Anca Miruna Achim, Teaching about the Past to Speculate about the Future in Mexico City

 

92-147. Anca Miruna Achim

SPEAKERS

Anca Miruna Achim, Will Bachman

 

2-147. Anca Miruna Achim
SPEAKERS
Anca Miruna Achim, Will Bachman

Will Bachman  00:02
Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with our classmate, Anca Miruna Achim, who goes by her middle name Miruna. Miruna. Welcome to the show.

Anca Miruna Achim  00:19
Thank you so much for having me here.

Will Bachman  00:22
So Miruna, tell us about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

Anca Miruna Achim  00:28
Okay, so let’s start with Harvard Yard, 1988 fall of 88 it’s probably the one I remember walking through in October, sometime in October, sometime in the fall, because the leaves were falling, and I really felt like this was it. This is exactly where I needed to be at the moment. And it’s one of these moments of fulfillment that one feels very few times in one’s lifetime: everything just  fit. Just to make it to there, it was a long and rough road

Anca Miruna Achim  01:09
to make it to Harvard Yard in 88 mostly because

Anca Miruna Achim  01:16
I left Romania as a refugee. I was born in Romania. I lived in a refugee camp for for a few months in Austria, and then the US was the only country that granted us political asylum. So I finally arrived in the US and and the only school I knew of in Romania was Harvard. So it  kind of stuck in my mind and became this obsession, and it was great when I got in and and it still feels like those four years were a lot more than four. It felt like it was really a lot more years, because a lot happened during those years at Harvard. I studied art history (Fine arts) at Harvard and focused mostly on Renaissance art history. After Harvard, I took a year off. I did some traveling. I went back to Romania. By then, Romania was no longer communist. Then I started coming in touch with many people from Latin America as I returned to the States, and I decided I really wanted to study something that had to do with Latin America. And I ended up going to Yale. I did Latin American Studies, in the departmet of Spanish and Portuguese. But it was no Harvard in the sense that New Haven is not Boston. And grad school is not undergrad, right? So it got really kind of too much the winters in New Haven, and everyone just so focused on their thesis. So I started traveling more and more to Mexico to do, research for my PhD, which was on colonial Latin America, I worked on narratives that have to do with history of science, even though I was working more in a Literature Department, but ended up working on how science and literature and and ritual came together. So I started coming to Mexico, where I am now, in Mexico City, and just stayed more and more and more until, in the end, I just stayed. I finished my PhD, and I came to Mexico City, and it was hard to find a job. It’s not, it’s it’s not a place where people retire much because there’s no no real like pension you can rely on afterwards. So people just stay in academia until they drop.  I am working at a public university. I teach courses on history of science, but also on formation of of collections and museums from a material culture perspective, where,  the object is really important to me, how how things change, and how they’re shaped by by social and political narratives and material limitations. How collections come together. I work a lot with the national archeological collection in Mexico City these days. So this is, this is sort of a very superficial account of what’s been going on and in the past, I don’t know, 30 something years? Oh, god,

Will Bachman  04:43
yeah, that is a whirlwind. Wow. I mean, I really have to ask, can you tell us a bit more about the leaving Romania as a refugee, like, what led to that, and just give us a little bit more narrative about how old were you when that happened, and why? Why, why did you become refugees? And what was the process like?

Anca Miruna Achim  05:06
Yeah, I was 13. I left with my parents, and we left on a trip to Austria, and we stayed on in Austria. In Austria,  close to Vienna, there is a refugee camp. It’s still a refugee camp, but it’s Syrian people now, and  refugees from the Middle East. But back then, it was all people from behind the Iron Curtain, and there were buildings that had been built by Hitler to house soldiers. This is where we stayed for a couple of months until … What led us to leave Romania ? Political persecution, especially for my stepdad. So you know, that’s that’s basically how it came together, that decision to leave, and then when we arrived, my parents applied, my stepdad and my mom applied to for asylum in Australia, in Canada, and the United States. And like I said, the first one we got was the United States. So we went to the States. It was a crazy trip. In a nutshell, to  give you a sense of of what it feels like to be a refugee, we left Austria in March and it was  cold, windy, you know, Central Europe. We were sponsored by a foundation in Los Angeles. So we showed up in LA in March with really heavy winter coats and and were picked up at the airport. It was really hot. We first stayed in a hotel on Sunset Boulevard, not the really plush, posh part of of Sunset, but  East LA.

Will Bachman  07:21
Your did your parents maybe like not tell you what was what they were planning when they were leaving for Austria that time, so that you wouldn’t spill the beans. Or did you know?

Anca Miruna Achim  07:34
We did know. We did know. My parents had  applied to go to Austria. They both lost their jobs, so we lived for a few years, for about two years, until we got permission to leave by selling things. So I would be coming back from school and a painting would be gone, or a chair, or, a porcelain cup,  a curtain. So we lived in this house that was just becoming emptier and emptier towards the end. So I did know, I did know that we’re going to leave, because we left legally.

Will Bachman  08:14
Oh, you left legally. So it wasn’t like you kind of just went for a tourist.

Anca Miruna Achim  08:17
Didn’t leave in the middle of the night. We were not chased by soldiers. No, we left legally.

Will Bachman  08:22
Oh, I see so your friends, you you were, like, saying goodbye to your friends and stuff. Yeah. I was, yeah. Oh, wow. Okay, so, so you managed to become a refugee and get permission to come to the US, yes, and all right, tell us a bit more about what you’re doing in Mexico now. Just double click there. Tell us a bit more about your areas of research and what you’re teaching and so forth.

Anca Miruna Achim  08:45
I teach public university, which is, you know, it’s sort of the reverse model from from the United States. Many provate universities tend to be technical schools or professional schools, like law schools. But public universities are what we would associate with an extensive educational program. They are also places where people from very different backgrounds can meet. Mexican society is quite hierarchical, quite structured by class and ethnicity. And universities are the one place where people do come together. I teach students from many backgrounds, including the sprawling peripheries of Mexico City.I f you’ve been here, if you fly over, it just kind of never ends. What t I  am interested in doing, more than the subject matter that I teach, is to enable students to see the classroom situation, the classroom setting, as a space where they get to ask questions more than find out answers. For many, many years, Mexico was ruled by a  a dictatorship. It was sort of a soft dictatorship, but it was a dictatorship. There’s only one party in power, a very paternalistic one. So there’s all these social programs that were started, but in return for votes. But in the past 20 years,  that has opened up. But its structures and ideologies and are sort of set in stone, and very literally, the Mexican state built its legitimacy on the pre Hispanic and the pre Hispanic past in Mexico is, is very much a stone, lithic, very big, solid objects that make up the past. So it almost feels that nothing can be moved, that everything is so heavy and so solid that it’s hard to  budge these things, you know, in the in a literal and in a symbolic way. And one of the things I’m really interested in in doing with students is  understanding that things have a history, and that the reason they are the way they are today, there’s nothing natural about that. There’s nothing obvious about that, so there’s a lot of room for asking questions, for unpacking truths that have been handed down and and for making their own interventions, right? So a lot of what I teach has to do with the past, but really has to do with the present.  I teach on how collections were formed on how the history of archeology, which is very much in alliance with the history of the Mexican state throughout the late 19th and 20th century, and I invite students to  take charge of very different kinds of relations With that past. A lot of them come from places where that past is very much alive. It’s alive because a lot of the ethnic groups are there, but also because they live among the ruins of that past. And the pre Hispanic past in Mexico is a past that belongs to the state, but at the same time, people who live with it, people who live among the ruins, develop very different relations with them. It’s not the stuff that you clean up and you put in a museum and you decide this is what it means. It’s the very different kinds of approaching that past through a much more sensorial, much more affective relationship. So this is, this is what I try to do.  I tried to instill that it doesn’t have to be the way it is, that there are alternate ways of caring, for, of reading, of interpreting those pasts, and that they can  intervene in those material cultures of the past, one actually has a say in the present and the way it’s it’s shaped the present. So this is what I tried to do. But I don’t know that makes any sense.

Will Bachman  13:46
Maybe, can you share, perhaps, like one specific story or two that helps illustrate the history of archeology that you teach, like one maybe controversy or issue or or I can

Anca Miruna Achim  14:00
share a few, one from the 19th century, and one much more recent from the 209th century. It’s It’s funny, if you go to Mexico City now the museum, if, if you land in Mexico City, and let’s say you’re at the airport and you ask cab driver, an Uber driver, whatever, to send you to a museum, they will send you to the Museum of Archeology. It’s called the Museum of Anthropology, but it is really archeology that

Will Bachman  14:30
really is and that is such a great museum, right? So you’ve been here, right? Oh, I mean, I spent actually one semester of business school as an exchange student. Aripade. So, okay, okay, so, yeah, we went to that. It’s, was it the museum?

Anca Miruna Achim  14:47
It is the first museum where one would go.

Will Bachman  14:50
Oh, yeah, definitely. Oh absolutely. And,

Anca Miruna Achim  14:52
I mean, they wouldn’t send you to a natural history museum. You probably haven’t even been there, have you?

Will Bachman  14:58
I probably not. Yeah. People

Anca Miruna Achim  15:01
don’t go because  the Mexican state took a bet on archeology. This is what represents the country that process happened in the 19th century. Now it’s more about biodiversity. It’s changing, right? But for the longest time, it was the stones, right? So you would, you would go there first, right? And Xochimilco as well. Yeah, you’d be going on the on the barges, and yeah, and  because it really is one of the few remnants of the pre Hispanic past. You know that the whole Mexico City was a huge lake. So the city is built on a lake that was drained between the 16th and the 19th century. So that Xochimilco, which is the southern part of the city, that has canal still Little Venice kind of canals is one of the few places that still ooks like the pre Hispanic past. So it’s quite interesting, right?  I wrote a book, Idols to antiquity. Forging the  National Museum of Mexico. To me it is interesting that right after, right after independence, after this country, became independent,  at the same time as many other Latin American countries become independent in the 1820s, they founded museums. And the museum in Mexico, when it starts, it’s everything, it’s it’s one of these collection of curiosities, a cabinet that very much is in keeping with what museums look like in the in the 19th century. And it is throughout the 19th century that natural history and object sof natural history, I don’t know, taxidermies, mineral collections, were little by little pushed out. And what stays in the museum, what becomes really associated with the National Museum here, is archeology. And what really interests me is, is how that happened? How did Mexico decide to bet that this is what will represent the country, right, that this is the national heritage? I study expeditions sent out to collect things in the 19th century: archeology, which was bieng collected in the course of  scientific expeditions to build a canal through the  isthmus of Tehuantepec, for instance. Of course, it never got built because, you know, the Panama Canal was a lot shorter. But the expedition collected pre Hispanic artifacts at the same time as they’re collecting  mineralogical samples, wood, information about what trees, what what resources would grow there, because they’re trying to sell these projects right to investors in London and other places. In the course of the  1840s expedition, archeological artefacts  came in at the same time as many other kinds of objects to the into the museum, with a logic that still informs museums today:  that these things are going to be much better off in Mexico City, in the capital, than, in  the heart of the communities that were taking care of them. And and there’s one story of these amazing urns,  big effigy urns from Southern part of the isthmus, in Pacific coast. And local people didn’t want to let these objects go. You know, they were still using them to ask for rains, but but the expeditionaries took them nonetheless. And they get, they get shattered to smithereens. So  to me that moment shows different forms of taking care of objects, the way museums have for the longest time imposed protocols of collection, of display, of study, while denigrating everyone else that has had access to to these objects before, right? We see that happening in in the United States as well. You know, people’s objects they’re in touch with that they use in daily life are being collected. They’re being put in museums as anthropological specimens. They had very different kinds of uses, right?

 

So, so that’s one moment, but then another moment that is something that one of my colleagues at the University has documented is, in 1964 when the museum moved to anew location, which is the one you visited, there’s this huge monolith that’s called Tlaloc, a rain deity, that was brought from a community about 30 kilometers from Mexico City into the city to be put in front of the museum. And the that moment was marked by state violence. The state sent  soldiers to get it. I’m talking about 160 ton monument  that was transfered to Mexico City. So you have an engineering  state project to build a new museum, to bring in all these things there, to collect everything that’s all over the country and put it in the museum, everything that mattered to them. And you have these moments where people would do not want to let their objects leave, and state used the army to bring these objects into Mexico City. So these are, these are the two moments of tension but there are many more t. I don’t think we have the time for that. But these are the two moments that I wanted to bring up precisely to show how people have been dispossessed of their own past and of the material cultures of the past. And what’s happening now is a trend that is that that wants to reverse that. There’s a lot more opportunity to open community museums and people  living with, surrounded by these objects, where they can put them on their own shelves or curate them. To tell different kinds of stories, right? Local stories, much more situated what they mean to them. So basically these are the two examples I could come up with for now.

Will Bachman  22:10
So have the kind of the norms changed now with collecting these kinds of artifacts from the past, in terms of professional archeologists out in the field the way they, I don’t know, get permission from the local community or how they study them and so forth. Talk to me about how that’s

Anca Miruna Achim  22:34
evolved. It has. I mean, they have changed. It’s more about implicit, tacit norms. On paper, it’s still pretty much the same. I still hear curators say, This is my gold, you know, talking about their collections that they’re in charge with of. And it’s like, well, no, this is actually from Southern Oaxaca, but whatever. But things have changed. It’s especially the younger generation of archeologists who would do go and ask for permission, and they thank people in their papers and writings. Archeology would be nothing without people who serve as local guides, who excavate. The campesinos, a know the terrain better than the archeologists. They understand stratigraphy better because they work with with soil. So it’s giving these people credit for what they know. And there is a lot more openness to the idea of of local museums and local collections and local ways of of curating and taking care of that past. So that that’s changed to some extent. The other thing that has changed, and that’s for the worse, is the  inability to access some places in in Mexico, especially in western Mexico, in Michoacan, in in Guerrero in southern Mexico, and more to the north and Sinaloa Sonora, because of organized crime. So there are fewer projects in archeology that are being carried out there. So that’s, that’s something that’s that’s happened in the past, I don’t know, few decades.

Will Bachman  24:33
Talk to me a bit about what your own experience has been like in this adopted country of yours. And you mentioned earlier that, you know, Mexico is a hierarchical, you know, kind of society, very struck, structured by class. Uh, what’s it been like for you to, you know, have that as adopted country? Uh.

Anca Miruna Achim  25:00
Well, when I first arrived here to do  research for my PhD, it was just the most amazing feeling getting off the plane. The city is so dynamic, and that’s when I it didn’t take me long to say I want to stay here. These first few years there was also, there were also, politically, a moment of change in Mexico City. The opposition party was winning , the first mayor of Mexico City who was not from the PRI,  the old party that ruled the country for seventy years, had won the election.  There was also the  Zapatista movement. So when I first came I also, I also worked a little bit — I don’t know if work is the word –, but I I traveled a lot to Chiapas, which was right then, in the midst of the Zapatista uprising, to deliver reading material for for children, because the Zapatistas were setting up schools there. So I had a little bit of the sense of of a society that was trying to find its way, trying to find a different way to, I don’t know, politically, culturally, just seemed so vibrant . New parties are vibrant for a while, but then they become old as well, and sort of stayed in their in their ways. The Morena party that’s that’s in ruling the country now, has managed to pull out, I don’t know, 13 million people out of extreme poverty. That’s that’s a great accomplishment, but, but I do feel that even though the political level, even though at the level of, oh, I don’t know, social programs this is going on, there’s still a lot to work on in terms of prejudices, in terms of the way these hierarchies are shaped. I live in a city, in Mexico City, and I work at a university where that is not present. I don’t see that but, but then you see comments, and you’re like, I can’t believe people still think that way. You know, very anti indigenous stances that I’ve seen. But at the same time, it is a place, Mexico City, where you know, gay marriage is allowed transgender or trans transitioning. There’s really huge March 8 marches, feminist marches. So you really do see that there are all these forces segments of society that are coming together, and there’s to not take things for granted anymore. So it’s, it’s been, I feel like there was a low there in the 2000 10s or so, but I feel like we’re going back to two people organizing more. So it was, I don’t know how to it’s been an interesting journey. For a while, I was little bit feeling like this was not going anywhere in terms of politically the country. But now I feel, I feel hope again, that that it’s it can that, you know, that it can be, that it is, it continues to be an interesting place to be at, and an interesting place in terms of the all these social forces that are meeting in these spaces. But I’m talking about Mexico City. Mexico city really is an exception to, I think, to the country, and I shouldn’t be generalizing, but it is a city that’s 20 million people, so it feels like a country, but at the same time, so you have this happening, you have different ways of relating to the past, different ways of imagining the future. One thing that I teach is science fiction. And this is more because it feels like it has nothing to do with with my obsession with the past, but it has everything to do with it, and it has everything to do with a history of science, sort of perspective I’ve been taking to things, um. But I teach science fiction written from the global south because it is a form of resistance against the kind of science fiction that the nuts and bolts or the films that are done in the so called Global North that always imagines the South as the end of the world. So what’s if you, if you think of Elysium, for instance, it’s what’s then India, the director, well, I don’t remember, but it’s set in Mexico City, in this very marginal parts of Mexico City, where he’s imagining the end of the world and and I’ve been very interested in seeing how people from living in the end of the world deal with it. How do you live in the ruins? How do you live in the ruins of late capitalism? So that sort of interest in understanding how people relate even in the so called end of the world, or that’s being sort of labeled as such, from, from,

Will Bachman  31:07
what are some of the what are some of the classics of science fiction filming from the Global South? From, uh huh, what are some of the classic novels or films of science fiction, Global South. You know, I could probably name some from Isaac Asimov from the north, but the global south. What are some ones that you teach?

Anca Miruna Achim  31:30
Well, the thing is, they’re not really classics, because this is a new genre. It’s pretty new in Latin America, science fiction. I mean, there’s Borges that one can talk about fantasy and ways of imagining and speculating about different kinds of worlds, but these kind of writings that deal with the social and cultural realities and material realities and speculate with them from the global south are new, and they’re new and they’re influenced by stuff that’s written in the north as well, like Octavia, Butler, Ursula Le Guin. they ask how do we speculate, and how do we  imagine things differently? And this is what’s happening in Mexico.  A young writer,Gabriella Damian, who just wrote a book called The song behind all things, translated into many languages. There’s Fernanda, Trias, in Uruguay.  Brazil has a really interesting film industry. There’s a film called bakurao, for instance. So there’s, there’s a lot going on, and a lot that’s going on really has to do not so much with a technological imagination, but with a cultural and social imagination. This is where I want to sort of draw the line between one kind of writing of these things, where you see, you know, the I don’t know, Star Wars, and everyone is wrapped up and has this amazing costumes and masks and and very closed bodies. Here, the idea is, how do we open, how do we connect to the other? So you have very interesting writings. There’s a novel called Gusano (worm), by a Colombian writer, Carlos Bermudez, I think, where every time you touch somebody, or you come in contact with somebody, there’s a little there’s molecules from their body that make it into yours. So you’re made up of everyone you see and you interact with. Which is which is true. After all, we are made up of all of our interactions. But this becomes physical. So there’s no such thing as a closed body,  a closed system. It’s more, how do we relate through these open networks that are how do we imagine those open networks?

Will Bachman  34:13
So before we go on to like the final question around, any tips for visitors to Mexico on you already mentioned the National Museum, of course, but for people that are interested in archeology that are going to Mexico, either DFA, the Mexico City or or, or anywhere else, what? What are some museums or sites that you would completely recommend?

Anca Miruna Achim  34:42
Okay, well, yeah, obviously the museum here, the Museum of Anthropology, like I said, it’s mostly archeology that people see there. Um, I would definitely go to Teotihuacan. It’s an amazing place to visit. I don’t know if you were, if you went, right?

Will Bachman  34:58
Yes, I’ve been there three or four. Of times. And I gotta say, for anybody who goes to Teotihuacan, totally recommend doing the balloon trip. Okay, you can do a early morning balloon trip over the pyramids, and that is the way to see them in my in my book.

Anca Miruna Achim  35:18
So I do a lot of trips to Teotihuacan, because I take students there. Some of them have very precarious backgrounds, and some of them have never left Mexico City. Have never been to Teotihuacan. And they cry when they see the pyramids for the first time. And I wish I were still I were still seeing them for the first time every time I see them, because they are, I don’t know –you were there too, they’re much bigger than one imagines. I’ve never done a balloon trip, but from the ground, if people do go to Teotihuacan, I would suggest not just going to climb the pyramid. There is a museum of mural paintings there that is spectacular from — Teotihuacan  was at its apogee in the first century, AD, first through the sixth century — I would go and see those paintings, those mural paintings from the first, second, third centuries, right? There’s Pompeii -like  residential compounds that people can visit, which show how these people live, surrounded by mural paintings. And so there’s more than just the pyramids, but the pyramids themselves are spectacular, impressive. So I would, I would definitely do, you know, the museum I’ll go to Teotihuacan. I would just try to stay out of the the two or three neighborhoods that are always in tourist books. You know, I try to go beyond that too. But you know, it kind of it’s a matter of what, you know the good restaurants are in these two or three neighborhoods, and then I will definitely go to the center of Mexico City, because it’s a center that’s 700 years old. We’re celebrating 700 years since the foundation of Mexico, Tenochtitlan, which is what was before Mexico City, by the Aztecs. And the very, very center of Mexico City is, is really a palimpsest of of of centuries and cultures, because you have the cathedral that was built by by the Spanish. But right behind the cathedral, there’s the so called Templo Mayor, that the temple built by the Aztecs that has been rising up. It’s it’s rising, every year, because before, they used to have buildings on top of it, and then when they realized they wanted to to to excavate the ruins of the temple. They tore down the buildings that were on top. And since you don’t have that weight on top, and Mexico is built on a lake, it’s like a sponge that’s been sort of expanding. So the the the temple in the center of the city, that the Aztec temple, the pyramids have been rising up out of the ground. So it’s a really crazy, you know, it’s just gonna taller and taller by the year. So it’s just a really special place to be in the very center of Mexico City. I would definitely go there.

Will Bachman  38:37
I don’t know, tell us. Let’s turn let’s turn back the clock. Tell us about any courses or professors you had at Harvard that continued to resonate with you in some way?

Anca Miruna Achim  38:49
Yeah, I had, I mean, the people, mostly from art history, and there was Joseph Koerner, who, I believe, is still a professor there, and he teaches, he teaches the northern, among other things, Northern Renaissance. So I remember sitting there in his classes on on Bosch and Bruegel and I don’t know, soaking it all in. I took various classes with him, and his work still important to me, and I still, I still read him the to this day, especially because I’m working on a project that is not focused on Mexico. It’s more focused on on the on some of these pre Hispanic collections as they reach among other people, Albrecht Dürer in in the 16th century. And he describes them. So Joseph Koerner, somebody that whose name just comes up all the time. And whose work I think about all the time as I do mine. And there’s John Sherman, who was teaching Italian Renaissance, and it was just so lovely to to hear him. And I took a course on on women in the Italian Renaissance with him. And then there’s Oleg Grabar. Oleg Grabar taught Islamic art, and he read peoms, Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium, and invited us to look k at the illuminated manuscripts. And just, you know, travel to completely different worlds. So, so I guess most of the people I could talk about it from from the field what I was studying. I look back now with regret, because as any undergrad, I wasn’t that smart in choosing my classes. So I would have taken classes with Stephen Jay Gould, which I didn’t. I mean, just there were people there that I had no idea were there. I mean, I now I realize who they were, but I didn’t at the time. I would have loved to take some classes that I didn’t. So maybe my, you know, others, others, my peers from that year, can tell me what those classes were like. Maybe somebody would have picked them.

Will Bachman  41:36
Yeah, yes, there’s, there’s so many to choose from, and we had so 32 slots to fill.

Anca Miruna Achim  41:44
32 slots and not the experience. I mean, I would just do it so differently now, you know, but, yeah, it’s many years later.

Will Bachman  41:54
Miruna, for listeners who’d like to follow up or find out more about what you’re doing, where’s the best place for them to find you online?

Anca Miruna Achim  42:04
Unfortunately I don’t have a big, you know, profile online.  I’m on academia edu, you know, people want to look at the stuff I’ve been doing, writing. I also have some videos there and interviews. But that’s, that’s pretty much it.  I’m not much online.

 

Will Bachman  42:26

Well, Miruna, thank you so much for the conversation and sharing your journey. Well, thank you so much.

 

Anca Miruna Achim  42:33

It was lovely to be able to share and to think back. And this is wonderful that you’re doing these, these interviews I look forward to hearing other people as well. Thank you.