Official Stories was originally an installation of archival material intended as an inquiry into the transformation of the Mexican government's political investment in pre-Hispanic iconography and history. Two timelines charted the contemporary fate of nationalist symbols that have helped support Mexico's identification with its pre-colonial past. I am interested in this nationalist identification at a time when the requirements of globalization upon developing countries have turned allegiance in historical and geographical territories into both a burden for development and an economical investment. Using materials from almost 20 libraries and museums from Mexico and the US1 , this project focused on the contradictory institutional/governmental administration of imagery through two cultural practices: on the one hand, the historiography of pre-Hispanic civilization in public school textbooks, and, on the other, globe-trotting government- sponsored exhibitions of pre-Hispanic artifacts.

1. My research took place mainly in public and academic libraries in the US, such as the Los Angeles Public Library, the New York Public Library, the Libraries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Public Library, the repositories at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Harvard University. In Mexico, I worked in conjunction with The Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia, the Centro Nacional de las Artes, the Universidad Iberoamericana, the Library from Relaciones Exteriores, and several libraries from UNAM . The catalogues gleaned from these libraries and used in the installation are a selection of my findings and don't encompass absolutely all of the exhibitions of pre-Hispanic artifacts exhibited in the world from 1959 until now. Nevertheless, archeologists from Templo Mayor, administrators from Relaciones Exteriores and other experts in the field have checked my selection and agreed that it offers the most comprehensive list ever compiled.
Official Stories • Carla Herrara-Prats • Invisible Culture, Issue 12