Mexico’s overseas ministry introduced on 1 December the repatriation of 223 pre-Hispanic artefacts from the Netherlands. The ministry cited “energetic cooperation” between the 2 nations, one instance of a bigger international effort to revive cultural heritage objects to their rightful locations of origin.
Since 2018, Mexican President Andres Handbook Lopez’s administration has spearheaded a social media marketing campaign underneath the hashtag #MiPatrimonioNoSeVende (“My heritage is just not on the market”) that has aided within the restoration of greater than 9,000 objects from all over the world, offering a mannequin for different international locations affected by the dual legacies of colonialism and cultural exploitation like Cambodia and Iraq.
In August of this yr, Mexican secretary of tradition Frausto Guerrero highlighted the administration’s method in an official assertion, praising “voluntary supply” procedures that “increase consciousness” with regards to repatriation extra broadly. The Netherlands authorities additionally returned a set of 343 pre-Hispanic ceramics to Panama earlier this yr.
In an announcement, the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia (INAH), the Mexican authorities’s heritage organisation, mentioned the 223 objects returned by the Netherlands dated from many various intervals spanning the thirteenth century BCE to the sixteenth century CE, and belong to quite a lot of cultures hailing from each the Pacific and Atlantic coasts.
In the identical assertion, Inah denounced a latest Paris public sale that included objects from Mexico, which bought for a number of thousand euros.
