Una historia y cultura propias desde la institucionalización de los Estudios Culturales en un Museo en la frontera norte de México

The objective of this article is to analyze the discursive practices surrounding the permanent exhibition “Desert, Migration and Border” (DMF), inaugurated at the beginning of the 21st century at the University Museum of Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico. This exhibition was produced under the gaze of cultural studies, leaving museology and its proposals aside, so we focus the discussion on this area of study and argue that the institutionalization of cultural studies allowed, at the time, to update the discourse on local history and culture. We consider the DMF permanent exhibition as a locus where power, conflict, co-optation and resistance are interwoven around what is exhibited and interpreted. Methodologically, we started from “radical contextualism”, which allows us to situate, relationally and processually, the meaning of what the museum shows. To this end, the museum’s foundational documents were reviewed and, at the same time, focus groups, workshops and tours of the exhibition were organized. We conclude that the critical view of cultural studies did not necessarily upset the interpretative frameworks on time and culture that reproduce otherness in terms of power; therefore, there is a need to establish a political/institutional practice in the museum that takes up the proposed dynamism on discourse and culture, opening this field of study, based on the analysis proposed in this paper.