*Disclaimer: the following text is derived from my personal experiences as a POC in a museum setting.

This morning I came across an article discussing the ways museums can be predatory and cause harm to the communities they purport to help. As a Mexican art historian and curator, whose entire academic and professional career has taken place in western institutions, I have witnessed and been involved in a variety of situations where my identity has been used as a way to lend credibility to certain initiatives. Now, I want to make it perfectly clear that most of my museum experiences have been productive and this is done not in the spirit of payback but out of love for the discipline and a wish to make it better for those who come after me.

Having said that, and for my arguments to make sense, it is necessary I explain certain particularities about Day of the Dead that are often missed by the general populace. First and foremost, Day of the Dead is a religious ritual linked both to catholic and pre-hispanic religions. Second, the rituals and ceremonies involved are aimed at remembering past family members that have passed on. It is a private practice that generally takes place in either graveyards or at home. Third, parades are not a part of Day of the Dead in Mexico (the movie Specter is the reason now Mexico has Day of the Dead parades), religious processions are. The difference being in both tone and objective as processions while still festive, are more focused on a formal organized process with the aims of arriving to cemeteries in order to begin the night long vigil where the ofrendas are located and involves prayer.

Having laid down this brief explanation of Day of the Dead, allow me to share with you an experience I had during my time studying in the UK. Being the only Mexican student in the whole art history faculty I was asked to participate in creating a day of the dead celebration day for the university’s museum. I accepted and proceeded to get instructions on what the aims of the holiday was supposed to feature and to design activities for families to engage with. At the time I was not as experienced in heritage, cultural studies nor colonialism and as such I proceeded from my own cultural participation of the holiday. However being an urban atheist white-presenting Mexican, the Day of the Dead is more akin to halloween than the actual celebration as performed by more devout, mixed-race Mexicans.

And here is where we witness the first example of performative inclusiveness in museums. I was asked to participate in this event for my nationality not my knowledge and participation in the holiday. Oftentimes when museums approach communities the approach fails to account for participation in the desired subject, class, race, privilege and other subtleties of the target culture. This results in non-expert individuals providing their own interpretation of practices/objects/activities that are alien to them. In my case it resulted in me not objecting to the removal of all religious imagery from the ofrenda turning it into a neutered object, completely stripped of its meaning.

The reason religion was stripped from the ofrendas leads me into the second example of performative inclusiveness: inclusiveness is only allowed as long as the dominant hegemony remains unchallenged and comfortable. In my Day of the Dead example, it was decided by the institution that religious imagery should be stripped from the entire celebration in order to be more inclusive and to be more confortable to the protestant public of the museum. At this point the Day of the Dead celebration despite featuring an ofrenda as its centerpiece, had in effect turned into Mexican themed halloween. Said ofrenda lacked a dedication to a particular person although it would have been even more problematic had they decided to use a protestan individual in a catholic ritual. Traditional imagery such as crosses and other religious iconography, was also removed. I found it interesting that the organizers tried to make an association between protestantism and the color orange, ignoring the ritual meaning of marigolds in the ritual. In fact, orange marigolds are used to create a path and lead the spirits from the entrance of the building to the ofrenda.Finally, I was asked to find and provide scary stories for storytellers to use in their activities with children. Again, a halloween practice was inserted into the celebration as it fit the western perceptions of the holiday. This was done as a substitute to the calavera which is a traditional practice where people write tongue in cheek obituaries of their friends and family and then given to the person in question as a gift. I did end up suggesting more appropriate activities such as papel picado activities where children could create day of the dead related bunting and paper marigolds to decorate the space. Not everything was negative and I did manage to find a way to integrate some aspects of the traditional elements of the celebration including importing sugar skulls and copal to at least have some authentic elements in the ofrenda.

In the end, the celebration was considered a success and feedback was overwhelmingly positive. It is however unfortunate that this event contributed to the westernization of Day of the Dead and its transition into a non religious Mexican equivalent of halloween. This is not an isolated example and we can see it happen with non western cultures over and over again, authenticity is not valued and community feedback is appreciated only as so far as it remains compliant (as I was) and provides a veneer of inclusiveness and diversity to events whose main goal is drive visitors in, entertain them and then maybe educate them. Museums have to move forward from this form of performative inclusiveness and find actual experts, who in some cases may be native to the culture in question and in others may be people who have studied and understand what is being presented, and ideally both, and more importantly be brave enough to allow them to operate unimpeded rather than westernize cultures in order to make them more palatable to their public. The failure to do so perpetuates the traditions of colonial erasure, orientalism, and policing aspects of native cultures that do not fit western sensibilities.