It's the beginning of February and it's hot. We literally navigate piles of rubble on foot, following Museo signs. The streets are dusty and the locals are staring at and smiling at the gringos. The Museo is a house. For a moment we worry that we've misunderstood something, and consider turning back, but a young man in his 20s meets us on the stoop before we can knock. In Spanish we ask about the decaying advertisements (painted Tyrannosaurus Rex, the word "fossil" in some form) for the museum that we've seen. He leads us around back.
What is this? Holy shit.
It's happening again:
Essentially, we are led to a barrack of esoteric shit. The man's father was (1) a wanderer of the desert, and (2) obsessive-compulsive about collecting, and subsequently organizing, the things that he found out there.
The unspoiled desert between the Mexican state of Chihuahua and Texas is a mysterious one. Unexplained lights appear on horizons at night. It's known for high amounts of drug trafficking, while locals live with and around the specter of a proposed immigration-deterrent, "La Entrada," or "The Wall."
What kind of things did we find in the Museu Particularo in Ojinaga? Well: rusted tools, hair dryers, what we can only presume to be legitimate dinosaur fossils, stamps, guns and weapons left over from the Mexican Revolution, Mayan goblets of gilded silver, arrowheads, taxidermic little creatures, etc. It is a mess of stuff, some of which may belong in a "real" museum, whatever that means. Although, for what it's worth, if one was to catalogue all these items and ferry them to the correct "institutions," one could hardly imagine that any two objects might end up in the same place.
All of these artifacts are housed in nothing more than a quarters: two small, windowless rooms with dirt floors with stuff nailed to the adobe walls. It is hard to move without knocking something over.
Is it only about making a junk room available and free to the public? Not really. There is a very concerted effort made "to display," and even to tell stories. We weren't able to leave without understanding through our very broken Spanish that one of the family's friends had died recently and hence a shrine to him in one of the corners. Or: how the collector had acquired such a collection of mounted animal heads.
Little separates the Museo Particularo from the other, more well-known forays into outsider curation: the Palais Ideal du Facteur Cheval, the Temples of Damanhur for example, or even Watt's Towers. It is truly the kingdom of one man, the result of hard work and a very particular(o) kind of tender megalomania. Did it stem from a desire to taxonomize the magical garbage of the Chihuahuan mountains? Did our curator see an absence, and dream to fill it? What happens when the collector is no more?
When I think about "true museums" my logic can be very simple. It is obvious that the Museo Particularo is incredibly honest -- so much so that the experience of seeing the display is gorgeous and heartbreaking. I do trust it like no other.
And what does this say about me? I'm a tourist, sucker for this kind of beauty.