Creating and Contesting Knowledges at the Museo Migrante

The Museo Migrante (MuMi) is a travelling pop-up exhibition constructed by and for indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in collaboration with the locally based NGO Voces Mesoamericanas. MuMi is designed to make visible the complex roots and consequences of domestic as well as international migration by revealing the stories of those who move—and of those who can, or do not. Its interventions aim not only to inform but also to examine the processes and material culture of knowledge and memory construction—both collective and individual—and to invite reflection on identity, dignity, rights, and freedom. In addition to its function as a tool for political education, we explain how the naming and operation of MuMi further interrupts popular, nationalist ideas about ‘the museum’, including whose voices, images, art, and ideas ‘belong’ within it. In contrast with the calcifying framing of Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Antropología, in which indigenous peoples and cultures are consigned to a distant past, MuMi presents images, texts, objects, and creative activities that are continuously reshaped and reinterpreted as it travels between locations, facilitating conversations across and within communities that consider pasts, presents, and possible futures. Throughout the chapter, we guide readers to engage in a series of activities that visitors might encounter at MuMi. In doing so, we demonstrate how interaction, affect, and personal reflection can not only highlight the lived realities of (im)mobility, but may also open spaces for forms of knowledge production that challenge the dominant narratives of the modern nation-state.