Conclusion

The conclusion discusses town residents’ recent efforts to return the stone to Coatlinchan, situating their work within a worldwide movement to return museum collections to source communities and appropriate or remove statues and monuments that embody and perpetuate violent histories. In conversation with these actions and debates, as well as with recent Mexican feminist activism, their call for restitution invites a politics of patrimony that takes into account how certain objects and sites cannot be separated from the places and communities they are embedded in and constitutive of. Theirs is not only an effort to right a historical wrong. Ultimately, their call for the stone’s return is premised on the ways in which it is connected to and interacts with telluric forces crucial to their town and the region’s survival, collective well-being, and environmental restoration.