The Contested Crown Repatriation Politics between Europe and Mexico (original) (raw)

Much of the literature engaging the repatriation of museum collections has focused on claims made by postcolonial nation-states, or by Indigenous communities in settler-colonial contexts such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Latin America, specifically, has been relatively absent from these debates because of the enduring legacies of Indigenism as a key politics of nation making, justifying the appropriation of Indigenous cultural production in favor of the nation. The very few instances of repatriation in the region have been negotiated between specific museums and private collectors, who have returned objects to countries of origin, rather than through centralized state-led policies. In even fewer cases, artifacts and human remains have been returned not to national governments but to the communities from which they were removed. In 2022, in an unprecedented act of recognition and restitution within a contemporary Latin American nation, the Chilean National Museum of Natural History returned a Moai, one of Rapa Nui´s iconic stone monuments, to the island.