Julia Sanches

great-great-grandfather is just a relic in a person’s life, unless the man in question took the not-insignificant sum of four thousand pre-

Columbian artifacts to Europe. And his greatest achievement was that he didn’t find Machu Picchu, though he came close.

It’s one of those European museums that houses large collections of non-Western art from the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. In other words, a very pretty museum built on something very ugly. It’s like someone thought that painting the ceiling with Aboriginal art and sticking a few palm trees in the corridor would help us feel at home and forget that everything in this place should be thousands of kilometers away from here. Including me.

Embarrassment seems to be the sole means of communication between parents and children.
— Heinrich Böll (trans. Leila Vennewitz)

look around for a suggested route, a timeline to ground the objects, but they’re displayed randomly, in isolation, their labels vague or generic.

Huaquero is not a euphemism. It’s how I refer to the looters who to this day remove cultural and artistic properties from

archaeological sites. Huaqueros can range from cultured gentlemen to mercenaries, and these ancient treasures can end up in European museums or the sitting rooms of their elegant criollo houses in Lima. The term huaquero, meaning grave robber in Spanish, comes from huaca in Quechua. This is what people in the Andes call their sacred places, most of which are now archaeological sites or ruins.

Community leaders and their funerary offerings are buried in catacombs at these sites. Huaqueros systematically invade them in search of tombs and priceless objects, and their incompetence is so great that they leave the sites a complete mess

Which is why to huaquear is a form of violence. It turns fragments of history into private property that accessorizes and dresses up the ego. Like art thieves, huaqueros are the heroes of Hollywood movies

that tells the tale of one civilization’s triumph over another.