MIGUEL FERNÁNDEZ FÉLIX
During the twentieth century, Mexico developed ways of caring for its cultural heritage. The immense historical and artistic wealth of our country has rendered cultural offerings, management, research, and care of our historical, ethnographic, and artistic heritage to be likewise diverse, thus giving life to differences in procedures and systems that must be debated.
The present document aims to set forth the challenges regarding Mexican museums at the start of the twenty-first century.
• The practices established by cultural policy have become obsolete, resulting in the birth of a “new museology” characterized by renovations in design, installations, and subject matter that are on the way to breaking free of this centralized policy. To study public reception, management practices, et cetera has become essential. This implies the professionalization of guides, educators, museographers, museologists, caretakers, psychologists, administrators, and so on.
• The centralization of national identity values is visible in the distribution of the republic’s museums. There is a need for pluralization.
• There is a lamentable lag in the training of museum professionals and specialists devoted to museological research who can contribute to the improvement of the quality of conservation services and facilitate access to knowledge about museums.
• The cultural consumption of the INAH (National Institute of Anthropology and History) and the INBA (National Institute of Fine Arts) has exceeded the conditions of infrastructure, management, and financing with which these institutions were originally created in the years between 1939 and 1947.
• There is an unequal distribution of supply and demand. The majority of museums are in the capital, while in Nayarit, Colima, Veracruz, or Tamaulipas there are around two hundred thousand inhabitants per museum. Chronic shortages of resources, and marginalization, exist in the greater part of Mexico’s museums.
With the consolidation of the modern state, the institutes played a fundamental role as primary enunciators and guarantors of what, in the eyes of Mexicans, their culture should be.
• The goals that gave rise to the INAH are not current; the objective was to nourish Mexico’s mestizo pride in the consolidation of identity, and in defense of historical riches facing looting.
• The artistic sphere lacked an organism that would watch over its most celebrated works in the same manner. The INBA was born out of the need to alleviate this situation; the importance of arts education and the cultivation of literature were its central objectives.
This is a fundamental point that requires rethinking. The pressing issues are no longer identity and the construction of the past, but rather the autonomy that leads to more profound and current values. It is now essential to develop a program to foment research that transcends the tasks imposed in the past. Likewise, it is necessary to develop diffusion, information storage, educational outreach, services to the community, and so on.
1. The coordinating axis of the functions of tracking and research is the visitor; it is necessary to have an understanding of the variety of audiences attended to by national, regional, private, and community museums in our country. Museums have lost their guardianship mission, and the awareness of the diversity of audiences renews and solidifies their purpose.
• Research on symbolic mediation exercised by museums should take into account the production of micro-identities, which entails a study of the public and its interaction, the rethinking of purposes, and the creation of a new awareness among individuals from diverse communities, underlining the importance of the museum as a media institution.
• It is essential to outline strategies to create better studies on the public, for which it will be necessary to train staff, which means investing in specialized personnel.
2. Collections are the basic strength that, together with visitors, makes possible the existence of museums. Today’s challenge is to establish a standardized catalogue of holdings, and to set into motion a network that will allow them to be known and valued.
• Registering and cataloguing according to minimum standards is indispensable in order to guard, administrate, and care for a collection.
• A standardized database for consultation by the public is fundamental in order to facilitate the work of planning exhibitions, caring for cultural heritage, and disseminating information to the public. In the short term it is urgent to have minimum authorized entries by index card for each work, and make them available on the web.
• Adequate policies must be developed that enable access to channels for the raising of funds devoted to the purchase of works, and recognition of their social value.
3. With regard to the political aspect, there are three types of museum institutions: those that rely on the state, those that belong to a community, and private entities. Basic lines of action exist in the form of internal standards, project development, annual programs or six-year programs, et cetera. Some needs are continuity of personnel to guarantee long-term performance, and training, evaluation, and incentives for administrative, manual, and technical workers. These dynamics can be improved through a plan that calls for the involvement of administrative, academic, and management indicators. For this it is necessary to create:
• Channels that facilitate interaction among institutions.
• Transparency of management mechanisms in each museum to facilitate communication and cooperation. This will make possible joint projects and new channels of cooperation. (But this should take into account differences and necessities determined by local laws in order to consider what is characteristic to each area so that institutions that do not, for some reason, have the possibility of taking part are not affected.)
4. With regard to standards, it is necessary to review the legislation for state museums and the regulation of cultural heritage, as well as to systematically inform workers about the rules guiding their work. If, as a result of this study and review, there is a need to change the law, museums should send a delegation to the government to promote such reforms.
5. One of the principal obstacles facing Mexican museums is the scarcity of resources and the difficulty, due to fiscal and administrative obstacles, of channeling funding that has been obtained. Trade union policies and fiscal strategies have, on occasion, made effective channeling of funds practically impossible. Private initiative has at times seen itself dissuaded from participating in the attainment of a public museum’s objectives given the difficulties established by law regarding the entry and distribution of resources. A major challenge is the consolidation of funds for investment in infrastructure to help standardize the quality of services.
6. Museum workers have been highly neglected. It is imperative to constitute axes of coordination that enable their adequate professionalization, as well as relationships with public and private educational institutions that train professionals in the areas of museology and museography. Correct evaluation of museum workers and personnel should be a goal, as well as raising awareness of museum workers’ public function (the corresponding government department would have to enlarge its functions in this area, analyzing the impact with the community, the mission of this work, symbolic mediation, and its purposes and results). Likewise, it is necessary to acquire a basic staff to guarantee quality and continuity in the event of political changes, and to be able to rely on a structure with a minimum number of positions. In addition, salaries should be made comparable across a category, with remuneration according to national standards that foresee budget possibilities and the needs of each museum. A network to announce existing job vacancies with their corresponding job descriptions would be of great value.
7. Tourism: For administrations, historical heritage has become an article of tourist consumption and an instrument for local development. The relationship between cultural heritage and tourism is becoming stronger, and should be seen as a continual source of feedback with major social impact, with the result, as well, of making a national system of small-scale museums ever more sustainable. The construction of a museum potentially means recognizing the social value of the public and the private. The insertion of museums into tourist enclaves also helps to develop projects of postindustrial urban reorganization, as has occurred in England, Germany, and Austria. Collective memory has taken on relevance in museums in tourist enclaves because they participate in the production of universal iconic symbols. To speak now of Aztecs, Maya, Romans, Jews, or Egyptians also implies acceptance of the fact that we possess images of post-museographic discourses. Historic districts, archaeological and monument sites, beaches, and museums are immersed in circuits of cultural consumption that tend toward feedback. It is appropriate here, however, to ask if it is possible to avoid the total mercantilization, the unilateral surrender of cultural heritage to private companies. How can we preserve the public objectives that gave rise to the creation of the museum without subordinating everything to profit? The need emerges here to guarantee the supervision of standards by the state. At the same time, it is essential that civil society activate its role of responsibility in the preservation of historical heritage.
What is posited here is a profound revision of the functions of recording, coordinating, refereeing, and evaluating museums, independently of their origins, budget sources, or institutional affiliations. One of the challenges for museums is to attain greater autonomy in three areas: the administrative, the political, and the financial. Only in this way will it become easier for national and regional museums to find the right course for their social projection and the redefinition of their mission.
What is still needed is the development of fundamental elements to track each of the points referred to here, and the clear task of de-bureaucratizing a sector that urgently needs to think about ever-more-agile mechanisms of self-funding and self-sustainment.
Culture is indispensable for elaborating strategies of media persuasion, transmission, and communication that will make consensus and action possible. It is undeniable that one of the most critical debates focuses on turning the state not into a protagonist, but into one more agent, the guarantor of technical and standards oversight. To avoid the massive bureaucracy that has directed culture from the top down, the government should design practices that contribute to co-responsibility with civil society and the political class. This entails the construction of consensus and networks with viable proposals that lead toward the organization of civil society around a common cause. Intellectual elites and authoritarianisms within governmental entities have no place in this purview of co-responsibility. Transition to a new museology of social, democratic, and plural participation must take place. It is a matter of adopting a creative role in strengthening the autonomy of society, and of corporate interests created by the cultural apparatus of the last half of the twentieth century.
(Translated by Francisca González Arias)