Mexico’s international 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 world effort to revive cultural heritage objects to their rightful locations of origin.
Since 2018, Mexican President Andres Guide Lopez’s administration has spearheaded a social media marketing campaign beneath the hashtag #MiPatrimonioNoSeVende (“My heritage is just not on the market”) that has aided within the restoration of greater than 9,000 objects from around the globe, 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 reference to repatriation extra broadly. The Netherlands authorities additionally returned a set of 343 pre-Hispanic ceramics to Panama earlier this yr.
In a press release, 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 durations 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 current Paris public sale that included objects from Mexico, which offered for a number of thousand euros.
