Building on Whose Capital? Mexico’s Memorial a las victimas de violencia and its Regime’s Recollection of the Past

• In Event: Cooptations: History’s Lesson in Sampling Visual Narratives

Abstract

Monuments make place by fixing a regime’s vision of an incorporated past to a specific location. The metal sheets that stand as sentinels erected at the recently inaugurated Memorial a Las Victimas de la Violencia en México were commissioned by the outgoing PAN political party in efforts to widely claim to never forget events in Mexico’s violent past and memorialize the victims of many tragic events. The project, however, was not inaugurated until after the PRI party regained presidential control a year later. Ironically, the incoming regime fumbled the political opportunity to ameliorate relations with the many victims’ representatives and what was to be a triumph of Mexico’s assertion to its citizen’s plight, reinvigorated claims of government’s inept understanding of its constituents’ needs. This paper mines the multiple layers of political maneuvers made material in this monument and explores the ways visual culture accommodates multiple voices of the past to negotiate and assert new political realities.

Author

• Eulogio Guzman, School of the Museum of Fine Arts