“Developing a Community-Led Ecotourism Museum in Oaxaca, Mexico”

📆 Monday, November 10, 2025
🕚 1:00pm – 2:00pm
📍 American Geographical Society Library (AGSL)
🏫 UWM Libraries, 3rd floor east wing

La Ventanilla is a small community on the Pacific Coast of Oaxaca, Mexico, and has, since the mid-1990s, become an ecotourism destination. Situated next to a mangrove, the human inhabitants of La Ventanilla made a major shift away from a primarily extractive relationship with the mangrove and formed a cooperative focused on its sustainable management in order to better serve all of those who call it their home, or who come to visit. Their programs focused on the non-humans of the mangrove include reestablishing the crocodile population, a reforestation program, and sea turtle nest patrolling and monitoring, among others. Visitors are introduced to these programs through guided tours, a nascent museum, and other opportunities to participate in the stewardship of the mangrove.

Beginning in 2017, six members of the community began photographing these activities as part of a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project that employed “photo-voice” as a methodology. Some of the resulting photographs to be used in a forthcoming museum exhibition are the focus of this talk. While a handful of museum anthropologists have discussed the use of PAR in museum contexts, this project and talk reorients PAR toward some of the unique characteristics of museum work—a version of collaborative museum work called Participatory Action Museography.

Three people on a sea turtle nest patrol near La Ventanilla, Mexico

Professor W. Warner Wood (UW-Milwaukee, Anthropology) researches the cultural politics of heritage in global context, primarily through ecotourism and cultural tourism sites in Oaxaca, Mexico. He is interested in museums as important sites for the production of meaning, studying the differing interpretations of material culture items and the environment that are constructed/contested by various stakeholders. Professor Wood currently serves as Coordinator of UWM’s Museum Studies Graduate Certificate Program and as an Adjunct Curator at the Milwaukee Public Museum, and is Past-President of the Council for Museum Anthropology.

 

Join us to learn about the many topics you can study through the interdisciplinary LACUSL major at UWM. Thanks for participating in the Fall 2025 LACUSL Speaker Series!

Free & open to the public
No registration required
For questions or accessibility accommodations, please contact: clacs@uwm.edu