CUAUHTÉMOC CAMARENA AND TERESA MORALES
Over the past four decades, the field of community museums has greatly expanded and gained relevance as local entities struggle to strengthen their identities and develop greater self-determination. It has been an honor to contribute to this field over the last twenty-eight years, principally in the areas of refining the concept of the community museum, developing methods to expand community appropriation of the decisions and creative processes involved, and providing ongoing guidance for the creation of community museums and networks at the local, national, and international levels. In this last respect, we have been and continue to be engaged in the Union of Community Museums of Oaxaca (Oaxaca is a state in southern Mexico), the National Union of Community Museums and Ecomuseums of Mexico, and the Network of Community Museums of America.
This work was not motivated by an abstract, academic interest that later was projected onto local communities, but by a commitment to support and provide tools to communities as they undertook the creation of museums as instruments to strengthen their integrity in the difficult context of contemporary society. Our theoretical and methodological reflections grew out of this concrete experience. It began when we were invited to support the initiative of an indigenous community of Oaxaca in 1985 and continued when a great number of diverse localities requested guidance to create museums; the communities themselves have been our most inspiring and demanding teachers.
For us it is important to clarify: the community museum is not a tourist attraction or a site where the animation of the presentation hides the voices of those who speak—and peoples’ right to speak for themselves, about themselves. The community museum is a process, rather than a product. It fosters the construction of collective subjects through the elaboration of memory, reflection, self-knowledge, and creativity; it helps strengthen community identity by legitimizing its own histories and values; it contributes to the improvement of the quality of community life through multiple projects for the future; and it strengthens the community’s capacity for action through the creation of networks with similar communities. This is a collective process, which comes to life within the community; it is a museum “of” the community, not built from the outside “for” the community. The community museum is a tool to foster self-determination, strengthening communities as collective subjects that create, re-create, and make decisions that shape their reality.
This concept is empty, however, unless the methods used build on and continuously expand the decision-making capacity of the community. One of the first lessons we learned was that a definitive aspect of the community museum is that it is born out of a local initiative and responds to the needs of the community. Even the best-intentioned external agent cannot substitute for the initiative and engagement of local people and community-based groups. This is not to say that these initiatives develop in a vacuum; clearly, external support and guidance can play an important role. But this support is present in a second moment, as a consequence of the action of a local group that seeks to develop its own project. The external agent must discipline itself to build on the actions of local groups and contribute to the process of expanding their ownership of the initiative.
A critique of previous experiences of so-called community museums, promoted by a national institution that trained schoolteachers to convince local communities that they needed museums, was useful in clarifying the self-defeating results of these methods. The museums were fragile projects dependent on a central authority working through the promoter and a few community members who became involved. At best, they became miniature versions of mainstream museums.
Thus one of the elements that defines a community museum is also a methodological principle: its basis is a local initiative, a local decision to respond to concerns about memory, heritage, and patrimony. The process of developing the museum throughout its initial establishment and beyond is a process of expanding the initiative, respecting the local traditions of decision making within the community, or developing new strategies of consensus building, linking a wide network of community-based groups in a comprehensive project.
Often we have encountered the opinion that the methods we have developed work only in the specific context of the indigenous communities of Oaxaca, with their long-standing tradition of collective decision making through community assembly. It is true that we learned a great deal from the enormous tenacity of these communities to sustain their decision-making bodies and to define their collective interests and projects. But their example helped us identify the critical importance of community appropriation through decision making as a principle; we never suggested that the specific process of decision making was the same in all contexts. Rather, early on it became clear that the strategy to create a community museum had to be based on a specific analysis of the decision-making processes of the particular community involved. In many scenarios, the identification of grassroots organizations and the development of a procedure to consult and include them within the project proved to be a valid consensus-building process.
In a similar fashion, the appropriation of the management of the community museum through committees elected by the community assembly, which was possible through the tradition of community service through the “cargo system” in Oaxaca, helped us define as a general principle that the community museum be directed and managed by community members. Again, this principle can be put into action in many ways, not only in the specific tradition of community service practiced in Oaxaca (although similar traditions exist in many local communities, at least throughout Latin America). This does not imply that people from outside the community will never be involved, but it does mean that the direction of the project should remain in the hands of a representative body of community members.
Methods to expand community appropriation also include consultation to decide on the themes to be researched and represented in the museum. In this way, collective community concerns, instead of the preoccupations of external experts, are expressed through the museum. The process of creating exhibitions, including the creative aspects involved in doing research and designing, producing, and installing elements of the exhibition, offers extraordinary opportunities to engage community involvement. Community members learn to carry out oral history research, to document through photography and observation, to develop ideas for design, to represent their stories through drawings and murals and dioramas. A large part of our work has been and continues to be an attempt to enrich the ways in which community members can carry out these processes.
Finally, networks of community museums can play a fundamental role. Just as the engagement of a network of local groups and organizations enables the development of community appropriation of the museum, so does the creation of networks between different communities make possible community management of regional projects. In 1991, the Union of Community Museums of Oaxaca was founded, and today it comprises nineteen communities. It participated in the creation of the National Union of Community Museums and Ecomuseums of Mexico in 1994, and in 2000 it fostered the formation of the Network of Community Museums of America, which brings together grassroots representatives of communities and organizations in Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico. These networks offer opportunities for each participant community to learn from the others, and to develop ties of mutual support and solidarity. Through the network, multiple relationships can be expanded, establishing collaborations and alliances with other organizations and institutions. Negotiations can be carried out in more favorable terms, as communities are capable of proposing and executing increasingly comprehensive and sophisticated projects. Collective projects can address the needs of all the communities involved, and approach these needs from their own resources as an organized network. Thus networks generate a broader field of action and greater autonomy.
This autonomy does not develop without opposition. It is difficult for most national and private institutions to place themselves in the position of collaborators and to treat to community-based networks as equals. Most frequently they assume that they must exert their authority with regard to policies for the conservation and dissemination of heritage without entering into a dialogue with communities to consider their concerns. But community museum networks are developing their own voices and initiatives to meet this challenge. National networks of community museums are arising in many countries of Latin America. The Association of Community Museums of Costa Rica was established in 2009. There have been training events and national meetings in Colombia, Venezuela, and Bolivia, from which committees have been formed to move forward with initiatives to organize their own networks as autonomous, nongovernmental organizations of grassroots community representatives.
Networks help transform relationships of subordination and disempowerment in non-hegemonic communities. They allow explosions of discontent to be replaced by creative efforts of communities to transform their own conditions. They project the capacity for community self-governance to higher levels, expanding the reach of their organized action. In this sense, both community museums and their networks are tools that local communities can appropriate to help them face the future.