Mexico City, Museums, and Memory
Published 08/19/2025 in Scholar Travel Stipend
Written
by Ashfah Alam |
08/19/2025
In my final spring semester at Columbia University, I took a course titled “Archival Photography” where we explored how photographs taken in eras preceding ours contributed to the development and remembrance of historical events and understanding. The course itself raised many questions about what is preserved, what is omitted, and why. In particular, I was interested in how the archives can frame and reframe memory.
Mexico City offered a unique location for examining how the archive can be operationalized, as the city maintains a long history of indigenous heritage, colonial conquesti, revolution, and present globalization. My research pchallenges the notion that visual representation within museum spaces is automatically neutral or legitimate. Who has the authority to reframe Indigenous pasts, and to what end?
My critical lens was also shaped by coursework on the "Family of Man" exhibit and the "Painters with a Camera" movement in India. Dr. Diva Gujral's lectures highlighted how Western institutions frame non-Western subjects to evoke universalist appeals while often reproducing colonial hierarchies. The "Family of Man" depicted non-Europeans in states of suffering or exoticization, flattening differences in the name of shared humanity. As Dr. Diva Gujral remarked in her course lecture on The Family of Man, the archive is never neutral—rather, it is “a site of power that produces history as much as it documents it.” The "Painters with a Camera" exhibition, as Dr. Gujral explained, challenged photography's relegation to mechanical reproduction by embracing experimental techniques and asserting its artistic legitimacy. However, the exhibit was largely forgotten due to a lack of archival infrastructure. This lack of institutional memory raises questions about what is remembered and what is erased.
As Zadie Smith writes, archives function like a mirror of cultural memory, capturing not a chronology but a mood. This notion complicates the conventional understanding of the archive as a stable repository of facts and instead positions it as a site of emotional and ideological projection. My experience in Mexico City confirmed that museum space, like the photo-roman format, which constructs meaning through discontinuous stills that evoke memory rather than explain it, the museum fragments time and significance even as it appears to stabilize them. In this way, the museum orchestrates sentiment and identity rather than participating in authentic preservation.
El Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, the largest and most visited museum in Mexico, grappled with this in the curators’ conceptualization of indigenous past and futures in the museum’s design. At the heart of this curatorial strategy lies the idealization of the “great pre-Hispanic cultures,” as described in one exhibition placard, which outlines how Mexico’s post-independence state project relied on vestiges of early civilizations to forge a historical identity. The institution curates a visual narrative in which pre-Hispanic civilizations are monumentalized, yet contemporary Indigenous presence is largely elided. This ideological move of framing the archive as ancient, complete, and politically inert permits the nation-state to elevate cultural ancestry without contending with ongoing marginalization. Photography, in this context, becomes complicit. Like The Family of Man, it produces an archive of spectacle where in both cases, the viewer is not prompted to ask who is speaking or under what terms, but rather to absorb an already-authored narrative. Images collected during 1960s expeditions to Comcaac and Seri communities were intended not to document evolving cultural life, but to “recreate museum settings,” fossilizing what curators claimed were cultures “close to disappearing.” These visual gestures do not merely reflect memory; instead, they stage disappearance.
My interviews with four tour guides who provide free tours in Mexico City supplemented these theories. One remarked that the museum “shows who we were, not who we are,” implicitly recognizing that the nation’s visual grammar of Indigenous identity remains historical, rather than relational or living. The visual consistency of photographs of Indigenous individuals positioned against deep-tone gallery walls, symmetrically hung, and visually consistent plays into an almost sanitizing function; Within such formal portraiture-style photos, there is little room for socio-political critique within this limited art form. Another noted how exhibitions are “for tourists now,” referencing the use of bilingual labels, world heritage branding, and polished aesthetic framing. This matched my observation of the museum’s overall design, in which the most popular displays had English translations for many of the signage as well as audios running in both Spanish and English for interactive activities.
These interviews echoed concerns raised in my archival photography course about institutional framing and the politics of display. Dr. Diva Gujral’s lecture on The Family of Man exhibit exposed similar tensions: how supposedly universal visual narratives obscure the asymmetries of representation. Just as Edward Steichen’s MoMA exhibit presented global subjects through the lens of U.S. photojournalists, flattening cultural complexity into consumable sameness, so too does the Museo Nacional de Antropología orchestrate visual unity through historical distance.
As Teju Cole warns in his critique of photography’s imperial legacies, “the right to remain unseen” must be protected just as urgently as the right to visibility. This assertion challenges the long-standing belief in visual documentation as inherently progressive or emancipatory. For Cole, the act of photographing has historically been entangled with systems of domination, rendering certain bodies hyper-visible for the consumption of others. Within institutional archives, the choice to remain invisible, to retain opacity or privacy, is rarely afforded to subjects. Instead, the archival subject is rendered legible to the state, to the scholar, and to the tourist. We see this in the museum’s display of Indigenous individuals where they are isolated from traditional context, reinforced to be static cultural artifacts. The state of the photographic subject is frozen to beautify the imagination of Mexico’s past privileges idealism without political realization. As such, visibility becomes a form of containment.
The Milken Institute and Milken Foundation value service and innovation to aid in problem-solving. My project pushes back on commonly accepted framings of the archive to critique how some communities are still left out of documentation that might mean well. By documenting and critiquing curatorial strategy, I demonstrate how public memory can still obscure structural inequity. So, this reimagination of what archival photography should do to ensure historical preservation and civic responsibility invites participation and fosters dialogue in ways that align with the Milken vision.
Sources
Cole, Teju. “When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And When It Still Is.).” The New York Times Magazine, 6 February 2019.
www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/magazine/teju-cole-photography.html.
Gujral, Diva. Lecture on The Family of Man and Institutional Framing. Columbia University, Spring 2025. Archival Photography course, instructor lecture.
Gujral, Diva. Lecture on Painters with a Camera. Columbia University, Spring 2025. Archival Photography course, instructor lecture.
Smith, Zadie. “The I Who Is Not Me.” Intimations: Six Essays. Penguin Books, 2020, pp. 57–70.
Steichen, Edward, curator. The Family of Man. Museum of Modern Art, 1955. Exhibition Catalogue.
Museo Nacional de Antropología. Exhibition texts and gallery panels. Mexico City, 2025. [Photographed by author.]
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