Juan Carlos Barrientos Garcia

Juan Carlos Barrientos García is a Honduran heritage researcher, legal scholar, and educator exploring how Decolonial theory, heritage practice, and cultural policy intersect to reshape narratives of identity, memory, and place. He holds a Master's degree in World Heritage Studies from Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany, awarded with distinction, and a degree in International Law from Universidad Tecnológica Centroamericana in Honduras. He is currently a PhD Candidate at Bauhaus University Weimar, where he is part of the DFG Research Training Group “Identity and Heritage.” His research explores how national identity is constructed and contested in postcolonial societies through museum narratives, with a particular focus on myth, memory, and symbolic reassemblies in Honduras. His work critically rethinks how memory, identity, and heritage are negotiated in contexts marked by colonial rupture, epistemic erasure, and the urgent need for symbolic re-invention.

As Coordinator of the Educational Programme at European Heritage Volunteers, he designs and leads international training initiatives on heritage conservation, public engagement, and education. His work spans World Heritage and heritage sites across Europe, integrating hands-on conservation with critical heritage interpretation. This immersive experience has given him a situated understanding of how heritage operates in diverse social, political, and ecological contexts, insights that directly inform his academic research.

Previously, he worked at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Environmental Law Centre in Bonn, where he focused on the legal junctures of nature conservation, national & international policy and cultural heritage. This engagement developed his understanding of international policy frameworks and the indivisible link between ecological and cultural systems, which is an approach that continues to shape his interdisciplinary perspective. 

Working Title: "Claiming the Maya: Decolonial Perspectives on Heritage, Identity, and the Museum in Honduras"

Juan Carlos Barrientos Garcia, MA World Heritage Studies,

DFG Research Training Group 2227 "Identity and Heritage" at Bauhaus University Weimar

Abstract

This research examines the Museum for National Identity (MIN) in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, as a central site for the construction, negotiation, and contestation of national identity in a postcolonial context. Framed within decolonial theory, the study focuses on the museum’s representation of Copán, Honduras’s only cultural UNESCO World Heritage Site and a symbol of ancient Maya civilisation. Copán was first mobilised through a state-led project known to scholars as Mayanisation, aimed at political and cultural homogenisation grounded in the racial ideologies of mestizaje. This study introduces the concept of Copanisation to describe its contemporary re-articulation within Honduran cultural imaginary. No longer confined to official discourse, Copán has become a shared symbolic resource through which diverse Honduran communities articulate a sense of belonging—responding to historical rupture, colonial dislocation, and the aspiration to connect with a meaningful past.

This dissertation develops Copanisation as an analytical framework for understanding the resignification of Copán with a focus on the 21st century. While grounded in critiques of the state-led Mayanisation project of the first half of the 20th century, the concept departs from that model by foregrounding the social, affective, and symbolic practices through which ordinary Hondurans appropriate, circulate, and reimagine the image of Copán. It offers a lens for tracing the transformation of Maya heritage from a nationalist instrument into a more complex and ambivalent site of identification—one that traverses class, ethnicity, and political affiliation in the ongoing negotiation of collective memory. As a process of cultural re-existence, Copanisation responds to the colonial wound and the postcolonial inferiority complex inscribed in Honduran self-perception, positioning Copán as a space of symbolic continuity, aspiration, and historical healing. Framed within a pluriversal perspective, this study recognises the “Maya myth” not only as a constructed category but also as a site of epistemic resistance—one that allows for the reclamation of erased histories and the articulation of inclusive, postcolonial forms of belonging within a landscape still shaped by colonial logics.

This study contends that the Museum for National Identity functions as a site of negotiation, where authorised heritage discourse intersects with opportunities to reimagine historical narratives. Through the lens of Copanisation, it explores how an imagined abstract of Maya heritage is rearticulated in ways that unsettle hegemonic frameworks and open space for a more inclusive understanding of a contemporary Honduran identity. The museum becomes a potential platform for engaging plural histories and diverse epistemologies, offering visitors a means to reconcile a fractured colonial past with aspirations for a culturally plural future. This dissertation foregrounds the role of heritage and museums in shaping shared identity as situated processes that, particularly in postcolonial and peripheral contexts, reflect the tensions, complexities, and aspirations of a modern, heterogeneous nation.

The research combines theoretical analysis with ethnographic methods, including fieldwork in the museum, participant observation, and the close study of selected objects that function as interpretive portals—linking the museum to other geographies where the Maya Myth, Copán, and the contemporary Copanisation of Honduras are differently engaged. These include sites such as La Esperanza, Cerro Palenque, and Los Naranjos, where distinct communities articulate alternative relationships to heritage. Through these object-based, connections, the study traces how the museum’s narratives extend into the wider Honduran cultural landscape, revealing how the Maya myth intersects with other histories within a pluriversal framework.

Hypothesis: This dissertation hypothesises that the Museum for National Identity (MIN) in Tegucigalpa functions as an arena for mediating the contemporary process of Copanisation: the re-appropriation of Copán as a shared symbol of collective identification across diverse Honduran communities. While not free from hegemonic structures, the MIN operates as an epistemically ambivalent space—one that both sustains and unsettles dominant narratives. Within this ambiguity, it becomes possible to trace how Copán’s heritage is re-signified by visitors and curators alike in response to colonial dislocation and the ongoing search for symbolic grounding. Unlike museums in the global North—often structured around the taxonomic display of the colonised Other—this institution becomes a performative space where the colonised subject enacts an imagined Self. In this context, the museum does not merely preserve a selective past; it functions as a symbolic stage where postcolonial subjects may perform imagined histories, testing forms of belonging that are aspirational, provisional, and affectively charged.

This study contends that the parameters of “authentic” heritage cannot be determined by the epistemic regimes of Western modernity or the geopolitics of knowledge that have historically silenced subaltern narratives, but must emerge from the situated realities and symbolic needs of those shaped by colonial disruption. In a context where historical continuity has been fractured by conquest, extraction, and epistemic subjugation, the desire to identify with Copán and its mythic grandeur is not a distortion of history, but a form of re-existence—a way to reclaim symbolic agency within the colonial matrix of power. In such settings, the museum ceases to be a colonial instrument of classification and becomes instead a postcolonial technology of self-fashioning: a space where potential histories can be imagined into presence, and where the right to re-narrate belonging asserts itself as both a political and affective necessity.

Barrientos García, Juan Carlos: “Bodies made of Maize and the Stones that grind it. Heritage Storytelling through Objects in the Museum”, in: Arnisa Halili, Olga Juutistenaho, Beate Piela, Martín Cornejo Presbítero, Annika Sellmann, Martha Ingund Wegewitz (Hg.): Bodies in, als, von, mit, und „Identität und Erbe“, Schriftenreihe des DFG-Graduiertenkollegs »Identität und Erbe«, Band VII, geplante Veröffentlichung 2025.

Barrientos García, Juan Carlos: “Analysis of a Difficult Heritage from an Ideology of Violence, the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg”, in Reader – Heritage Conservation and Ideologies, p.152 – 165 Jan 2019, Brandenburgische Technische Universität Cottbus-Senftenberg IKMZ- Universitätsbibliothek © 2018 ISBN 978-3-940471-42-0

Barrientos García, Juan Carlos:: “Beyond the books and university halls: experiencing European heritage”, in Good practices of volunteering for European cultural heritage, p.57 – 59  Jan 2020, European Heritage Volunteers Programme, Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien · Federal Goverment Commissioner for Culture and Media · Berlin · Germany

Mitarbeit im Redaktionsteam:

WITH/OUT IDENTITY. Zur Frage von Identitätskonstruktionen in Raum, Erbe und Communities, Schriftenreihe des DFG-Graduiertenkollegs »Identität und Erbe«, Band VI, geplante Veröffentlichung 2025.