Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Leading to the Smithsonian’s institution-wide celebration of Christopher Columbus’s fortuitous face-planting into the Western hemisphere, curators and administrators at the institution’s National Museum of American History sought to develop an exhibit capable of representing the State of New Mexico as an ideal space for subsuming the histories and legacies of Spanish colonialism and Indigenous peoplehood into a distinctly American narrative. Museum staffers in Washington indeed worked diligently to narrate this national imaginary wherein the cultural persistence of non-white societies could be effectively communicate American values of cultural diversity, pluralism, and tolerance to an increasingly diverse U.S. public. Utilizing Pueblo Indian and nuevomexicano cultural patrimonies as the representational arbiters for this project, curators were equally forced to qualify these pre-American cultural histories and legacies with their historical, political, social, and cultural complexities. Like their counterparts in the private sector, Smithsonian cultural policymakers would ultimately outsource this intellectual labor by contracting local consultants to collect cultural materials and memories from their own communities. Ironically, it would be one of these cultural fieldworkers who consistently undermined the exhibit’s conceptual integrity by purposefully injecting nonrecognized Indigenous - in this case, Genízaro–perspectives into his work for the Smithsonian. It is with this body of knowledge which this paper intends to think with to consider both the pitfalls and possibilities of museological, archival, and ethnographic methods in relation to Genízaro modes of knowledge acquisition, production, and dissemination which manifest within the very spaces where they should not, but do nonetheless.