Local philanthropy and the transformation of culture in Oaxaca, Mexico

Abstract

Scholars suggest that philanthropic activity in Latin America is limited. However, this suggestion overlooks the potential for philanthropists focused on specific localities to significantly influence the places in which they work. In this article, I explore the case of cultural philanthropy in Oaxaca, Mexico to advance our understanding of philanthropy in Latin America by highlighting the work of operating foundations funding locally with little state regulation. In Oaxaca, a small number of philanthropists have transformed the cultural sector by building and managing a proliferation of cultural institutions. They have imbued these institutions with a unique vision for Oaxacan culture, derived from a combination of four philanthropic goals – public access, knowledge production, Western aesthetic value, and efficiency, which have arisen via social and professional networks between philanthropists. Oaxaca’s philanthropists have advanced their vision for Oaxacan culture by critiquing and compelling action by the state’s government, thus solidifying their impact on Oaxaca. This case study shows the importance of a local lens in describing philanthropy in Latin America, highlights the importance of social and professional networks in shaping local philanthropic work, and illuminates the mechanisms by which philanthropists working locally can expand their impact on cultural heritage by compelling state action.

Introduction

In one of the most-traversed sections of Oaxaca de Juárez’s historical center, beyond ornate wrought-iron gates fashioned from delicate flower motifs, lays a courtyard of thin geometrically arranged bricks, with elegant cacti growing in a rustic, yet ordered, fashion up a wall. An old convent, stone walls impeccably clean, rises on the right. Inside the building, the musty smell of old stone meets a modern glass-and-iron wall, beyond which lie rows of tables and stacks of books – the Biblioteca de Investigación Juan de Córdova, an academic research library focused on Indigenous languages and history. On the other side of the complex is a matching iron and glass structure, closing off the courtyard from the street. The bottom floor hosts exhibitions; on a recent visit, a show displayed the ceramic and textile work of Oaxaca’s artisan communities, in elegant showroom-style arrangements. This complex – containing the Centro Cultural San Pablo, Biblioteca de Investigación Juan de Córdova, and Fonoteca Juan León Mariscal – was created and is maintained by the Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú Oaxaca (FAHHO). Elsewhere in the historical center are several other buildings bearing the FAHHO’s mark, including a stamp museum, a museum of the city of Oaxaca, and multiple libraries, most also housed in restored colonial or Porfirian edifices. In total, Oaxaca de Juárez, a city of about 300,000 in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, and the surrounding countryside are home to more than 30 arts and cultural organizations, most created in the last 20 years. Many of these institutions are free to visit and share the appearance described above – an elegant nouveau Spanish colonial aesthetic, where dusty stucco meets geometric brick and elaborate wrought iron, scented with pine and tzalam beams.

Literature on philanthropy in Latin America suggests that philanthropic activity in the region is limited. However, most such studies focus on general measures at the national level (for example, total giving, number of philanthropic foundations).¹ In this article, I unpack the case of cultural philanthropy in Oaxaca, Mexico, one of substantial philanthropic investment in a specific area. I describe how a small number of elite Mexican philanthropists brought four different philanthropic goals – public access, knowledge production, Western aesthetic value, and efficiency – to bear on Oaxaca’s cultural scene. I explore two research questions: first, given the supposedly limited nature of philanthropic activity in Mexico, how did a significant cultural philanthropic enterprise take root in Oaxaca and, second, given that literature on philanthropy suggests that such values as democracy, efficiency, aestheticism, and scholarship often compete, how did they come to co-exist in Oaxacan cultural philanthropy? I explain how social relations between philanthropists led these approaches to meld and combine. This simultaneous pursuit of multiple philanthropic goals led to a proliferation of organizations that together consolidate a vision for Oaxacan culture that contains a universal aesthetic and academic significance upon which regional progress should proceed. By both critiquing and compelling state action via their philanthropic work, Oaxaca’s cultural philanthropists have advanced their vision for the region and solidified their impact. Based on this case study, I argue that in order to build a complete picture of the character and impact of philanthropy in Latin America, we must also attend to the local-level impact – the work of philanthropists who focus on, and significantly influence, specific localities.

After orienting my argument in the relevant literature, I introduce each of the philanthropists and philanthropic goals I argue are salient in Oaxaca. I then present a historical account of how these approaches emerged in Oaxacan cultural philanthropy and came to be combined, focusing on the relationships – marriages, collaborations, apprenticeships, and the movement of personnel and advisors – between the key cultural philanthropists. I close by showing how the Oaxacan case illuminates the importance of local impact in describing Latin American philanthropy and by suggesting several mechanisms that shape philanthropists’ local work and impact on cultural heritage, including operating foundations working with little regulation, social and professional networks, and encouraging state action.

Background and context

Cultural philanthropy

Scholars of philanthropy – the giving of money by people or organizations to support charitable causes – have firmly established the history of this practice in various national contexts,² elaborated on how elites use philanthropy to build and maintain relationships and reinforce identity,³ and outlined some factors that motivate and influence philanthropists’ decision making.⁴ Cultural philanthropy – that which is focused on supporting the arts, artists and cultural producers, and arts, culture, and history-focused nonprofit organizations – has some unique characteristics, including a linkage to class distinction.⁵ The majority of academic interest in cultural philanthropy is focused on the US context,⁶ with little attention to philanthropic practice in other parts of the world and how it might align with, or differ from, US philanthropists.

In notable articles about cultural institution building by American elites in the nineteenth century, Paul DiMaggio shows that in Boston an elite social group created and controlled cultural organizations to centralize high art, monopolizing the art form and forging concrete boundaries between high and popular art.⁷ To accomplish this, elite entrepreneurs purified programming, professionalized staff, and created “correct” ways of interacting with art that was accessible only to the elite with the resources to cultivate connoisseurship skills, thus consolidating an elite class and subordinating lower classes. In contrast, Chicago elites used cultural institution building to establish the city as a center for culture rather than to distinguish themselves as an elite class. This difference was in part driven, DiMaggio argues, by a lack within the Chicago elite of ties to scholars and other cultural figures, which led to a disdain for aesthetic superiority.⁸

These works highlight how the actions of philanthropists – and the types of art and culture they support – are both influenced by, and correspondingly influence, broader social arrangements. They also illustrate how different orientations toward art and culture – aestheticism, democratic access, commercialism – are often placed in tension or competition with each other by elite actors. Building on these arguments, I trace how social relationships between Oaxaca’s cultural philanthropists fundamentally shaped their work and impact on Oaxaca and caused these actors’ distinct philanthropic goals to meld and combine.

Philanthropy in Mexico and Latin America

Most extant work on philanthropy in Mexico focuses on mapping and describing the small-but-growing field. Studies show that there exists relatively little philanthropy in Mexico⁹ – the word “philanthropy” is primarily associated with religious charity¹⁰ and wealthy prestige-focused giving, and most charitable activity in Mexico consists of direct donations to individuals.¹¹ The majority of Mexico’s philanthropic foundations are located in Mexico City and other capital cities, with more than half focused on education, human services, and health.¹² Corporate foundations and international funders also play a major role in the country,¹³ and many foundations operate their own programs in addition to, or instead of, engaging in grant making, identifying as “actors” rather than as donors.¹⁴ Other scholars have added to this picture, pointing out that Mexico has the smallest nonprofit sector in Latin America, with most human services provided by the government in a state-centric paradigm.¹⁵ However, both the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors have grown and expanded since the 1990s, in the context of democratic change and economic growth.¹⁶

While the prevalence of philanthropic organizations in Mexico and larger Latin America is growing, most philanthropic giving still occurs via individuals rather than institutions, and even corporate foundations are often run by the families behind the businesses.¹⁷ In this context, giving is justified in terms of faith and a sense of morality, and personal interests and experiences influence giving, as does local and national pride. Interest in social change is increasing among philanthropists, though many grant makers still focus on charity, and some scholars argue that Mexican philanthropy is scattered and ineffective in bringing about social change.¹⁸ A lack of regulation of philanthropic activity can lead in some cases to innovative strategies or approaches (and, in others, to self-dealing and corruption), and while collaboration with the government is challenging in the context of perceived corruption,¹⁹ some newer philanthropic foundations facilitate collaboration between the private sector, civil society, and government.²⁰

Art and culture in Oaxaca

Oaxaca has long been heralded as unique in Mexico for its natural beauty and rich cultural history. Oaxaca has the highest level of linguistic diversity of any Mexican state – it is home to 15 distinct ethnic groups, each with its own language.²¹ Traditional artistic and craft production in Oaxaca, including ceramics, textiles, woodworking, and culinary arts, are renowned in Mexico and internationally. Oaxaca city’s historical center and the state’s most famous archaeological site, Monte Albán, were declared an United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s World Heritage Site in 1987. In the years after the Mexican Revolution, Oaxaca was framed as a “heart of mexicanidad” and frequented by Mexico’s most famous muralists.²² Oaxaca is also one of the poorest states in Mexico – over 62 percent of the state’s population lives under the national poverty line, with some of the worst conditions found in Indigenous communities.²³ In this context, Oaxacan culture is continuously subject to ascribed and often contested definitions, characteristics, and statements of value by a multitude of actors, including local and national politicians, academics, artists, local residents, tourists, and, the focus of this article, philanthropists.

Little has been written about cultural philanthropy in Oaxaca. Cynthia Sanborn and Christine Letts, Paula Johnson, and Colleen Kelly argue that philanthropy is important in the Latin American cultural sector and in the preservation of cultural sites since governments are preoccupied with other issues, and they claim that much philanthropic investment in culture goes to traditional arts institutions.²⁴ Edward McCaughan discusses the work of Francisco Toledo, a prominent activist, artist, and philanthropist in the state,²⁵ and Selma Holo uses an art historical lens to trace the rise and philanthropic influence of Toledo and other Oaxacan artists, covering the beginnings of the FAHHO’s work, the Oaxacan contemporary art scene, the management of archaeological sites, the community museum movement, and the recent circumstances of Oaxaca’s artisans.²⁶ In this article, I use the case of cultural philanthropy in Oaxaca to demonstrate the importance of local impact in describing Latin American philanthropy today.

Methods

Data for this article are drawn from 45 interviews with public figures, intellectuals, directors, leaders, and staff of Oaxaca’s cultural institutions as well as observations conducted in the public space of roughly 20 Oaxacan cultural institutions during the summers of 2015 and 2016. I conducted interviews, which lasted between 30 minutes and 1.5 hours, with many FAHHO staff, including the president and senior advisors, as well as with the directors of many other Oaxacan cultural institutions and others involved with Oaxacan cultural philanthropy and both public and private cultural institutions. The interviewees were selected via referral sampling, in which I requested that interviewees identify other individuals to approach for interviews; I also independently requested interviews with the directors of all Oaxacan arts and cultural nonprofit organizations that I could identify.

Nearly all individuals approached for an interview agreed to participate, with the exception of one to two public officials who did not respond to my requests. Interviewees comprised both women and men (with a higher proportion of men than women); all were adults between the ages of 25 and 70. The majority of the interviewees were Mexican nationals, but a handful of the interviewees (including two FAHHO staff) were citizens of other countries living in Mexico; some were natives of Oaxaca, and others were Mexican from other states in the country. Most interviews were conducted in Spanish and are included here in translated form. For public figures whose identities would be impossible to conceal via pseudonyms, interviewees were given the opportunity to review attributed quotes before inclusion in the text; in all other cases, interviewee identities are kept confidential, and names are not included in the text. During analysis, I hand-coded interview transcripts to identify and trace salient themes, timelines, and relationships. The interviews were supplemented by the review of extensive secondary material regarding FAHHO philanthropy.

Findings

Oaxaca’s cultural philanthropists and their goals

Consistent with prior findings regarding the prevalence of operating foundations within the limited population of philanthropic foundations that exist in Latin America,²⁷ many of Oaxaca’s cultural organizations were created by a handful of philanthropists and intellectuals who directly fund and govern them on an ongoing basis. Alejandro de Ávila, a prominent academic who serves as the founding director of Oaxaca’s ethnobotanical garden and curator of the city’s textile museum, argued that philanthropic investment in culture in Oaxaca began in the 1970s with the first renovation of the Santo Domingo convent, a prominent institution in downtown Oaxaca city, and the opening of a museum in the convent’s cloister. The leader of another Oaxacan cultural organization concurred, asserting that, since this project’s completion, the Oaxacan cultural scene has greatly expanded – in terms of the number of restoration and institution-building projects and tourism growth. Almost all of the leaders of cultural organizations in Oaxaca identify two key parties that are responsible for this growth: Francisco Toledo and the the FAHHO. An analysis of the work and histories of these two philanthropic actors reveals four distinct approaches to philanthropy that their work embodies and that combined to impact Oaxaca: public access, knowledge production, Western aesthetic value, and efficiency.

Francisco Toledo

Toledo, an Indigenous Zapotec Oaxacan, activist, and artist of international renown was born in Mexico City to parents from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec region of Oaxaca. Toledo spent his childhood in southern Veracruz, returning to Oaxaca to study before enrolling at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City for training in visual art. Toledo later spent time in Paris and New York before returning to Oaxaca permanently in the 1980s to create the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca (IAGO) in 1988, a graphic arts library and gallery in Oaxaca’s historical center. De Ávila called Toledo’s return a “quantum leap” in terms of cultural development in Oaxaca.²⁸ Toledo went on in subsequent years to create more than four additional cultural institutions, ranging from art museums to a library for the blind. As de Ávila put it in an interview, in the 1970s, “Toledo started building cultural institutions. And not just building cultural institutions, but really linking Oaxaca to a larger scene. Toledo really started creating a community – he attracted people.”²⁹

Holo expands on this idea, asserting that “his presence in the city caused other artists to move there or return to live there. As a result, within a decade of his arrival … Oaxaca had become a city populated with creative people, politicians, wealthy residents, and average citizens, many of them … generally changing their world to suit his vision of Oaxaca as a city with an economic engine run by visual culture.”³⁰ In the 1990s, Toledo also directed an organization called Pro-Oax, dedicated to protecting Oaxaca’s cultural, architectural, and environmental patrimony. While most of Toledo’s institutions have since been turned over to federal control (a shift the artist planned to ensure the sustainability of his work), he remained highly active and involved until his death in 2019.

Reciprocity and public access

A commitment to reciprocity and free public access consistently underpinned Toledo’s philanthropy, rooted in his cultural background. Responding to a biographer’s question about the link between his upbringing and philanthropic work, Toledo reflected: “[Y]es, in Juchitán a culture of mutual help exists. … Perhaps it comes from there.”³¹ Toledo’s upbringing in an Indigenous Oaxacan community and cultural tradition was an important influence on his philanthropic career, both in framing the idea of giving back as an obligation rather than as a choice and in shaping the character of his work and institutions. Toledo primarily created free cultural institutions oriented toward open public access; as a director of an Oaxacan artist workshop stated, Oaxaca’s youth see the spaces that Toledo created as theirs, pointing out that Toledo never put his name on these institutions, preferring non-eponymous labels that describe the organizations’ contents or functions. Indeed, Toledo’s institutions, particularly the IAGO, are marked by public use – benches and tables are nearly constantly occupied by youth studying on computers or reading books and steps and chairs are worn from constant movement.

Western artistic merit

In addition, Toledo’s philanthropic work consistently positioned Oaxacan cultural production in conversation with Western standards for the evaluation of artistic merit. Via this framework, evaluators of artistic production consider form to be divorced from context, judging the value of artworks via recourse to Western art historical concepts.³² Derived from Toledo’s formal arts education and experiences in the meccas of the international art world, in his institution building, Toledo described Oaxacan art and culture using Western aesthetic criteria, and he built collections that rivaled those of elite institutions in global cities. For example, Toledo’s IAGO is one of the most extensive graphic art libraries in Mexico. As the director of a FAHHO-run library put it, “with Toledo there was never the necessity to … explain or justify the necessity of resources to enrich and update collections.”³³ Another longtime collaborator of Toledo and the FAHHO recounted the fabulous exhibitions of internationally renowned artists and writers that they organized and hosted in the early days of the IAGO: “[A]bsolutely first class … of Luigi Pirandello, of Chagall [… others] with the work of de Kooning, of Rauschenberg, of the best of pop art.”³⁴

Toledo’s orientation toward the Western art world is reflected in the mode of exhibition in his institutions, which are also evident in the FAHHO museums. Visual art hangs on white or monochrome walls with sparse text, textiles hover in the air, suspended via invisible threads and casting shadows on the often-uneven neutral walls of colonial-style stucco. This curatorial style evokes the modernist white cube aesthetic popularized by the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s;³⁵ it is an effective tool of artistic legitimation, in which elites mobilize a language of high art to make the case that certain categories of cultural production be considered art and simultaneously advance their own interests.³⁶ Interestingly, this style also simultaneously recalls a very different display tradition; de Ávila suggested in an interview that it references rural Mexican traditions around the unadorned household display of Catholic icons, thus creating a confluence of Indigenous traditions with modernist styles. In what follows, I will show how these commitments to public access and Western aesthetic criteria traveled between key actors to influence the character and impact of cultural philanthropy in Oaxaca writ large.

The FAHHO

The FAHHO is a branch of the Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú (FAHH) based in Mexico City. It was founded in 1997 by former Banamex (a major Mexican bank) owner Alfredo Harp Helú and his second wife María Isabel Grañén Porrúa. Harp Helú was born in Mexico City to Lebanese immigrant parents. Grañén Porrúa is the scion of a Mexico City publishing family and holds a doctoral degree in art history from a Spanish university. While the FAHH eclipses the FAHHO in terms of dollars spent in Mexico, according to senior staff, the FAHHO far outstrips its sister foundation in terms of staff and project volume. The FAHHO works on educational, ecological, health, and sanitation-related projects in Oaxaca in addition to its cultural philanthropic work, but staff identify culture and patrimony as one of the foundation’s primary strengths. The foundation employs a hybrid grant-making operating structure, in which it both gives grants to external organizations and initiates and runs its own projects.

In its work on Oaxacan culture and art, the FAHHO has founded and maintains more than 12 cultural institutions, ranging from research and children’s libraries to museums and study centers. All FAHHO institutions and programs are free to visit and open to the public. In addition to these and other institutions, the foundation has engaged in countless church and altarpiece restoration projects in Oaxaca’s villages, built several cultural centers in towns throughout the state, and recently created a new campus for Oaxaca’s state archives. Prior to the establishment of the FAHHO, Harp Helú contributed to the restoration of the Santo Domingo convent while still at Banamex via the Fomento Social Banamex, a philanthropic arm that, along with the Fomento Cultural Banamex, supports social and cultural initiatives in Mexico.³⁷

Like Toledo, FAHHO institutions orient Oaxacan cultural production toward Western standards of artistic merit. FAHHO president María Isabel Grañén Porrúa is a trained art historian; in a 2012 interview, she asserted: “Art history is something I carry inside myself. I’ve always admired art, and always have the desire to mentally describe the forms, the colors, the textures, how the work was conceived, in what historical moment, etc. It’s a discipline that though I learned it [in school], since I was a little girl my maternal grandmother always took me to museums.”³⁸ Grañén Porrúa attributed her inclination toward aesthetics to early family and educational experiences, an inclination that is reflected in the FAHHO’s emulation of Toledo-style white cube exhibition techniques.

Producing and preserving knowledge

The FAHHO’s philanthropy also highlights Oaxaca as a site of academic importance, a notion with a long history and bibliography. As a senior staff member explained, Grañén Porrúa “is an academic with her own interests in art history and document conservation and research into these things.”³⁹ Beyond Grañén Porrúa, several other key actors in the proliferation of Oaxacan cultural organizations are also academics. Sebastián van Doesburg, a Dutch historian, longtime advisor to Grañén Porrúa, and director of the Biblioteca de Investigación Juan de Córdova, articulated an academic motivation for the FAHHO’s philanthropy:

There is a consciousness [in the FAHHO] that Oaxaca, since thousands of years ago, constitutes the heart of Mesoamerica. … And from that comes a particular interest in all the expressions that are unique in Oaxaca: the textiles, architecture, documents, languages, et cetera that represent for the foundation a great humanistic value, a great collection [acervo] of values, techniques, ideas that is worth knowing, diffusing, reinforcing.

This pursuit and diffusion of knowledge is an important guiding force in the FAHHO’s decisions. As another foundation employee put it, the FAHHO does a lot of projects with social impact, but it also has no problem doing things with “very little social impact, but that also have other values – academic, or … pretty much academic.”⁴⁰ As van Doesburg elaborates, “[f]or the foundation there are different objectives. One objective is to assure the conservation of certain collections that we consider essential for Oaxaca. The other is, if we can achieve public interest in getting to know the collections, great.”⁴¹ He gives the example of an archive – the public may not be interested at first, but the project is worthwhile to the foundation if there is a large enough group of interested academics, with the hope that the archive’s contents might eventually enter general knowledge via publications and events.

Another academic elaborated on this idea, identifying an archives-focused project as “a good example of doing work that nobody appreciates. How many people care about their archives? … [B]ut the discourse … is rescuing the memory of Mexico.”⁴² Knowledge production is, for the FAHHO, a goal in and of itself, which is linked to a broader project of heritage preservation.

Speed and efficiency

The FAHHO’s work also follows a tradition in Mexico of corporate philanthropy around culture, in which Banamex is a major player.⁴³ Recall that Harp Helú contributed to the restoration of the Santo Domingo convent as part of the Fomento Social Banamex. Building on historical precedent, the entry of Harp Helú’s banking capital into Oaxacan cultural philanthropy was consequential for multiple reasons. Freddy Aguilar Reyes, a longtime friend of Toledo and Grañén Porrúa and director of a FAHHO-run children’s museum, raised this idea first in an interview: “[W]hen María Isabel married Alfredo Harp, many of the ideas that were in the air could be constructed as realities.”⁴⁴ The scale of capital that Harp Helú brought to Oaxaca eliminated financial barriers to philanthropic projects, facilitating the proliferation of projects and organizations visible today and eclipsing the institution-building power of other local actors, including Toledo.

The FAHHO’s productivity is facilitated by the speed and efficiency by which it completes projects – many institutions proceed from idea to reality in a year or less, including the identification, purchase, and renovation of a historic building as well as the design and fabrication of the material that will occupy the space. For example, a new FAHHO project – a showroom for Oaxacan artisanal projects – was announced in the summer of 2016 and opened in April 2017. This focus on speed was echoed in personal terms by a senior FAHHO staff member, who claimed that Harp Helú does not like to keep anyone waiting – the FAHHO issues prompt responses to grant requests, regardless of their substance or relevance to the foundation’s work.

In the FAHHO’s philanthropy, banking capital facilitates the pursuit of projects for their academic value and the organic proliferation of these projects via an interest-driven process of research and discovery. At the same time, the pursuit of academic knowledge helps legitimate the involvement of financial capital in Oaxaca’s art and culture. However, as a FAHHO staff member explained, there exists some public distrust of Harp Helú given his banking background; he has been accused in periodicals of profiting from his philanthropic work and stealing history from the Oaxacan people,⁴⁵ and some individuals argue that FAHHO-facilitated institutional proliferation in Oaxaca’s historical center has contributed to an increase in property values. However, many other cultural actors and community members refute these accusations as oversimplified and inaccurate. As such, these critiques are contested and should not be taken for granted; further research is needed to evaluate them in full.

Social networks and the production of Oaxacan culture

These four philanthropic goals – public access, knowledge production, Western aesthetic value, and efficiency – which were brought to Oaxaca by Toledo, Harp Helú, Grañén Porrúa, and others involved in Oaxaca’s cultural philanthropy, were then shared between actors via collegial collaborations, marriages, apprenticeships, and the movement of personnel and advisors. This transmission resulted in the transformation of the city of Oaxaca and the articulation of a vision of Oaxacan culture and its value that set a precedent for future development in the city and state.

Collaboration and apprenticeship

Early collaborations between Toledo, Harp Helú, and members of Oaxaca’s academic community were important precursors in this work. The Santo Domingo convent was, as mentioned earlier, restored via a tripartite collaboration between the Fomento Social Banamex (then run by Harp Helú), the state government, and the federal government, a project shaped by Toledo’s vision and influence (via Pro-Oax).⁴⁶ This collaboration marked an important encounter between Toledo’s orientation toward public access and Harp Helú; it also facilitated the meeting of Harp Helú and Grañén Porrúa. In 1993, Grañén Porrúa, while finishing her doctorate, had come to Oaxaca at the request of Toledo. As she recounted in a published interview, “[i]t was Francisco Toledo who proposed that I come to Oaxaca to do an exhibition of some antique books that the university had thrown away. Later I found out that it was teachers of mine from the Universidad Iberoamericana that had suggested me for the project when Toledo asked, ‘who could do an exhibition of these books?’”⁴⁷ They mounted an exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca that focused on the books’ “beauty, typography, the covers, the paper, the dust jackets, the bindings, very striking prints, very lovely, black and white with shadows,” combining an academic interest in old texts with a shared aesthetic orientation toward these as art objects and a Toledo-driven commitment to public access to information.⁴⁸

This project led to another for Grañén Porrúa – at Toledo’s request, the cataloging and conservation of the very old library that originally belonged to the Santo Domingo convent. After a brief return to Spain, Grañén Porrúa took up, in addition to this library project, the directorship of Toledo’s IAGO and another of his organizations. According to Grañén Porrúa, these experiences with Toledo had a significant impact on her: “Via the work of IAGO I was steeped in Toledo’s talent, his madness, his love for this city and for the people.” She elaborated in an interview: “Also, I am a disciple of Toledo” – from him she got the idea of a “great social vocation… to serve society via art.”⁴⁹ From Toledo, then, Grañén Porrúa took up the notion of “the democratization of art and knowledge” as well as the idea of art in the service of society – Toledo’s dedication to public access and reciprocity. A friend put this in more concrete terms – namely, that Grañén Porrúa learned from Toledo to turn private spaces into public ones. This orientation added to the pre-existing similarities between the two individuals – a shared dedication to books and knowledge and an orientation toward Western aesthetic standards, driven by Toledo’s artistic training in elite institutions and Grañén Porrúa’s education in art history. Facilitated by these early collaborations and apprenticeship relationships, these confluences led to an alignment in the austere, minimalist display style preferred by the two actors and a shared commitment to free public access to cultural and artistic material.

The movement of advisors

This alignment was reinforced by the movement of other important cultural leaders between Toledo-driven projects and the FAHHO’s initiatives, notably Freddy Aguilar Reyes and Alejandro de Ávila. Aguilar Reyes attended college with Toledo and went on to collaborate with him for 12 years, including in the creation of IAGO. As Aguilar Reyes explained, after finishing his “ciclo” with Toledo, Grañén Porrúa, whom he had met when they both worked at IAGO, called and asked him to work with the FAHHO. The FAHHO’s projects, he asserted, had a “similar profile” to those that Toledo did – they have a shared interest in community access to information.

De Ávila and Toledo collaborated on, among other things, the creation of Oaxaca’s ethnobotanical garden, housed in the cloister of the Santo Domingo convent, and the Museo Textil de Oaxaca (MTO). According to de Ávila, Toledo came to him looking for ideas for the historic space that came to house the garden, which was in danger of being turned into a parking lot. De Ávila proposed the creation of an ethnobotanical garden. When de Ávila returned from completing his doctorate in the United States, work had already begun on the space based on a four-way funding collaboration between Toledo, Banamex, the Oaxacan state, and the federal government. The garden’s final character was determined by another academic-artistic confluence – this time, the idea that the garden should contain only plants native to Oaxaca in a carefully designed and curated space. As Holo recounts, de Ávila envisioned a garden dedicated to the research of, and encounter with, the native flora of Oaxaca, with a focus on historical and contemporary uses; it was designed in collaboration with Toledo and artist Luis Zárate to incorporate both historical traces of the former convent and contemporary sculptural pieces.⁵⁰

In the case of the MTO, Toledo raised money for the institution, and both he and de Ávila donated personal collections. The institution, however, was in the end constructed by the FAHHO, with de Ávila assuming the curatorial role. De Ávila asserted that he and Toledo shared a perspective that was crucial to the MTO:

Let’s look at textiles differently than the way INAH [the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia] has looked at them and displayed them. They are presented as the costume of these people. We said no, we are going to display textiles as pieces of art, with space so they are not vying for attention. We devote a lot of work to providing good background information, as good as we can get.⁵¹

Rather than hiding contextual information in an effort to present textiles as art, de Ávila and Toledo integrated academic and aesthetic presentation styles by employing minimalist display styles for textiles while offering extensive ethnographic and aesthetic context in leaflets that are available in the galleries.

Toledo’s influence on Grañén Porrúa was also crucial in shaping the character of this project, transforming her personal love of Oaxacan textiles into a public commitment. Through Toledo’s desire to make a textile museum, Grañén Porrúa realized over time that it “gives more satisfaction when you share things and the people enjoy them.” Here again, we see a confluence between valuing Oaxacan cultural material for its aesthetic significance and a commitment to public access to information rather than having these two goals compete with one another.⁵² In both the ethnobotanical garden and the MTO cases, we see this confluence occurring via the movement of cultural figures between the two groups. Toledo’s daughter Sara summarized this situation, asserting that some of the people that were directing the cultural projects at the FAHHO started out working with Toledo and say that Toledo was their inspiration. Both Toledo and the FAHHO “make amazing stuff available and free” for the public.⁵³

Marriage

Once Harp Helú arrived in Oaxaca and met Grañén Porrúa, we see for the first time the confluence of all four philanthropic goals in the proto-FAHHO’s work – an academic notion of preserving information for its own sake, a dedication to public access, an aesthetically oriented display style, and an orientation toward productivity and efficiency. In 1994, the same year that Grañén Porrúa began work on the old library, the restoration of the Santo Domingo convent also began. The correspondence of these two projects brought Grañén Porrúa into contact with Harp Helú – she raised money from him for the library’s cabinetry.⁵⁴ As their partnership blossomed, Grañén Porrúa and Harp Helú’s first projects were shaped by Toledo’s extant work in Oaxaca. Grañén Porrúa elaborated in a published interview:

When Alfredo saw what I was doing in the IAGO, he observed that (in this institution) there was a house that had been converted into a museum and library, that they had rescued a building. At some point he told me that he had a collection of postal stamps that he didn’t want to just leave in a box, and later, when he saw the postal museum in Washington he began to conceive the idea of another house, another museum. It was with this model that MUFI [Museo de Filatelia de Oaxaca] was created.⁵⁵

Enabled by their infusion of capital into the Oaxacan cultural scene, in 1998, the pair explicitly modeled elements of their first independent cultural institution, the Museo de Filatelia de Oaxaca, on the example of Toledo’s IAGO.

Academic relationships

During the years in which Grañén Porrúa was working on the old library, she also forged multiple academic relationships, reinforcing her connection to knowledge production in Oaxaca. As Sebastián van Doesburg explained, he became acquainted with Grañén Porrúa while in Oaxaca working on his doctoral degree. As he put it, “there was lots of shared interest in old documents, archives, which she was interested in, which I was interested in.”⁵⁶ They began to work together on related projects, which evolved into FAHHO priorities as the foundation took shape. As stated earlier, shared academic and personal interests also led de Ávila and Grañén Porrúa to begin collaborating on the MTO. One FAHHO staff member provided his view on how these pieces fit together:

[Toledo] really influenced [Grañén Porrúa] who came to work as the director of IAGO. And then she teamed up with Alfredo, and they had Alfredo’s vision of a foundation, and María Isabel’s vision from the more academic side, and then you have the relationship with Toledo, which adds a bit of social activism through culture. And then in comes a whole bunch of people. Bas (van Doesburg) was one of the first ones, and each person brings a lot of their own projects and ideas.⁵⁷

Beyond Toledo’s influence on Grañén Porrúa, the structure of the FAHHO came from the combination of Harp Helú’s more conventional notion of foundation work, perhaps from his experience at Fomento Social Banamex, and the influence of various intellectuals who, via shared academic interests with Grañén Porrúa, shaped the FAHHO’s priorities.

These intellectuals also reinforced the centrality of knowledge production in the FAHHO’s projects. Specifically, they reinforced a valorization of information gathering and preservation for its own sake, along with a notion of Oaxaca being specifically valuable for such knowledge generation. They also helped cement academically inclined institutions like museums and libraries as the FAHHO’s priorities. As another academic involved with the FAHHO explained, “the development of personal relationships directed the shape the foundation took – [Grañén Porrúa] saw what independent people were doing, sort of adopted their projects, and that became a focus for the foundation.”⁵⁸ The result was a foundation that evolved and expanded organically – and rapidly – based on the interests and discoveries of its core personnel, led by Grañén Porrúa as the sounding board and convener.

A vision for Oaxacan culture

In this philanthropic environment, fueled by financial capital and a commitment to productivity, institutions and projects proliferated, organized around a vision for Oaxacan culture and its value. Driven by Toledo’s influence and Grañén Porrúa’s art historical training, these philanthropists articulated the academic and Western aesthetic significance of Oaxacan cultural patrimony, while simultaneously arguing for its importance for local communities. This combination resulted in an idea, advanced by the FAHHO’s institutions, of Oaxacan culture as both internationally exemplary and essential to local public memory, an idea that is both significant in itself and promising in promoting Oaxaca to national and international aesthetic markets. This idea is nicely encapsulated in the FAHHO’s approach to architectural restoration. As van Doesburg explained,

[w]e try not to over-restore, but at the same time we try not to fall into the pitfalls of declaring anything historically sacred. When it doesn’t add any historical or aesthetical or architectural value, you can do away with it. … Be very respectful of the archeological remains, be very respectful with what you know about the original architectural elements of the building, but don’t cede for aesthetic arguments or for purist arguments. … People feel [this approach] makes the buildings visible again.”⁵⁹

The stated goal of the FAHHO’s restoration work is to “make visible” Oaxaca as a repository of Mesoamerican culture and to appeal to international aesthetic tastes – as Grañén Porrúa put it, to get “to the essence, the depth, the root, the heart.”⁶⁰ The FAHHO’s restoration of the San Pablo convent is an effective example of this approach; the building combines careful restoration of stucco cloisters in which faint original wall inscriptions are carefully restored, with modern iron-and-glass elements to house an extensive library. Notable archeological ruins, discovered in the process of restoration at the building’s base, are left uncovered and visible under a glass floor.

Through such work, a staff member explained, the FAHHO’s leadership aim to save and protect the memory of Oaxaca and Mexico and cultivate a sense of local ownership of this memory. In the FAHHO’s approach, this memory is intrinsically connected to physical artifacts of Spanish colonial and Mesoamerican civilizations, combined with present-day Indigenous life, including artisanal craft and folk traditions and Indigenous languages. However, it also includes the Western aesthetic significance of Oaxacan cultural production. As Sebastián van Doesburg put it, the idea is that “at the present time we need to first recognize and then valorize that the aesthetic exists, that it is possible, and that everyone has the right to it, that it is part of being human.”⁶¹ As a different FAHHO staff member elaborated, “FAHHO generates sophisticated spaces that you would only see in cosmopolitan cities, but they do it for the audience of local people, the original people of Mexico, of Oaxaca. … And [FAHHO institutions] aim to emphasize and project [resaltar] indigenous culture and heritage – that the knowledge of the pueblos actually is Mexico, the essence of Mexico.”⁶² This message contains an important pragmatic sensibility, as van Doesburg reminded me: in addition to arguing for the preservation and public availability of patrimony, the FAHHO aims to “build the consciousness that when Oaxaca wants to grow, that the most favorable would be to grow over its own roots. Rather than importing foreign development programs, [it would be preferable to] reinforce the existing potential of Oaxacan culture to go forward.”⁶³

In sum, through social relationships – marriages, collaborations, apprenticeships, and the movement of personnel – multiple philanthropic goals that we would expect to conflict or exist in tension with one another⁶⁴ instead combined into a cohesive vision for Oaxacan culture. I argue that this confluence of philanthropic goals produced Oaxaca’s proliferation of institutions and their unified approach. Advanced through these institutions, Oaxaca’s value is based on an idea that the region possesses Western aesthetic and universal historical significance that supports both self-determination and marketing in the hope of improving local livelihoods via historical strengths.

Mechanisms for impact

The ability of Oaxaca’s philanthropists to advance and institutionalize their vision for Oaxacan culture was meaningfully enabled by the lack of regulation of philanthropic activity in Mexico, a situation other scholars have found can lead to innovative approaches.⁶⁵ Indeed, Oaxaca’s philanthropists often position their work as a superior alternative to the cultural work of the Oaxacan state government. Both the FAHHO and Toledo pride themselves in doing work that is more efficient and of higher quality than that of the government – as one informant explained, “both the group of people working with Francisco and the group working with the Harps have been very savvy in using the contradictions between the [local Oaxacan] state and federal government.”⁶⁶ The state reflects a political class that Toledo, the FAHHO, and Oaxacan intellectuals often accuse of advocating for an essentialized and commoditized version of Oaxacan culture in pursuit of tourist dollars. The city’s yearly Guelaguetza festival is a frequent target of such criticism; run by the Oaxacan state, it is a commercialized and tourist-focused weeklong event that culminates in a performance of folkdance in a large amphitheater above the city. The individual continued:

[T]hese two groups (with Toledo and the Harps) represent an intellectual elite very sensitive to what is happening globally. Not just the aesthetic movements, but how cultural programs are implemented. So it is inevitable that there are contradictions between the vision of [the government] and such groups like we have in power here … [stated otherwise], a group that sees the potential that Oaxaca has to become part of a global discourse, and a system where culture continues to be used for a state agenda.⁶⁷

The institution-building work of Oaxaca’s philanthropists represents, then, an argument for how government should support and leverage Mexican culture as well as a critique of current efforts. While both the government and philanthropists suggest that culture is key to Oaxacan social and economic change, Oaxaca’s philanthropists argue, via their work, that efforts at economic advancement in the region, as van Doesburg put it, ought to be based on Oaxaca’s roots and cultural uniqueness rather than on Western notions of a colorful, essentialized Mexico. The FAHHO’s projects articulate this idea by using institutions to crystalize a specific vision for Oaxacan culture and its value. Via their institutions, Oaxaca’s philanthropists claim this region’s universal aesthetic and historical significance and argue that regional progress should proceed from this same basis rather than via commoditization for external audiences.

Beyond critiquing Oaxacan state actors, however, Oaxaca’s cultural philanthropists work to advance their vision for Oaxaca via two strategies: doing projects “no one else will do” and “sumando esfuerzos [combining forces]” and facilitating public-private partnerships.⁶⁸ A FAHHO staff member explained the first strategy: in FAHHO-run projects, “there has generally been a preference for doing projects that no one else will do.”⁶⁹ As he explained, the FAHHO’s leadership believe that if they start doing work that the government already invests in or should invest in, the government will recede from that work. Correspondingly, via “sumando esfuerzos,” Oaxacan philanthropists work to push the state toward their approach to cultural projects. As a colleague of Toledo and Grañén Porrúa recounted, the tripartite collaboration between the state government, the federal government, and a private entity (Banamex) to restore the Santo Domingo convent has served as a template for ongoing work by Toledo and the FAHHO. Toledo forged collaborations through political connections, charisma, and activism – as Holo has made clear, Toledo was highly skilled in convincing government actors to support his projects and, building on experience in political resistance movements, generating citizen support for his endeavors.⁷⁰ Correspondingly, according to a FAHHO staff member, Harp Helú’s business acumen has facilitated the FAHHO’s negotiations with the government, in which government participation (at the municipal, state, and/or federal level) is elicited via the promise of significant financial contributions from the FAHHO (often 33 percent of a project’s costs) if public entities match this investment and each party retains equal decision-making power.⁷¹ This model works, according to another FAHHO staff member, to compel continued commitment to, and maintenance of, the project by public entities once the FAHHO’s involvement has ended.

Discussion

The Oaxacan case, which is one of substantial philanthropic investment in a single locale, advances our understanding of philanthropy in Latin America by highlighting the importance of local impact in understanding the true extent and influence of philanthropy in the region. Regardless of whether one interprets Oaxaca’s cultural development as contributing to gentrification or to local self-determination, it is significant in its scale and impact on Oaxaca’s built environment. This case also illuminates several mechanisms that shape philanthropists’ local work, including operating foundations that function with little regulation, social and professional networks, and critical collaboration with government.

Existing scholarship on philanthropy in Latin America underscores the limited extent of philanthropic activity in the region.⁷² Among the philanthropy that does exist, scholars have shown the prevalence of operating foundations⁷³ and the influence of personal interests and experiences on philanthropists’ decisions and donations. While some argue that the scope and characteristics of Latin American philanthropy make it ineffective in advancing social change, the Oaxacan case shows that some Latin American philanthropists, through extensive investment in particular localities, have a significant impact on the communities in which they work. This case study is unlikely to be an isolated instance, as a study of corporate foundations in Mexico found that 28.1 percent focus on a particular local area.⁷⁴ In Oaxaca, the FAHHO and Francisco Toledo consolidated, through philanthropic investment, a vision for Oaxacan culture, which they embedded in myriad institutions, programs, and infrastructure throughout the city and state. They did this via operating foundations that established and manage their own institutions, driven both by personal interests and, importantly, by shared social networks and the friends, advisors, and employees that traveled through them. These social relationships allowed these philanthropists’ diverse philanthropic goals to coexist and combine rather than to conflict with one another.⁷⁵

The Oaxacan case therefore provides a compelling example of other scholars’ observations that some Latin American philanthropists foster collaboration between the private sector, civil society, and government⁷⁶ and unpacks the mechanisms via which philanthropists are able to broker such relationships, compel state action, and expand their impact. By undertaking projects that “no one else will do” – those that lack political appeal and state support – and orchestrating state participation in projects built upon their preferred notion of Oaxacan patrimony and its value, Oaxaca’s cultural philanthropists advanced their vision for the region against a backdrop of perceived state mismanagement. Drawing on their unique backgrounds, networks, and resources, Oaxacan elites built cultural institutions imbued with a particular vision for the value of Oaxacan culture in order to claim this region’s universal aesthetic-historical significance and advance their agenda that social and economic progress in Oaxaca proceed from this same basis.

Conclusion

I have shown that the case of cultural philanthropy in Oaxaca contributes to a more complete picture of philanthropic activity in Latin America by highlighting the importance of local-level impact by philanthropists focused on particular places. In doing so, I have posited several mechanisms for impact – the power of operating foundations working with little state regulation, the importance of social and professional networks in local philanthropy, and the utility of critical collaboration to compel state action. In Oaxaca, the FAHHO and Francisco Toledo transformed the Oaxacan cultural sector by building and managing a proliferation of cultural institutions, concentrated in Oaxaca city as well as distributed across far-flung municipalities. They imbued these cultural institutions with a unique vision for Oaxacan culture, derived from the combination of four philanthropic goals – public access, knowledge production, Western aesthetic value, and efficiency – which, instead of conflicting with one another, combined via marriages, apprenticeships, collaborations, and the movement of personnel between philanthropic organizations. Oaxaca’s philanthropists advanced this vision of Oaxacan culture as containing universal aesthetic and academic significance upon which regional progress should proceed by both critiquing and compelling action by the state’s government, thus solidifying their philanthropic impact on Oaxaca.