Twelfth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

La Ventanilla is a small coastal community in Oaxaca, Mexico founded in the 1960s by displaced peasants (campesinos) and coffee plantation workers from the nearby Sierra del Sur mountain range. In 1996 the community founded a cooperative (Servicios Ecoturisticos de La Ventanilla) and began offering guided tours of an adjacent mangrove. Over the years they have been stuck by two hurricanes and added several conservation programs to their ongoing activities including: reforestation, crocodile population monitoring, and sea turtle nest patrolling, among others. In 2013 leadership of the cooperative invited the copresenters to consult on the creation of a museum to support their interpretation of their ecotourism and conservation work. The presenters frame this ongoing project from the perspective of “Participatory Action Research” (PAR), a collaborative approach to social science research design and methodology that has developed since the 1970s. In La Ventanilla, the authors have used the principles and practices of PAR and applied them to what has become a collaborative ecomuseum project, an approach they call “participatory action museology.” This paper outlines the principles of participatory action museology and reflects upon their application in 2016-18 to a digital auto-photo documentation (“photo-voice”) component of the wider project.