Mobilizing the Monolith: Patrimonio and the Production of Mexico through its Fragments

Sandra Rozental
Sandra Rozental has a Bachelors' degree in Culture and Politics and an M.A. in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University. She received her PhD in 2012 in socio-cultural anthropology from New York University. Her dissertation "Mobilizing the Monolith: Patrimonio and the Production of Mexico Through its Fragments" explores cultural property, national patrimony and heritage claims generated by the extraction of archaeological objects from local communities. Her research was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, a fellowship at NYU's Humanities Initiative and a ACLS-Mellon Dissertation write up grant. She has taught graduate seminars at Mexico's National Autonomous University and at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City where she is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Anthropology Program. She has published "Becoming Petrified: The Making of Archaeological Personhood" in Estas Ruinas que Ves/These Ruins That You See (Sternberg Press, 2008), "La Creacion del Patrimonio en Coatlinchan: Ausencia de Piedra, Presencia de Tlaloc" in La Idea de Nuestro Patrimonio (CONACULTA, 2011) and articles based on her doctoral research that will appear in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and in Anthropological Quarterly in 2014. She has worked as an exhibitions researcher and curator in museums of anthropology and popular culture and as a cultural journalist in Mexico. She has also collaborated with artist Mariana Castillo Deball and with art curators on several installations in museums and galleries. Most recently, she co-directed a feature-length documentary with filmmaker Jesse Lerner titled "The Absent Stone" (2013) that has received several awards and is currently screening in film festivals in Mexico and abroad.
www.lapiedraausente.com
Assistant Professor
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico