The return of cultural heritage to Latin America. Nationalism, norms and politics in Colombia, Mexico and Perú Pierre Losson. Mexico City, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Translated by Victor Altamirano 2024, 394 Pages

Abstract

The Return of Cultural Heritage aims to develop a complex network of actors, institutions, scenarios and discourses on the problem of the return of archaeological heritage objects in the cases of Colombia, Mexico and Peru in recent decades (basically at the end of the 20th century and so far in the 21st century). For his research, Losson chose a corpus that covers six cases in three countries. With regard to Colombia, he analyses the situation of the Quimbaya treasure that has been in the Museum of America in Madrid since the end of the 19th century, as well as the statues of Saint Augustine that have been in the Ethnological Museum of Berlin since the 1920s. In the case of Mexico, he chooses the Teotihuacan frescoes that were returned to that country in the 1980s by the Young Museum in San Francisco (United States); it should be noted that these mural fragments recorded their stay in this place since the 1970s. In the Mexican case, she also decided to work with the Moctezuma headdress, which had been kept in the collections of the Habsburg monarchy since the 16th century and is now in the collection of the Weltmuseum in Vienna. In the Peruvian context, she analyses the Machu Picchu Collection, which had been in the Peabody Museum at Yale University in the United States since the beginning of the 20th century, as well as the so-called Paracas textiles, kept until 2014 by the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden, which had been in this facility since the 1930s.