Resumen

RINCON PANTANO, David. Collecting to Build Nation. A Review of Collecting Mexico: Museums, Monuments, and the Creation of National Identity, by Shelley Garrigan. Intervención (Méx. DF) [online]. 2015, vol.6, n.12, pp.101-106. ISSN 2007-249X.

The book Collecting México: Museums, Monuments, and the Creation of National Identity by Shelley Garrigan (2012), published by the University of Minnesota Press (UMN, United States of America [USA]) explores the mechanisms of representation of the Mexican national spirit associated with the construction of public collections, the production of art pieces, the study of archaeological objects and its relationship with Eurocentric paradigms of modernity and market values. This dialectic relationship between heritage and market is the key idea of the text, which is elaborated throughout four chapters that unravel the logics underlying the construction of four phenomena: an official artistic canon, a group of public statues, a commercial world fair, and -in the final chapter- the assembly of a body of statistical data. All these cases show the construction of a new social-political paradigm that concluded the national-identity building process implemented by the Porfirian regime. The author seeks to demonstrate how Mexico reinvented itself through culture and heritage by a twofold movement of -inwards- hegemonic affirmation and of -outwards- linking with the global market. This movement reflects the intrinsic relationship between cultural and commercial values.

Palabras llave : museums; public collections; national identity; international market; Mexico.

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