia — though
he admitted his state abounded in interesting objects from the animal and plant king-
doms — but he suggested the central government hire an ‘instructed’ person to
conduct surveys and collect objects. López’s diagnosis respecting the absence of anti-
quities in Yucatán is especially ironic at a moment when foreign travellers were
beginning to visit the peninsula in search of antiquities. He knew the peasants in
Yucatán rather well,16 which means he must have been aware that pre-Conquest
objects lay scattered throughout his state; however, as a declared federalist, he prob-
ably had reservations about them ending up in the country’s capital. On his part, the
governor of Tlaxcala made an explicit appeal to local politics when he denied the
Museum a banner that had supposedly been brandished by Hernán Cortés when
he entered the city of Tlaxcala in September of 1519, on his way to Tenochtitlan,
the capital of the Mexican Empire: the banner belonged to Tlaxcala’s City Hall
and the city would not part with it.17
Finally, the governor of the State of Mexico, Lorenzo Zavala (1788–1836), ada-
mantly opposed relinquishing objects from his state to the Museum. Throughout
1826, Saturnino Islas (dates unknown) had worked as Icaza’s contact in the State
of Mexico, whence he remitted antiquities to the Museum. In July of 1827, Islas
delivered ‘three sackfulls of bones’ of ‘an unknown animal’ unearthed from
various properties in the Texcoco region.18 Zavala accused the parties engaged in
the transaction of illegality: ‘It is very strange’, he wrote, that certain hacienda
owners ‘had ceded to the Museum of the capital an object pertaining to this state,
 THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MEXICO 17

but it is even more notorious that the [Prime] Minister looked kindly upon a
donation that is by all lights illegal’. Still, he agreed to cede the skeleton in the
name of ‘the good harmony that should be conserved with the Federation’.19 In
fact, Zavala had his own ideas about what the good harmony of the Federation
entailed, being a staunch federalist who defended the rights of individual states
over those of the central government. Even when, as in this case, the Museum
obtained the skeleton it desired, the curator was left to deal with the problem of
paying Islas for his expenses, the 93 pesos and 7 reales incurred in transporting
the bones and other objects. To Islas’s petition, Icaza could only give the humiliating
answer that, as of August of 1828, the Museum had not received any money since
January.20 Typically, as Icaza was warding off Islas, he was being rebuffed by the
government on his request for 300 pesos for a ‘fine mineralogical collection’ and
4000 pesos to buy Buffon’s Histoire naturelle — useful, he claimed, for the classifi-
cation of the natural history cabinet.21 Instead, he was instructed to find a cheaper
reference book and to pay the Museum’s debts to Islas before considering new pur-
chases.22 There is no record as to how the conflict was resolved.
As we have seen in this correspondence, the government officials asked to deliver
‘valuable’ objects to form a national collection were not sure what, exactly, constituted
value, especially in the case of objects that did not enter the usual logic of economic
exchange. What was valuable enough to be taken out of circulation and put on
display in a national museum? Antiquities? Silver ores? North-western furs? Stuffed
birds? Curious skeletons? Zavala, for one, made no objections to antiquities leaving
his state, but considered bones valuable enough to have wanted to keep them. The
skeleton incident further highlights another ambiguity: to whom did collectibles
belong? There was no consensus around an answer, especially as the issue was
entangled in the fierce debates between federalists and centralizers, which led to full-
fledged civil wars during the first half-century since independence. Nor was it simply a
matter of choice between sending an object to the National Museum or keeping it for
a fledgling local one. As certain objects began to gain commercial or symbolic value in
the international market in curiosities, they were sold to the wealthiest buyers, who
often happened to be foreign collectors. The chronically underfunded Museum was
at a disadvantage in this rivalry, for, even when it obtained an object, the agent
who managed matters having to do with the discovery and transport of the object
was often left to pay his own bills, as was the case with Islas. And, when the object
was heavy or fragile or far away, as was the case with the ruins from Yucatan, carrying
them over mountain ranges to the Museum in Mexico City, in a country that lacked
railroads (or good roads in general) until later in the nineteenth century, proved to be a
nearly impossible task. London, New York, and Philadelphia were, in this sense, much
closer to the ruins of Yucatan than the National Museum was.
Still, despite difficulties of all kinds, the national collection grew, both through
government intervention and through private donations and sales. In his February
1828 address to Congress, Prime Minister Juan José Espinosa de los Monteros
(dates unknown) boasted about the Museum by highlighting some numbers: 600
paintings and drawings on the history of indigenous peoples, 200 stone and 400
clay ‘monuments’, 60 manuscripts, 42 paintings by Mexican artists, 200 kinds of
shells and minerals, wood samples, maritime productions, and extraordinary
18 MIRUNA ACHIM

bones.23 The Museum’s eclecticism was an expression of an encyclopaedic ambi-

tion — to bring together antiquities, natural history, and machines — which
shared an ethos with other museums in both the Americas and in Europe during
that era. Like his contemporaries, conservator Icaza was striving to achieve a
museum of universal knowledge, even in the context of a slowly developing crisis
concerning the logical possibility of universal knowledge.24 But, while the more
famous museums could go on accommodating an infinity of disparate things, the
hodgepodge of objects that found their way to the Museum in Mexico was not
given the space that would sort them according to their kind. And, though on
paper Icaza developed a division by species according to the classical model,25 the
physical space he commanded did not correspond to that mental space.

On display
By the 1840s, the Museum was a visitors’ destination, firmly in place on Mexico
City’s tour circuit, along with the main plaza, the Alameda, the School of Mines,
the Botanical Garden, and the sanctuary of Guadalupe at Tepeyac. Frances
‘Fanny’ Erskine Inglis, Marquise of Calderón de la Barca (1804–1882), the wife
of the Spanish ambassador, visited the Museum in 1842, and observed: ‘The
Museum […], owing to the want of arrangement and classification in the antiquities,
and the manner in which they are crowded together in different rooms of the univer-
sity, appears at first undeserving of attention’; a closer look reveals the presence of
some valuable objects.26 Only a handful of visitors took the time to describe in some
detail the objects and the way they were displayed. Among them, Brantz Mayer
(1809–1879), the secretary to the US legation in Mexico between 1841 and 1843,
left a thorough enough account of the Museum in his Mexico As It Was and As It
Is (1844) so as to enable us to reconstruct the Museum’s displays two decades
after it was founded. Mayer was especially drawn to Mexico’s pre-Hispanic
past — his short stay in Mexico planted the germ of long-term interests in American
antiquities — and, in his search for ancient ‘monuments’, he visited ‘every spot of
interest’, from the ‘remarkable remains’ at Cholula, Xochicalco, Tezcoco, and
Tezcocingo, to the cabinets of private collectors. And ‘whenever it was convenient,
[he] spent much […] time in the Museum, where [he] made accurate drawings of
almost every striking and important object’. His only regret was that his other
duties ‘limited [him] to but a brief inspection and study of these relics’.27
Let us follow Mayer on one of his visits to the Museum in the ‘fine old monastic
building’ of the University, as he steals time away from other duties. One real to the
porter admitted Mayer into the enclosure of the Museum, on the ground floor of the
University’s courtyard, where a first glance elicited his conflicted impressions: amid
the ‘mass of filth, dirt, and refuse furniture’, next to a ‘mimic tree, with a stuffed bear
climbing up it, a bleached and hairless tiger skin dangling from the ceiling, and
half-a-dozen Indian dresses made of snake-skins, fluttering on the wall’, stood
‘relics of antiquity for which thousands would be gladly paid by the British
Museum, the Louvre, the Glyptotheca of Munich, or, indeed, by any enlightened
Sovereign, who possessed the taste to acquire and the money to purchase’.28
 THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MEXICO 19

What we now identify as Mexico’s most noteworthy antiquities were there: ‘the
grand and hideous idol of Teoyaomiqui’ towering above the ‘confusion’; the great
Stone of Sacrifice (‘with a stone cross now erected in the middle to sanctify it’); ‘a
colossal head of serpentine, in the Egyptian style of sculpture’; and the statue of
the so-called Sad Indian (Indio Triste), in whom some saw a destitute witness to
the Spanish Conquest. For Mayer, a contemporary of the Indian Wars in the US,
the statue was a figure of moroseness — brows ‘drawn together with anger’, eyes
‘wide and glaring’, tongue ‘slightly protruded from the mouth’, ‘a fixed, stony
gaze of imperturbable surliness and impudence in the face’.29 Scattered over the
floor, Mayer found numberless figures of dogs, monkeys, lizards, birds, serpents,
‘all in seemingly inextricable confusion and utter neglect’, all of them ‘deformed
and hideous’ manifestations of ‘the dawn of religious ideas’, when men ‘personified
every evil which assailed them under the shape in which it became annoying, [to]
appease by worship and offerings’.30
Leaving the enclosure on the ground floor, we follow Mayer up the flight of steps
to the first floor, where the rest of the collection attained a certain kind of order,
being divided between three rooms that corresponded roughly to objects from colo-
nial history, antiquities, and natural history. In the first one, a large hall ‘which, like
everything in the republic, was neglected and lumbered’, hung the portraits of
Mexico’s viceroys, providing Mayer with an opportunity to exercise his keen eye
as reader of portraiture: ‘in the stiff and formal guise of their several periods’,
some viceroys were ‘in military costume, some in monkish, some in civil, and
some in the outlandish frills, furbelows and finery of the last century; but whether
it be of wisdom, or of wickedness, nature has invariably stamped a decided character
on every head’. Upon leaving this room, Mayer came upon a throne, next to an
unfinished relief of a trophy of liberty, above which, inexplicably, ‘in a rude coffin
of rough pine boards, [hung] a mummy, dug up not long ago on the fields of Tlate-
lolco north of the city’.31
In the adjoining room, he found himself amidst ‘a jumble of fragments of the past
and present’. He paused before a numismatic cabinet, ‘tolerably rich in Spanish
specimen’ and Roman coins, ‘which promised […] to become exceedingly rare
and valuable’, and before a cabinet which displayed, ‘among gimcrackery, some
beautiful specimens of rag and wax work’.32 In a corner, Mayer spotted ‘a plain,
unornamented suit of steel’ — purportedly Cortés’s armour. Nearby, encased in a
glass frame, hung one of Cortés’s banners, with the Virgin ‘painted on crimson
silk, surrounded with stars and an inscription’. Below the banner was an ‘old
Indian painting, an authentic record of some of the cruelties practiced by Spaniards
in subduing the chiefs of the country, and striking terror in the minds of the artless
Indians’.33 It showed Doña Marina34 holding a rosary, and Cortés, giving orders,
which were presumably being executed in the scene below where a guileless
Indian was being attacked by a bloodhound. Was there a dialogue or a critique
implied by the curators who placed the banner above the painting? An attempt to
show abuses perpetrated in the name of religion? Mayer did not say, and, given
the haphazard assembly of artefacts, it is difficult to know if the juxtaposition
was accidental or meaningful. It is true, however, that the cruelty of the Spanish
was a common topic in the writings of both foreign travellers and Mexican liberals
20 MIRUNA ACHIM

at the time. Under this image, the conservator had ‘aptly placed’ a picture of the last
king of Tezcoco, and beneath, ‘in the midst of hideous stone idols’, two funeral vases
found full of human bones in Tlatelolco, some of the ‘most beautiful relics in the
Museum’.
In the same room were cases with ‘valuable’ Mexican antiquities, ‘gathered
together by the labour of many years and arranged with some attention to
system’.35 One displayed tools and ornaments: hatchets, which Mayer thought
were strikingly similar to those of native North American Indians, unearthed
around Mayer’s native Baltimore; bows, arrows, and obsidian arrowheads, ‘some
of them so small and beautifully cut, that the smallest bird might be killed
without injuring the plumage’; and obsidian beads and mirrors. The next case exhib-
ited vases discovered in 1827 in the Isla de Sacrificios — in the Gulf of Mexico —
which, due to what Mayer called the ‘inertness of the Mexican government’, had
been liberally excavated by foreigners who, ‘taking advantage of their detention
at anchor under the lee of the island, have rummaged the sands in search of
Indian remains, which have been carried to other lands, and are thus for ever lost
to Mexico’.36 Another case held a ‘series of interesting objects’: figurines of ‘house-
hold gods’ and musical instruments, such as rattles, whistles, and teponaztli
(wooden drums). In a neighbouring cabinet, Mayer sighted ‘a curious little figure,
carved in serpentine’, from Tlatelolco, which ‘resemble[d] the bronze figures
found at Pompeii and preserved in the Secret Museum of Naples’ and those ‘used
in the old worship of Isis’. The Mexican statuette showed ‘great disregard for
decency’ and Mayer deemed it ‘too indelicate to be inserted in [his] work intended
for general readers’. 37
On the westward side of the room, Mayer admired models of Mexican mines,
made of stones from the mineral regions of Mexico. They portrayed, ‘most faith-
fully’, ‘the various parts of the mines, the modes of obtaining the ore, of freeing
[mines] from water, of sinking shafts’, as well as the dress, appearance, and
labour of the workmen, represented as silver figurines. Hung about the walls
were copies of Mexican codices, depicting aspects of Mexican history, genealogies,
and calendar systems. The originals, Mayer claimed, ‘had been taken to England
shortly after the establishment of Independence and have not been returned’.38
Given the disorganization of the Museum, he thought that ‘they were perhaps
better there than they would have been in Mexico, where the existing remains of
antiquity excite[d] no curiosity and [lay], from year to year, covered with dust,
and unexplored on the walls of the University’. A ‘disappointing’ glance at the
room dedicated to natural history, where the ‘present fared no better than the
past’,39 ended Mayer’s visit.
Although his description of the Museum stands out for its richness of detail and its
genuine interest in the objects on display there, Mayer shared the sense conveyed by
other visitors that the Museum, far from being a crown jewel of Mexican scholar-
ship, was instead an indictment of Mexican indifference. Objects had been
grouped together in disparate lumps, ‘with some attention to system’ — whistles
with drums, small idols with small altars, arrows with arrowheads and obsidian
blades — but, on the whole, there was no palpable thread in this labyrinth, no
overall order of things, no organizing metaphor behind the collection. It was
 THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MEXICO 21

evident that the Museum was more the nation’s storeroom — a product of seemingly
unplanned accumulation — than its educator. Driven by the painful awareness that
certain objects had to be claimed and gathered before it was too late, its administra-
tors had turned the Museum into an attic. Even if the museum experience was a rela-
tively new thing in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the collector
mentality competed with the exuberant spirit of the fair in the ‘science’ of organizing
the museum, the Mexican national collection fell short of the organization and exhi-
bition that characterized some of its European contemporaries. As a result, picking
one’s way through the collection, with its sometimes inexplicable juxtapositions and
its lack of explanation of curatorial intervention, did not produce the edifying
experience that normally justified the endowment of museums in other lands.40
Mayer drolly remarked:
Gondra [the current conservator] did no more than open the door of these saloons on
stated days and smoke his cigar quietly in a corner, while the ladies, gentlemen,
loafers, and léperos, wander[ed] from case to case, and lift[ed] up their hands in aston-
ishment at the grotesque forms. What those forms and figures [meant]; what was rep-
resented by such an idol, or by another — receive[d] the unfailing Mexican answer,
‘Quién sabe?’ — ‘who knows, who can tell?’41
Instead of inspiring the visitor with a citizen’s pride in Mexico, the Museum gave the
loafers that wandered into it an excuse for time wasting. As for the more interested
scholar, Mayer offered his own book as guidance to the ‘uncouth idols of a bloody
religion and the remains of a partial civilization’ housed at the National Museum.

Towards a Mexican science of antiquity

Mayer’s point, that Mexican collectibles, especially antiquities, were better off else-
where, echoed a rationale increasingly marshalled in the international competition
for Mexico’s natural and cultural resources in the mid-nineteenth century: the
capacity to gather, conserve, and study objects, that purportedly belonged to the
history of mankind, could be the only legitimate basis for owning them. By the
1840s, when Mayer visited the Museum, Mexican intellectuals were beginning to
make the case that the vestiges of Mexico’s ancient past belonged in Mexico.
Where the National Museum, cramped as we have seen into a ground floor and
three crowded first-floor rooms, was not especially conducive to the classification
and study of the objects gathered there, paper technologies — such as drawings,
lithographs, photographs, and newspapers — made it possible for Mexican scholars
to intervene in international discussions about the meaning of pre-Conquest antiqui-
ties and the most adequate methods for studying them. José Fernando Ramírez
(1804–1871) was one of the most talented historians and antiquarians of the mid-
nineteenth century, unjustly forgotten by liberal historiographies for his political
participation in the Second Empire (1864–1867). Besides holding high political
posts, Ramírez was curator of the Museum between 1852 and 1866, with a
two-year interruption during his exile in Europe, between 1855 and 1856, which
he spent visiting museums — the Louvre had opened an American antiquities
22 MIRUNA ACHIM

gallery just a few years before — and studying Mexican manuscripts at various
libraries.
Back in charge of the Museum after his return from exile, Ramírez published the
‘Descripción de algunos objetos del Museo Nacional de antigüedades de México’ as
part of the celebrated album, México y sus alrededores (1857), which paired litho-
graph plates of ‘monuments, costumes, and landscapes’, evocative of Mexican
national life, with chronicles and descriptions by contemporary Mexican writers.
Ramírez’s ‘Descripción’, a first step towards the kind of comprehensive inventory
Ramírez had toyed with for years as an essential beginning for a true science of pre-
Conquest America, is a lithograph representing forty-two antiquities from the
Museum, with long explanations devoted to each in an accompanying text. The
illustration shows an improbable cluster of things collected together in an unidenti-
fiable space that appears to be more a storeroom than a Museum (Figure 1). The
artist represented each individual object accurately, so much so that the image
depicts the passage of time and the weathering of the material;42 still, the lithograph
is not a scientific illustration, in the sense that objects are not drawn to scale or
singled out, so as to facilitate their study. Rather, the overall impression is one of
abundance, and was probably meant to put the viewer face to face with the
nation’s archaeological treasures. But, if the visual rendering is not a page in the
science of Mexico’s past, Ramírez’s written descriptions are. To each object

figure 1 ‘Descripción de algunos objetos del Museo Nacional de Antigüedades de México’,

in México y sus Alrededores (Mexico City: Decaen, 1856). Courtesy of Leonardo López Luján.
 THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MEXICO 23

Ramírez has dedicated a separate entry, where he assembled together information

about its formal aspect, size, material, provenance, and the circumstances of its dis-
covery. There is nothing new in this way of identifying Mexican antiquities; it had
become the norm by the mid-nineteenth century, when Adrien de Longpérier pub-
lished his catalogue of the American antiquities gallery at the Louvre.43 But, in con-
trast with earlier catalogues, Ramírez’s descriptions have expanded considerably, to
include historical, iconographic, and bibliographical notes. More than simple identi-
fications, his entries are case studies where Ramírez sets forth his hypotheses and
makes a call for future scholars to contribute their own findings about each object.44
By way of example, we turn to the cylindrical stone to the right, ‘vulgarly known
with the name Piedra de los Sacrificios’. Ramírez tells us that the ‘monument’, of
solid basaltic porphyry, is 0.53 m tall and 2.67 m in diameter, that the reliefs on
the cylindrical faces are 0.021m deep and those on the horizontal face 0.025 m. It
was unearthed on 17 December 1791 in Mexico City’s central plaza, and was
re-buried in the same place, until it was brought into the Museum in 1824. The
stone had an exciting intellectual biography. Soon after the stone’s discovery,
Mexican creole scholar Antonio de León y Gama (1735–1802) had theorized that
the stone represented a solar calendar, with the symbol of the sun sculpted on the
superior side, and thirty dancers, representing the fifteen peoples that venerated
the Sun, carved around the cylindrical circumference. Alexander von Humboldt
(1769–1859) had since rejected that hypothesis, suggesting that the stone comme-
morated the conquests of an Aztec king and that it functioned as a gladiatorial
altar. For Ramírez, neither of the two conjectures was completely acceptable,
although each had some claim on the truth. The cylinder was both a commemorative
and a votive monument, he suggested. On the one hand, it was a historical source
which provided information that could not be found in printed or handwritten
books about the military campaigns undertaken in 1482 by Tízoc (1481–1486),
the seventh Aztec king, against the peoples depicted on the circumference; far
from symbolizing dancers, as León y Gama had thought, these figures represented
‘groups of victors and vanquished, arranged two by two, the one dragging the
other by the hair, the vanquished holding a bundle of arrows pointing down, the
same way one sees in reliefs of the same genre, in the monuments of Egypt and
Assyria’. Behind the head of each prisoner, a hieroglyphic symbol gives the phonetic
name of his people. On the other hand, Ramírez explained that the effigy of the Sun,
carved in high relief on the flat side of the cylinder, showed the monument’s votive
associations. Like the Romans, Greeks, and all the famous people of antiquity,
ancient Mexicans ‘understood that all great actions had to refer always to divinity,
as the first cause and unique dealer of benefits’ and consecrated the monument to the
Sun, ‘one of the principal divinities of empire, thus giving thanks for the victory
obtained’.
To arrive at his own hypotheses concerning the uses of the stone, Ramírez sifted
through those of earlier scholars. At the same time, he combined bibliographical eru-
dition with a more concrete sort of knowledge, bringing to bear his studies of places
and place names, his philological and linguistic training, and his understanding of
the uses of objects and of artisanal procedures in the Mexico of his time. Such
was the case with the small winch-like object to the right of the lithograph, which
24 MIRUNA ACHIM

he identified as a clay instrument, similar to those still used for spinning by indigen-
ous women, who called it a ‘malacate’. The National Museum owned many items of
this class, of varying form, ornament, or material, ‘according to the quality of the
persons who owned them’. Ramírez remembered having seen them also in the Egyp-
tian Museum in Turin, which classified them as ‘oggeti diversi’ and in the British
Museum, in cases 29 and 30 of the Ethnographic Rooms, which held Mexican anti-
quities. The catalogue of the British Museum described them as ‘conical, perforated
objects, ornamented with native devices, apparently used as BUTTONS or STUDS’,
a description with which Ramírez disagreed, explaining that the ancient Mexicans
did not use buttons, and that in fact Nahuatl lacked a word for ‘button’. He used
the opportunity to take issue with ‘similar explanations in the catalogues of other
collections’, which circulated ‘so many false ideas, so many violent interpretations,
so many imaginary analogies and so many fantastical systems, as are present in
almost all of the writers on American antiquities’.
The ‘Descripción’ is as interesting as an object in the history of archaeological
method as it is for the objects it describes. Here, Ramírez begins to set down conven-
tions for studying and representing Mexican antiquities. Against what he rejected as
‘fantastic systems, brilliant in their colouring, but completely empty of reason’,
Ramírez offered a modest ‘corrective’: description, a deceivingly easy method, but
one which presupposed the collection of as much information about an object as
possible. The science of Mexico’s past would begin with building up a very large bib-
liographical corpus, which lay scattered in libraries, museums, and other reposi-
tories across many countries. Just as German historians of the time, beginning
with Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), were emphasizing the crucial importance
of finding and applying critical tools to primary documents in order to create scien-
tific histories, Ramírez strove to make Mexico’s past the object of a ‘science of the
archive’45 by collecting, sifting through, and juxtaposing studies, objects, manu-
scripts, or, in their absence, images of objects and copies of manuscripts. Mexico’s
past would open up its mysteries slowly, painstakingly, one hieroglyph, one deity,
or one spindle at a time, as the curator organized the state of knowledge about
each object. He advocated for small-scale analyses in opposition to universalist his-
tories commonly circulating at the time that sought to explain the relation between
New and Old Worlds civilizations through the study of coincidences — mythologi-
cal, linguistic, or morphological — between antiquities in the Old and the New
Worlds, and that operated in a selective manner, choosing certain objects and ignor-
ing others according to the author’s bias. With exceptions, this comparative strategy
had served to underscore an evolutionary paradigm, placing the ancient civilizations
of America as beneficiaries of Egyptian, Hindu, Chinese, or Hebrew wisdom.
For Ramírez, coincidences were sometimes just coincidences. ‘Those who do not
want to grant America’s unfortunate son any original thought, explain the pyramids
as an imitation of Egypt’,46 complained Ramírez. To de-centre history from a model
in which the development of European culture was not only the most advanced but
the root of all other cultures meant reading Mexico’s past as well as its present as a
particular and autonomous phenomenon, which may be connected to other cultures
but that absorbs or rejects them according to its own codes. By the same token, the
curator of Mexican antiquities, while thoroughly familiar with the theories that laid
 THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MEXICO 25

claim on the study of Mexico’s past, would fashion his own methods. Ramírez par-
ticipated in the complex international spaces where different international agents
competed with each other to stabilize the circulation and the meanings of
Mexican antiquities, and in so doing was increasingly making the case that the
National Museum was an intellectually credible student of Mexico’s past and there-
fore, a legitimate depository of its vestiges.

Conclusions
By 1866, Emperor Maximilian (1832–1867) arranged for the National Museum to
be moved out of the University, to a much ampler and symbolically charged space at
the National Palace, where it remained until 1964. Thence, the collection of antiqui-
ties was moved to the National Museum of Anthropology, while the natural history
collections were dispersed among various institutions. The Second Empire ended
tragically with Maximilian’s execution, before the Museum’s antiquities could be
unpacked; the task fell on Mexico’s liberal governments to take these objects out
of boxes and create from them stories of triumphant republicanism that have
endured until today. The centrality of the National Museum of Anthropology in
Mexico’s cultural politics — indeed, the strong alliance between archaeology and
the Mexican state — has made it difficult to envision a time when antiquities
shared a crowded space with naturalia or when the Museum was struggling to
stay open and to make itself matter to both national and regional politics.
The early years of the National Museum of Mexico — especially when read in
light of the tight relationship between the birth of the museum and nation-building
in the nineteenth century, postulated by recent scholarship — suggests a history of
negations. If we take Brantz Mayer’s comments at face value, a visit to the
Museum in the 1840s was hardly a ‘civilizing ritual’,47 in the sense that the insti-
tution failed to produce ‘imagined communities’ of Mexican citizens.48 More criti-
cally, the Museum did not succeed in creating consensus, among the governments in
turn, that its collection could become a valuable agent for building up much needed
national unity. It is difficult to imagine how, when the idea of the nation was still
being debated in Mexico — as it was throughout the newly independent countries
of Latin America — national museums would have eschewed the material and ideo-
logical contingencies, to emerge fully formed, as depositories of national meanings,
with a clear sense of their mission to educate citizens in these meanings. In fact, as
José Fernando Ramírez’s antiquarian studies show, before becoming the objects of
some national ideal, Mexican collectibles were first the objects of nascent (especially
archaeological) sciences, as practised by a handful of Mexican scholars who were
part of wider international networks of collectors and savants. The travails of the
National Museum of Mexico during the first half-century after its foundation
hold important lessons for the contemporary historian: the models used to describe
the birth and consolidation of European museums have limited explanatory value
for their Latin American counterparts. Here, case-by-case studies represent necess-
ary first steps before a more sweeping picture of the functions and uses of
museums in Latin America can begin to emerge.
26 MIRUNA ACHIM
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank my colleagues at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-
Cuajimalpa — especially Alejandro Araujo, Alejandro Estrella, Sandra Rozental,
and Nuria Valverde — for their comments and suggestions on some of the topics
presented in this paper. I am also grateful to Irina Podgorny and to Maria Margaret
Lópes and to the reviewers of this article for their comments and suggestions.
Notes
1 Lucas Alamán, the scion of a mining family
from Guanajuato, was a man of two worlds:
coming of age in the last years of the Spanish
dominion in New Spain, he went on to
occupy important posts in the post-
independent Mexican government, where he
sought economic progress by attracting
foreign investment in mining and banking.
Politically, Alamán leaned conservative: he
credited the Spanish dominion for bequeathing
Mexico with the political and religious struc-
tures that would insure the new country’s
success in the Western world and he fought
for the establishment of a centralist govern-
ment post-independence. For a detailed biogra-
phy of Alamán, see J. Valadés, Alamán,
estadista e historiador (Mexico City: Porrúa e
Hijos, 1938).
2 L. Alamán, Memoria al Soberano Congreso
Constituyente (Mexico City: Imprenta del
Supremo Gobierno, 1823), p. 34.
3 Before independence, the University was offi-
cially known as la Real Universidad de
México. During the nineteenth century, it is
referred to simply as la Universidad. It was in
1910 that it was officially named La
Universidad Nacional de México.
4 It is difficult to summarize the first half a century
of Mexican independence. There was rapid gov-
ernmental turnover, as federalist and centralist
factions vied for power. At times, factionalism
escalated into full civil war, as was the case,
most notably, with the war that pitted Benito
Juárez’ liberal government against conservatives
starting in 1857 and continuing, de facto,
throughout the 1860s, when the French and a
French-sponsored Habsburg Second Empire
(1864–1867) entered the war on the conserva-
tive side. Foreign intervention — both in the
form of foreign participation in Mexican politics
and in the forms of full-blown war (the Spanish
war against independent Mexico throughout the
1820s, the Spanish American War, 1846–1848,
and the French Intervention, 1862–1867) aggra-
vated the situation. For an overview of the pol-
itical and social upheaval during Mexico’s
post-Independence years, see W. Fowler,
Mexico in the Age of Proposals, 1821–1853
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998).
5 These questions were hardly unique to the
National Museum of Mexico. For specific case
studies, see, for instance, S. J. M. M. Alberti,
Nature and Culture. Objects, Disciplines, and
the Manchester Museum (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009); C. Gosden, F. Larson, and
A. Petch, Knowing Things: Exploring the
Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008);
I. Podgorny and M. M. Lopes, El desierto en
una vitrina (Mexico City: Limusa, 2008); for a
compilation of case studies of Latin American
museums and collections in the years
post-Independence, see M. Achim and
I. Podgorny, Museos al detalle: colecciones,
antigüedades e historia natural (Buenos Aires:
Prohistoria, 2014).
6 For a very reduced summary of this period, see
note 4 above.
7 The ‘Porfiriato’ refers to the thirty-four-year
period that Porfirio Díaz was Mexico’s de
facto ruler. During this time, the country experi-
enced important economic progress, though it
made few political advances in the direction of
democracy.
8 S. Garrigan, Collecting Mexico: Museums,
Monuments, and the Creation of National
Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2012).
9 I. Bernal, Historia de la Arqueología en México
(México: Porrúa, 1979); M. Díaz-Andreu, A
World of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology.
Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Past
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007);
E. Florescano, El patrimonio cultural de

México (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura 21
Económica, 1993); M. L. Rico Mansard,
Exhibir para educar: objetos, colecciones y
museos de la ciudad de México (1790–1910) 22
(Mexico City: Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, 2004). In recent years,
L. G. Morales Moreno has offered pointed criti- 23
cism of the tropes of the Museum as producer of
objectivity and as forger of national identity; see
especially ‘El primer Museo Nacional de México
(1825–1857)’, in Hacia otra historia del arte en 24
México, ed. by E. Acevedo (Mexico City:
Conaculta, 2001), pp. 36–60; and ‘En torno a
la museología mexicana: la crítica de las
imágenes fundantes’, Curare, espacio crítico
para las artes, 22 (2003). 25
10 This strategy was proposed by Gosden, et al.
11 ‘Circular a los gobiernos de los Estados’, 6
October 1826, AGN, Gobernación, Sin 26
Sección, Caja 98, Expediente 9, ff. 58r–60v.
12 See responses from Queretaro, Veracruz,
Guanajuato, Oaxaca, Puebla, San Luis Potosí, 27
Michoacán, Zacatecas, Coahuila, Durango,
and Tamaulipas, AGN, Gobernación, Sin 28
Sección, Caja 98, Expediente 9, ff. 62r–83v. 29
13 Icaza, letters to Ministerio de Hacienda, 15 30
April–20 June 1828, AGN, Gobernación, Sin 31
Sección, Caja 109, Expediente 5, ff. 2r–8v. 32
14 J. M. Riesgo, ‘Nota de las curiosidades y cosas 33
naturales procedentes de la Alta California’, 34
22 March 1829, AGN, Gobernación,
Sin Sección, Caja 118, Expediente 3, ff. 38r–
42v.
15 López, letter to Camacho, 16 February 1827,
AGN, Gobernación, Sin Sección, Caja 98,
Expediente 9, ff. 83r–v.
16 T. Rugeley, Rebellion Now and Forever. Mayas,
Hispanics, and Caste War Violence in Yucatán,
1800–1880 (Stanford: Stanford University 35
Press, 2009), p. 72. 36
17 C. González Angulo, letter to Icaza, 8 May 37
1929, AGN Gobernación, Sin Sección, Caja 38
109, Expediente 5, ff. 27r–30v.
18 Icaza, letter to the Ministerio de Hacienda, 22
July 1827, AGN Gobernación, Sin Sección,
Caja 109, Expediente 5, ff. 20r–22v.The skel-
eton was later identified to have belonged to a
mammoth.
19 Zavala, letter to the Ministerio de Hacienda, 30
August 1827, AGN Gobernación, Sin Sección,
Caja 109, Expediente 5, ff. 25r–v.
20 Icaza, letter to the Ministerio de Hacienda, 22
July 1827, AGN Gobernación, Sin Sección,
Caja 109, Expediente 5, ff. 34r–v. 39
THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MEXICO 27
Icaza, letter to Ministerio de Hacienda, 5
February 1828, AGN Gobernación, Sin
Sección, Caja 109, Expediente 5, ff. 28r–v.
Ministerio de Hacienda, letter to Icaza, 1 March
1828, AGN Gobernación, Sin Sección, Caja
109, Expediente 5, ff. 33r–v.
J. J. Espinosa de los Monteros, Memoria del
Ministerio de Relaciones Interiores (Mexico
City: Imprenta del Supremo Gobierno, 1828),
p. 19.
U. Eco, From the Tree to the Labyrinth:
Historical Studies on the Sign and
Interpretation, trans. by A. Oldcorn
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,
2014).
Icaza, ‘Proyecto de reglamento del Museo
Nacional’, AGN, Gobernación, Sin Sección,
Caja 82, Expediente 20.
F. Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1982
[1843]), p. 281.
B. Mayer, Mexico, As It Was and As It Is
(New York: J. Winchester, 1844), p. viii.
Ibid., p. 84.
Ibid., p. 88.
Ibid., p. 89.
Ibid., p. 90.
Ibid., p. 91.
Ibid., p. 100.
Doña Marina, also known as La Malinche,
occupies an ambivalent place in Mexican
history: a Nahuatl-speaking woman from the
Veracruz region, she was sold to Cortés and
played a crucial role as translator in the latter’s
conquest enterprise. While some have equated
her participation with treason, others have
praised her as an able go-between and a rare
example of female self-fashioning.
Mayer, Mexico, p. 91.
Ibid., p. 96.
Ibid., p. 97.
Ibid., p. 106. It is hard to know what Mayer was
referring to here. While William Bullock did
indeed take Mexican codices to England and
showed them in his exhibits on ancient and
modern Mexico in London in 1823, the
Englishman returned these objects to Mexico
at Prime Minister’s bequest. This was one of
the few instances of repatriation of Mexican
pre-Conquest objects during the nineteenth
century. See M. Costeloe, ‘William Bullock and
the Mexican Connection’, Mexican Studies,
22.2 (2006), 275–309.
Ibid., p. 107.
28 MIRUNA ACHIM
40 Tony Bennet, The Birth of the Museum: History,
Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995).
41 Mayer, Mexico, p. 107.
42 It is the case with the upright statue in the centre
of the illustration, whose darkened face,
Ramírez told his readers, was not a defect of
the lithography; the statue was stained,
covered in a 1 mm thick layer of incense
smoke. ‘How many years must have passed’,
mused Ramírez, ‘for this “scab” to have
formed on a statue placed outside, exposed as
it was to the inclemency of weather and
blasted by continuous winds? It cult must have
been extraordinary’, he concluded.
43 Adrien de Longpérier, Notice des monuments
desposés dans la Salle des Antiquités
Americaines (Méxique et Pérou) au Musée du
Louvre (Paris: Vinchon, Imprimeur des Musées
Nationaux, 1850).
Notes on contributor
Correspondence to: Dr Miruna Achim, UAM-Cuajimalpa, DCSH,Torre III, 6to
piso, Ave. Vasco de Quiroga no. 4871, Santa Fe, Cuajumalpa, CP 05300, México
DF, México. Email: kimichintli@gmail.com
44 For a thorough study of the potentials of lists
and case studies as technologies for knowledge
production, see Volker Hess and Andrew
Mendelsohn, ‘Case and Series: Medical
Knowledge and Paper Technology, 1600–
1900’, History of Science, XLVIII (2010), 287–
314.
45 The concept is Lorraine Daston’s, ‘The
Sciences of the Archive’, Osiris, 27.1 (2012),
156–87.
46 Ramírez, ‘Noticias históricas y estadísticas de
Durango’, Boletín de la Sociedad Mexicana de
Geografía y Estadística, V (1857), 99.
47 C. Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art
Museums (London: Routledge, 1995), see
especially chapter 1, ‘The Museum as Ritual’.
48 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origins and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 2003 [1983]).