Collecting Mexico: Museums, Monuments and the Creation of National Identity is a book about history, but not strictly a history book. This review is thus unfair by necessity: it is written by a historian. The book examines objects and the idea of patrimonio as instrumental in creating and spreading a national identity. In its thematically defined chapters, it deals with nineteenth-century paintings by J. A. Arrieta, Germán Gedovius and J. M. Velasco, archaeological pieces in the Mexican National Museum, Mexico City's monuments, Mexico's pavilion at the 1889 Paris World Fair, and some statistics developed by official agencies. It is based on some close, quite interesting readings of images; on the annotated catalogue of the Banamex art collection; on Ida Rodríguez Prampolini's marvellous published collection of nineteenth-century art criticism in Mexican periodicals; on part of the excellent recent art historiography that has rewritten the history of art during Porfirian times; on a portion of the histories of archaeology, museums and anthropology; on official publications (annals of the National Museum and statistical compendia); and on insights from literature and cultural studies departments. In addition, the book makes use of 18 documents from two of Mexico City's archives: this comprises ‘extensive archival materials’, according to the book's back cover.

The chapters are uneven in their empirical richness and in their interpretative reach. Various concepts – fetishism, melancholy and others – come to the fore as key metaphors of a past unseen. But, like any metaphor, these work only when they can restructure a selected linguistic domain. So, for instance, the author states: ‘I do not view the central drive behind national patrimony as capitalist per se’ – that is, objects are not mere symbolic lies that seek to make money – and continues: ‘What I claim does lie at the very core of patrimony is a dialectical tension between those two opposed systems of values’ (p. 4). That a Velasco painting was an aesthetically and nationalistically charged fetish and, simultaneously, merchandise seeking value in the art market is rather obvious, unless we accept prima facie that someone, somewhere, somehow has proved this to be otherwise.

Shelley E. Garrigan lucidly explains how late nineteenth-century Mexican painters and critics gradually discovered the market potential of self-exoticism, debating thus how to brand ‘Mexico’ in the international art markets. At the same time, they sought to satisfy a small but growing domestic demand for not necessarily ‘Mexican-looking’ images. As the author moves along in her interpretation, however, she falls into the fetishism of fetishism which advances as a surprise what has already been argued by the historiography of the last two decades: ‘The consideration of fetishism makes a meaningful contribution to the concept of modern origins that grounds this study. Taken together, the proliferation of parades, public commemorations, constructions, and representative spaces that staged the metaphorical rebirth of the Mexican nation during the late nineteenth century created a collective perspective that was to be both learned and, at the same time, quite paradoxically taken as given’ (p. 49).

At times, then, the book seems to be summarising the vast historiography on these topics, although in a disturbingly selective way – it favours the historiography in English, even of scholars who are consulted but whose many relevant contributions to its topics are reduced to their few available works in English, such as Enrique Florescano and Mechtild Rurtsch. At other times, the book seems to be theoretically ‘updating’ that historiography by phrasing it according to prevalent academic vernaculars. Garrigan does provide interesting new connections and conclusions about the idea of patrimony and the social role of objects. But it is not easy to summarise the added historiographical worth advanced by the book in the understating of the use value and exchange value of objects.

The chapter on painting, in this reviewer's unauthorised opinion, succeeds better in blending text (nineteenth-century art criticism), images (though very few and chosen through undisclosed criteria) and ‘theory’ in a compelling interpretation of the simultaneous emergence of a nationalist stock of images and an art market. The rest of the chapters add thought-provoking nuances here and there but contribute neither new research nor radically different perspectives from those already proposed by Luis Gerardo Morales, Laura Cházaro, Charles Hale, Luis Vázquez, Carmen Ruiz, Paul Gillingham, Fausto Ramírez and many others not consulted in this book, or at best only partially consulted.

But this reviewer's is an unauthorised opinion, for by now the variegated kinds of historical scholarship available in English-speaking universities are well established. There is the boring, supposedly atheoretical history for and by history departments; there is the more imaginative and undoubtedly theoretical history belonging to art history and history of science departments; and there is the prêt-à-porter history for and by Spanish and Portuguese/Romance language/cultural studies departments. This reviewer, being illiterate in the former kind of history, cannot judge, by its own lights, the added value of the kind of history this book advances. Initiates in these endeavours ought to read and judge the book better. I wonder only about its use of history.

Words are like bones, said Adolphe Pictet; they can tell entire stories. The same could be said of objects. But deciphering the history that objects tell can be done either by writing a history in which they make sense or by assuming an already established history to which they belong, as Collecting Mexico does. Indeed, history is not very intriguing for this book; that is, it is already known. What is important here is how that history can be phrased defiantly, selecting an image here and there, adding some contemporary theorist, and trying to say something revealing not about the past but about the very attempt of renaming things anew – and therein lies the historiographical marvel of choses, of objects: they endure in welcoming new paroles. The core of the book thus is in inviting new thinking through new phrasing – not a small contribution – but this is done without a minimum level of historiographical rigour. Findings and interpretations are framed in a textbook perspective of Mexican history, and the book overuses US textbooks on that subject. Valuable theoretical and interpretative insights lose stamina as a result of the book's devotion to textbook dates, names and facts, which are often simply wrong, as when the author talks about Benito Juárez leading a successful liberal reform in 1876. Indeed, historians will find many, many factual errors and historiographical misinterpretations in this book, but these inaccuracies, disturbing as they are for the fastidious historian, might not seriously affect the book's interpretations. For here history, other than as textbook scaffold, matters little. Hence the unresolved enigma: if specificity and nuances in history seem so secondary, why ‘theorise’ something so adamantly unimportant?