Museum Matters: Making and Unmaking Mexico's National Collections, edited by Miruna Achim, Susan Deans-Smith, and Sandra Rozental, explores how museum collections in Mexico came into being, evolved, or ceased to exist over time, tracing their movements through institutional spaces and exhibits. The contributors include Bertina Olmedo Vera, Laura Cházaro, Christina Bueno, Frida Gorbach, Haydeé López Hernández, Carlos Mondragón, and Mario Rufer, in addition to the editors. Each essayist confronts the complex ways in which major museums, such as the Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of Cultures of the World, and, most importantly, the National Museum of Anthropology, have built up, negotiated, and deconstructed their collections from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

The editors state that their purpose is political. Asserting that there “is nothing fixed or intrinsic about the things collected,” they hope to undo entrenched notions about objects that have become the anchors of national...

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