Please register to attend.
Join us for the CLAS Welcome Reception after Dr. Rozental's talk from 5-6:30 PM! All are welcome!
Sandra Rozental is an anthropologist and Research Professor at the Centro de Estudios Históricos at El Colegio de México. She is the author of The Absent Stone: Mexican Patrimony and the Aftershocks of State Theft (Duke University Press, 2026) and co-director of the feature length documentary The Absent Stone (2013). Her research has focused on the politics of patrimony, the history of archaeology, collections and museums, archival practices, visual cultures, and the production of landscapes and geologies in Mexico. Her current project focuses on the aftermaths of the Parhíkutin volcano in the P'urhépecha regions of Michoacan and in the geological imaginaries of Mexico and the world. This research forms the basis of her feature documentary Bajo Lava, currently in production. She co-founded and coordinates the Interdisciplinary Ethnography Lab of El Colegio de México (LabEtno) and also works as a curator and multimodal media-maker, often in collaboration with filmmakers, photographers and contemporary artists.
ABSTRACT:
Where and to whom do ancient things belong? What happens when they are stolen—not by a colonial power, but by a national museum claiming them as state patrimony? What kinds of healing and restitution can follow? These are the questions that animate Rozental's book as it tells the story of the Piedra de los Tecomates, the largest stone monument in the Americas, popularly identified as the pre-Hispanic rain deity Tlaloc. In 1964, the Mexican state called in the military to forcefully relocate this 167-ton carving from the town of Coatlinchan to Mexico City’s National Anthropology Museum. Using in-depth historical and ethnographic research, Rozental explores how the stone’s absence continues to affect and unsettle Coatlinchan and its residents decades later, revealing the tensions between patrimony, nationalism, territory, memory, and materiality in Mexico. Questioning the premise that historical artifacts belong in museums under state-sanctioned care, The Absent Stone pushes contemporary critical scholarship on monuments and museum collections beyond the language of law, heritage, and cultural property, demonstrating how ancient things remain bound to the people and places they come from even after they are removed and displayed elsewhere.