Mexico, July 2017. While doing research for my previous book, The Contested Crown, I followed a troupe of Aztec dancers. One of them, also a historian, tells me that the near-extinction of the quetzal is due to over-extraction.[i] The story of over-hunting is so familiar that it seems plausible. Why? Because it is an archetypal story—the human sees some beautiful being or object and wants to possess it.
Is it just another expression of capitalism at its most voracious? What about the hunting of birds in the precolonial Aztec empire—did that seriously affect the population of quetzals? Or was it the change of scale in hunting during Mexico’s industrial age, when more bird hunters were employed more than ever before? A shrinking habitat, together with public calls for quetzal hunters in national newspapers in the 1930s, may have been the lethal combination.
This is a story about a particular place, told over time through the dance of birds—a dance so alluring that everyone, from monarchs to museums, from priests to poachers, wants to possess them. Feathers were a commodity of the Pochteca—traveling merchants in the Aztec Empire—and appear as tribute payments in the Aztec Codex Mendoza. In Nahuatl, the Aztec language, the word quetzal also means “precious”—the birds, which came from the Guatemalan highlands, were always rare and precious because of how hard they are to find (for humans). We don’t know exactly how the Aztecs and Mayans controlled the populations of their precious feathers, tlazohihhuitl, used for the featherworks, yet we do know that Emperor Motecuhzoma bred and kept many birds. Their feathers were delivered “in bunches,” but exactly how many is not written in the historical records.
There is a souvenir pen made from a green feather in the gift shop of the Weltmuseum museum in Vienna, in the section dedicated to Mexican gifts related to el Penacho. Feather quills were the writing instruments of choice in earlier centuries, of course, gifting the writer’s hand with flight. On testing this one, we discover it is a plastic feather—another illustration of the conservator María Olvido Moreno Guzmán’s belief that there will never be another item made of quetzal feathers, because the birds are now so endangered.[ii]
To redress extractivism, a method of shock absorption may be needed—absorption through flying lightly and avoiding heavy landings. For this, I have sourced wire springs designed to cushion and transport the ancient and fragile feathers of the ancestors. In a vessel, these springs can counter the vibrations encountered by, for example, an ancient Aztec featherwork that may make a voyage of return from Vienna to Mexico in the future. Wire springs and sensors will provide the technology of flight. For the returning ancient feathers will not be the same as those that never left.
Donna Harraway explores a similar theme in her book, Staying with the Trouble, when she includes a cartoon of an orchid that has evolved its color and pattern to attract a bee that that is now extinct.[iii] The orchid, itself a delicate organism, becomes a signifier of the bee’s extinction, much like the Penacho is for the quetzal. I never felt this connection as strongly as I did in the biosphere. This link is not mentioned either in the Weltmuseum in Vienna or in literature on the quetzalapanecoatl. The impact of extractivism is most palpable when experienced in the natural environment, in sites that then experience further negative impacts due to conservation work. The quetzal breeding program at the Zoomat zoo in Chiapas carries on in parallel to the large-scale devastation of forests. The zoo has managed to breed only seven birds in the twenty-four years of the program; alarming amounts of the surface area of their habitat have disappeared during that time.[iv]
Time Warp
How el Penacho came to prominence is an interesting story. In 1888, the pioneering woman anthropologist Zelia Nuttall published a research paper about the piece in Vienna entitled “Standard or Head-Dress?”[v] The title reflects the debate at the time about whether el Penacho was a feather standard worn on the back, or a headdress. Earlier in its time as part of the Austrian collections, it was also mistakenly identified as a skirt. In the early twentieth century, Nuttall’s research was picked up on by the news in Mexico. General Abelardo L. Rodríguez, the film tycoon who served as president of Mexico from 1932–34, tried to have the feather crown returned around 1937-38. When his attempt failed, Rodríguez began to prepare for a copy to be made for Mexico City. He rallied his contacts—he worked in many fields and was one of the richest men in Mexico—even melting down the gold jewelry of his wife’s friends as donations towards the making of the replica crown. He went as far as putting an advertisement in the national newspaper El Universal calling for hunters to kill birds and bring feathers—including six hundred quetzal feathers—to Vienna. Among the many replies to this national call for hunters, some of which are in Mexico’s historical archives in the National Museum of Anthropology, one corrects the amount of birds required; Jose Ramiro Culebro writes that it “will need to be more birds than requested” but offers to do the job for the same price “because this is a reproduction of a historical reliquary, as good Mexicans we are delighted to cooperate on such a transcendental reproduction.”[vi]
By March 1938, rumors about the copy crown are rife and criticism is published about the process. The letters between National Museum of Anthropology director Luis Castillo Ledón and Rodríguez include reassurances from Rodriguez that the plan is on track. An ornithologist, Professor Ochoterena, and a taxidermist are both consulted. Each recommend their own feather collector, telling Ledón that gathering the materials would not incur a high cost and should take just a few months. Ledón reports this to Rodríguez, saying that the newspapers have overblown the length and cost of this extraction, citing Professor Ochoterena.[vii] There is again the offer to do the work required for the “transcendental reproduction,” not for a salary, but simply in exchange for travel expenses and an honorarium.
The Formula: Politician, Museum, Scientific Experts, Press
In these letters between Rodríguez and Ledón, the structure of extraction shimmers in disconcertingly familiar ways: Historical hierarchies replicate themselves in contemporary institutional structures, which have not changed much over the last century. In this case, it is the political interests of Rodríguez which synchronize with those of the museum director Ledón. Rodríguez is able to instrumentalize the media and thereby assemble a cast of hunters. At the same time, the museum director is the link to a host of scientific specialists, providing some kind of legitimacy to the process. Science appears—because of its one degree of separation from politics—to be somehow objective. But particularly the close relationship of these three elements—state museum direction, politicians, and scientists—is a formidable and powerful alliance.
In 1937, in order to ensure the accuracy of the copy, the archaeologist Eulalia Guzmán was employed by the Ministry of Public Education in Mexico to investigate the “great feather headdress.” In the lead-up to World War II, a tense exchange of letters took place between Mexico City and Vienna about creating the reproduction headdress in Vienna. Mexico wanted to a copy to be made based on the original. Among the correspondence (carefully kept in the National Museum of Anthropology archive but conspicuously absent in the Viennese one), a reply from Vienna includes a list of necessary materials that Mexico would need to supply for the copy. Already the availability of quetzal feathers was cited as a problem. But was this really the result of over–hunting?
In 2012, when the Weltmuseum Vienna was compiling its report on the plausible return of the headdress, the cast of characters around the binational commission similarly involved the museum director, Christian Feest, and scientists in Vienna; however, the necessary politicians were missing from the equation, and so there was no movement. As I think about this, I am reminded of my own project, and the many repatriations it engages with—processes that also require the navigation of exactly these forces. One site of experimentation that artist Nina Hoechtl researches is the attempt to interrupt the chains of extractivism through which the Weltmuseum Vienna benefits from sales of souvenirs in their Sisi gift shop, especially to Mexican tourists. How can the production of so many souvenirs of the resplendent quetzal crown be made sustainable, and their sales ethical? This is how the counter-extractivist position is currently being thought through.
“Do you like coffee?”
I remember being asked this question in preparation for the expedition into El Triunfo.
In hindsight, more pressing questions would have been: “Are you aware that coffee plantations are one of the main threats to the quetzal’s rapidly diminishing habitat?” Or: “Can you focus on birdwatching while your four-year-old son hikes five hours through the viper and mountain lion jungle without straying from the path?” Or even: “Are you prepared to offer your blood to thousands of hungry insects each day?”
Had I known, I may have answered differently.
“Of course, I love it”.
Starbucks, the World Bank and Conservation International have joined forces to promote shade coffee near the El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve in the state of Chiapas.[viii] The mystique of the quetzal is also used to sell coffee; but, unsurprisingly, on the blog Coffee by the Roast, an invitation for visitors to El Triunfo to share quetzal sightings remains uncommented.[ix]
Finca Prussia
An abandoned coffee plantation—the kind you read about since the 2016 Roya (coffee leaf rust) outbreak that has swept through Central America since 20212. Across the region, many coffee plantations have been deserted, putting them at risk of being bought up by loggers, among other threats. This one—Finca Prussia, with its grand, rambling array of buildings—has been abandoned by its German owner as a result of the 1994 social movement. He was a distant but lasting memory for the neighboring Santa Rita community, who were not entirely sure where he was; they only knew he kept ownership of the land. The “Prussian farm” seemed a tell-tale image for the dangerous presence of the international coffee industry and its constant encroachment on pure forests, because coffee likes to grow in the cooler highlands. Where big industry operates, the masks of extractivism grow ever more ornate and suspicious. Although now dormant, Finca Prussia was just one façade of many: Active are countless others, from Starbucks greenwashing to campaigns that sell feminist coffee online.[x]
It was strong coffee I bought from the local indigenous growers Karmen, mother of Maria, who had spent days with us at the station in El Triunfo with her son as part of the team of guides at the biosphere station. I have a weakness for this one substance I can never quite dose correctly—perhaps because overdose is related to thinking, or because, as a legitimate addiction, it is socially acceptable. Certainly, for the quetzal, coffee is a much bigger problem than the other forms of drugs being trafficked through Chiapas. This ubiquitous legal package—replete with a saccharine, happy lion drawing especially for Starbucks on their new merchandise —is probably the greatest threat to the quetzals in their shrinking forest habitat, which is now “buffered” on all sides by coffee plantations.
Huella Ecológica
This book invited us to investigate how contemporary art and ethnographic museum objects reflect extractive practices and the potential for regeneration. The site of extraction in forests of Mexico is a field that shows the impossibility today of ethnographic museums, like the Weltmuseum Vienna or the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, collecting rare bird feathers again. Alternative perspectives of agency might be found when art enters a new relation with the ethnographic object, for instance, in the form of the app Huella Ecológica (Eco-footprint) which helps users calculate their environmental impact. The app also analyses the environmental and sustainability impacts of producing souvenirs. By analyzing a variety of resources used to create ecological footprints, Huella Ecológica can then offer advice to museums on how to source or produce environmentally friendly souvenirs. To aid this process, a decision-support framework has been developed for the app comprising a suite of dimensions, including resources, emissions, energy, waste, and human well-being, to identify and choose key sustainability issues of interest in sourcing or producing souvenirs.[xi]
What becomes so clear while being in the mountains with the communities that live around El Triunfo is that a holistic approach has to be taken to support the people that live in these buffer zones, so the shifting coffee industry does not push them into precarity. This is a recurring realization of mine during this larger study of extractivism and counter-extractivism through museum repatriations. These efforts can only work when the people who are directly affected—those who are the purported benefactors of natural and cultural resources—are also in a position to make decisions about how they are used. The two sides—the “universal” (Euro-American) museum and the Indigenous communities around El Triunfo—remain at a great distance. A souvenir sourced from these communities (rather than from China via an inexpensive online shop) might begin to traverse this distance, potentially accrue a mediatory role, shuttle some of the energy back and forth, and, with light, deft hands, convert its toxicity into a beautiful and playful mode again.
Conclusions
To take, grabbily, to extract, forcefully, to loot, when possible—these are, it seems, basic human urges. The figure of the pirate (Indiana Jones, the Conquistador, etc.), so ubiquitously loved by children from a young age, hunts around for treasure and seizes by any means. The appetite for gold is aroused in the earliest readers of today, from the greedy Scrouge McDuck to the raiders of lost arks and other temples of boom. I run a research project on repatriation and yet, despite all efforts, I fail to raise my child in a world of narratives that are not repeatedly ending in a violent but successful pillage. The trickery and capitalism of the looter is shrouded in heroism and mystery.
Walking through the Weltmuseum Vienna, I come across a familiar scene: A group of school children gathered in front of the display, with a museum worker animating the discussion. The Stories from Mesoamerica exhibition is a horizontal hodgepodge of weighty ancient and new Day of the Dead figurines and textiles. As is often the case with spaces of confusion, the Germanic mind reaches to definitions, and a game for children is set out on three cards with the words: Feder (feather), Kopf (head), and Schmuck (ornament, also jewelry). Accompanying each word is a picture for the children to understand—Schmuck is represented as a pile of treasure. What is odd is that they are trying to define the name of the thing on display in front of them. Is it a Kopfschmuck Feder, like a feather in a hat? Or is it a Federkopf, a head decorated with feathers? Or is it a Kopffederschmuck, a head-feather-ornament? These words do not feel right, even for a German speaker; they lead to stumbles, to confusion. I keep going. That evening, there is a lecture, and the same item again causes stumbles; it cannot be suppressed in this museum, yet it also cannot be spoken about because its restitution claim is so tense. The moderator invites the audience to listen to Mexican speakers discussing feathers—but not The Federkopfschmuck, although that is what we are all thinking about. They have found a different set of feather ornaments to work on. One cannot help but feel it is a ruse.
The researchers are very genuine, and one can see their joy in exploring the techniques of the feather mosaic which they have chosen to replicate and learn through the process of replication. This idea speaks volumes of the value of collections—both in art historical research and contemporary artistic revivals of the kind I study in relation to repatriations. What is unusual about this situation is precisely the position of this museum vis a vis the Penacho, which makes it impossible to claim an autonomous research project on Mexican featherwork. Many museums are still so burdened by unresolved reckonings regarding decolonization that it takes great strength to work within the extractive zone that permeates these museum spaces.
Extractive vocabulary saturates these spaces too, including the one that makes speakers stumble on a name which is not the actual name. It is not quetzalapanecoatl, the Nahuatl name that could be learned and uttered with respect. Rather, it is the deterritorialized name, one that fails to acknowledge Motecuhzoma or provide a context of extraction that is at once vague but also very concrete. Concrete feathers. Plastic feathers. And then so many quetzal feathers than will ever be collected again.
Are you a Federkopfschmuck or are you just the treasure of some head that does not know where the feathers are from? Feather head, are you Schmuck? Are you Schmuck treasure? Featherhead. Montezuma’s Crown. Are you not also—and more than, and without—a name for so long? You who were mistaken for a skirt, for a standard, and now for the unknown head amongst all this Schmuck. Piles and piles of Schmuck that these museums keep on their Kopf. The Kopf is heavy. Heavy with all this Schmuck.
To point accusingly at anthropology museums as institutionalized gift stores is all too obvious. A more difficult quandary is how to counter, or reverse, the accelerated plundering of the Earth’s environment for cultural production over the past decades. Habitat loss is a larger problem than poaching. Conservation cannot only be about preserving the material; it must also conserve the origin of the material, which, in this case, is a life. The extinction of that life would be the ultimate end of the kinds of extractivism driven by capitalism and colonialism.
Full circle—El Triunfo
In the end, the only quetzal we found was supposedly a dead one. Those feathers on the cloud forest track were not what they seemed. Nothing looks the same up close. Alberto, the biologist guide, became very excited and collected the feathers as fast as he could. I also found four and wondered about this sad remnant of the bird I was hoping to watch in real life.
The way it had died was a mystery; or so I thought until I talked to the local ranger. He didn’t think what we had found was the result of a killing by poachers or a raptor; it rather just represented the loss of some feathers. He also disabused us of another idea. Flashing his silver teeth as he smiled, he said that the plane we had heard overhead was fertilizer being dropped. Anything is possible, I realized, but nothing is as it seems from a distance!
The reason I wanted to see the quetzal in its habitat, I realized, is because of its feathers—feathers that I had spent an inordinate amount of time looking at through glass, always through glass, in the museum.[xii] It is only when we arrived at San Cristobal de las Casas, and Alberto placed the quetzal feathers we had found inside a vitrine, did I feel something of the collector’s euphoria that ensues when rare and precious items are put on display, even if these items are indices of extinction.
[i] Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Mit Fremden Federn: Quetzalapanecáyotl – Ein Restiutionsfall (Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2022).
[ii] María Olvido Moreno Guzmán, Carlos Barrera Reyes and Renée Riedler in conversation at the Weltmuseum Vienna after the lecture “Mexican Feather Art: Heritage at the Interface between Nature and Culture,” November 19, 2024. See https://www.weltmuseumwien.at/en/programme/detail/mexican-feather-art-heritage-at-the-interface-between-nature-and-culture/1731970800/.
[iii] Here, Haraway refers to xkcd’s Bee Orchid cartoon, which imagines a future in which orchid bodies are the remaining archive of extinct bees, whose mirror can be found in their form. It is the plant’s own interpretation of what a bee used to look like that paints the picture at the end of the comic, because the orchid had “an idea of how the female bee looked to the male bee.” The melancholy of extinction is captured in the poetic statement that “the only memory of the bee is a painting by a dying flower.” xkcd, Bee Orchid, accessed May 20, 2025, https://xkcd.com/1259/, quoted in Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 69.
[iv] The quetzals’ habitat stretches from the Mexican municipalities of La Concordia, Angel Albino Corzo, and Villa Flores to Jiquipilas. The losses of the humid primary forest from 2002 to 2023 are shown by municipality as follows on Global Forest Watch, all accessed May 20, 2025; La Concordia https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/MEX/5/49/?map=eyJjYW5Cb3VuZCI6dHJ1ZX0%3D; Angel Albino Corzo https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/MEX/5/9/?map=eyJjYW5Cb3VuZCI6dHJ1ZX0%3D; Villaflores https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/MEX/5/116/?map=eyJjYW5Cb3VuZCI6dHJ1ZX0%3D; Jiquipilas https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/MEX/5/46/?map=eyJjYW5Cb3VuZCI6dHJ1ZX0%3D
[v] Zelia Nuttall, Standard or Head-Dress? A Historical Essay on a Relic of Ancient Mexico. Archeological and Ethnological Papers of the Peabody Museum vol. 1, no. 1. (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press, 1888).
[vi] Jose Ramiro Culebro, son of David Culebro, February 10, 1938, VIII-3. 141.2 J-118. Historical Archive of the National Museum of Anthropology.
[vii] Loc. cit, 29 January 1938.
[viii] Patricia Moguel and Víctor Toledo, “Biodiversity Conservation in Traditional Coffee Systems of Mexico,” Conservation Biology 13, no. 1 (1999): 1–21, http://dx.doi.org/10.1046/j.1523-1739.1999.97153.x; NACEC (North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation). 2003. Mexican Law Governing Forests and Forest Management. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=29323 (or full article: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/http://www.sobtell.com/images/questions/1500279777-20170223021239starbucks_and_conservation_international.pdf); Ivette Perfecto, Robert A. Rice, Russell Greenberg and Martha E. Van der Voort, “Shade Coffee: A Disappearing Refuge for Biodiversity,” BioScience 46, no. 8 (1996): 598–608, https://doi.org/10.2307/1312989; Robert A. Rice and Justin Ward, Coffee, Conservation, and Commerce in the Western Hemisphere (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and the Natural Resources Defense Council, 1996).
[ix] Coffee by the Roast (blog), “Spotlight on… Organic Mexico El Triunfo,” July 30, 2019, https://coffeebytheroast.com/blog/2019/7/26/spotlight-onorganic-mexico-el-triunfo.
[x] On feminist coffee, see, “Mexico | El Triunfo | Women Producers | Light Roast,” Tiny Footprint Coffee, accessed 20 May, 2025, https://www.tinyfootprintcoffee.com/products/mexico-el-triunfo-women-producers-light-roast. And on greenwashed coffee, see Starbucks (blog), “Starbucks Unveils New Packaging for Its México Chiapas Whole Bean Coffee, Honoring the Rich Coffee Legacy of the Sierra Madre Region,” July 8, 2024, https://historias.starbucks.com/en-es/press/2024/starbucks-unveils-new-packaging-for-its-mexico-chiapas-whole-bean-coffee-honoring-the-rich-coffee-legacy-of-the-sierra-madre-region/.
[xi] Huella Ecológica, accessed May 21, 2025, https://eco-footprint.vercel.app/.
[xii] Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, “Object to Project: Artist’s Interventions in Museums,” in Sculpture in the Museum, ed. Christopher Marshall (Farnham: Ashgate Press, 2012), 216–239; “Small Mirrors to Large Empires: Towards a Theory of Meta-museums in Contemporary Art,” in Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence. Proceedings of the 32nd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2009), 1012–1017; “Museopiracy: Redressing the Commemoration of the Endeavour’s Voyage to the Pacific in Processions for Tupaia,” in Exhibiting the Experience of Empire, ed. Imma Ramos, John Giblin, and Nikki Grout, special issue, Third Text 33, no. 4–5 (2019): 541–558.
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