that the preparations for the celebrations related to the four-hundredth
anniversary of the ‘discovery’ of America in 1892 took place in Spain (Peiro ́
Martı ́n 1995: 98).
It was only with the re-emergence of a certain nationalist pride for the
lost Spanish empire in the celebrations of 1892 that interest was raised.
An American historical exhibition (Exposicio ́n Histo ́rico-Americana) was
organized. Yet, even here, Spanish frailty was put in evidence: instead of
being a celebration of the glory of Spain, after several discussions the display
became a sum of exhibitions by several countries consisting of Mexico,
Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Ecuador,
Peru, Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina, as well as the US, Sweden, Norway,
Denmark, Portugal, Austria, Germany together with the representatives of
the Spanish state formed by the City Council of Habana, the Body of
Mining Engineers, the Archive of the Indies in Seville and the National
Archaeological Museum (Marcos Pous 1993b: 69). The newly formed inter-
est in Latin America by Spanish scholarship was, however, quickly forgot-
ten in later years, especially after the loss of the last colonies, Cuba and
Puerto Rico (as well as the Philippines), in 1898 (Marcos Pous 1993a; Ve ́lez
Jime ́nez 1997).
The re-emergence of national pride in ancient Great Civilizations in
Mexico, Peru, and ArgentinaThe interest by the European powers and the US was contested and controlled
by nationalist archaeology. In the last third of the nineteenth century the
institutionalization of archaeology in Mexico and Peru experienced a renais-
sance. The presence of Aztec and Inca monumental ruins had been used to
inspire national pride during independence in the 1820s. This had led to early
institutionalization with the creation of museums and legislation, a surge that
the global growth of racism in the 1840s provisionally annihilated, leading to
the intellectuals’ temporary rebuVof their links with the native past in the
central decades of the century. The alienation from the pre-Columbian past
explains the inadequate institutionalization of native American archaeology
at this time. The earlier work of the 1820s was lost. In Spanish America,
nothing similar to the explorations propelled by Brazil’s Historic, Geographic,
and Ethnographic Institute in the late 1850s and early 1860s, and the early
research in museums in the 1860s and 1870s (Chapter 4), was initiated.
Mexico was a partial exception to this. There, the mid nineteenth-century
Indianist discourse seen in Brazil was echoed, if with some delay, by some of
Latin America, China, and Japan 181