Filling in the Picture: Nineteenth-Century Museums in Spanish and Portuguese America

Abstract

This special issue comprising articles on Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico is devoted to museums established over the long nineteenth century in Spanish and Portuguese America. It features a variety of museums: from national to provincial, from monumental to one-room shows, from general to those devoted to a single subject, from lost to still existing. Awide variety of institutions in North, Central, and South America are examined in a century that witnessed the last reforms of the Iberian empires, the impact of Napoleonic politics on the Atlantic world, the long processes inaugurated by the wars of Revolution and Independence, the establishment of the Brazilian empire, and the convoluted configuration of the new Latin American Republics. The contributions cover a period that begins with the establishment of new general museums in Mexico (1825) and Bogota (1823). Miruna Achim, in her article, calls this moment ‘the trial years’. A complete continental survey would also have included studies of museums founded in Rio de Janeiro (1818), Buenos Aires (1823), Santiago de Chile (1823), Lima (1826), and Charleston (in South Carolina), all of which faced the same difficulties. A number of the following articles remark, in fact, on the ephemeral character of those creations. Institutional accounts and current historiography have tended to make a connection with later, surviving establishments. From a historiographical point of view, however, one may ask whether it is legitimate to insist on these connections, which tend to canonize a notion of permanence attaching to present-day museums. The period covered in this volume finishes with the establishment late in the nineteenth century of museums devoted to art, history, or natural history in Sao Paulo, Salvador in Bahia, Amazonas, La Plata, and Buenos Aires. By discussing all these institutions in one place, we want to address historiographical problems that museum history journal, Vol. 9 No. 1, January, 2016, 3–12