Museo Comunitario Del Valle de Xico - Mexico

A community museum is reshaping the past and present identity of a settlement in the outskirt of Mexico city, through a bottom-up participative process.

WHERE AND WHEN?

Valle de Chalco, Mexico City, Mexico.

WHAT’S GOING ON?

Valle del Chalco is a municipality in the Federal State of Mexico, at the outer limit of the Mexico City conurbation. It is built mostly without any planning process in former rural territories remediated from the existing lake by the Spanish to establish a colonial Hacienda. Here great flows of immigrants have settled starting from the ’80s, coming from all over Mexico attracted by working opportunities ofthe big metropolis. The Museo Comunitario started in the ’90s when the settlers discovered archeological finds while building their houses and decided to collect them creating spontaneously a museal collection. An abandoned warehouse part of the old Hacienda was occupied and freed from debris to guest the museum.

The initiative became a vibrant community project supporting the formation of a shared identity of the new citizens appropriating the remnants of the pre-hispanic cultures once inhabiting the territory.

INFO & LINKS
We visited Valle the Chalco and interviewed the founder of the Museum during the secondment for the Cocreation project in November 2018, and setting up a collaboration for a participative art project to be realised next year in the frame of ReCentering Periphery.