The crown jewel of Mexico City's many museums is the National Museum of Anthropology. No where in the world will you find a comparable collection of treasures from Mexico's pre-Hispanic civilizations. If a visitor to the city sees only one museum it should be this one. Most visitors never make it to the upper floor which contains ethnographic exhibits dealing with the culture of Mexico's many indigenous peoples today.
Before the pandemic it seemed that they were doing a renovation of the upstairs. Back then I wrote several entries on the blog, and there were still parts of the upstairs that were not completed and closed off. It's been a while since I have been to the museum's upper floor. I had no idea that another remodeling was taking place until I read earlier this month that President Claudia Scheinbaum had attended the reopening of the floor.
I was eager to see what had been done, so last week I took a visit to the museum.
I went away very dissatisfied with the changes that had been made.
This map in the museum shows the many indigenous groups which live throughout the country.
More than 20 million people in Mexico identify as members of one of more than 60 groups, and more than 11 million live in households in which at least one family member speaks an indigenous language. The highest concentration of indigenous peoples are in the states of Yucatán and Oaxaca.
The ethnographic exhibits used to be arranged by geographic region. So, for example, if you wanted to learn about the Huichol people of western Mexico, there was an area that presented their way of life, religious beliefs and artwork with detailed explanations. You went away with a better understanding of that group.
Now the exhibits are divided by themes such as food, fiestas, textiles. So, continuing with the example of the Huichol people, you will see objects related to them throughout the museum floor. It seemed to me a very disorganized manner of presentation with a lack of focus.
What irritated me even more was the lack of identification of objects. There are around six thousands objects on display on the second floor... many of them beautiful works of art. But, at least for the first half of the exhibit, there is very little signage. There are showcases filled with masks, pottery, jewelry, etc. that are meant to show the diversity of the country's many tribes. Yes, they are very lovely, but where do the individual pieces come from and who made them???
As I continued through the upper floor, finally the individual objects in the showcases were identified. It almost seemed as if they hadn't finished with the signage and had not got around to the first half of the displays. (It certainly would not be the first time the government had opened a project with fanfare before it was actually completed.)
I preferred the way the floor was organized previously. As a person who frequently plays tour guide to visiting friends, I would find it very difficult to give a coherent tour of the exhibits as they are now displayed.
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