Frida Everything Everywhere All at Once
El Tri may be slight underdogs facing England on the football pitch on Sunday in Estadio Azteca, but when it comes to cultural conquests, it seems Mexico has already won.
The Tate Modern’s “Frida: The Making of an Icon” exhibition opened on 25 June in London to enormous public appetite, breaking the museum’s record for pre-ticket sales and spreading beyond the museum walls in public installations and cultural activities across the city. Seventy-two years after Kahlo died with little recognition beyond her volatile marriage to Diego Rivera, the global flood of “Fridamania” shows no signs of receding.
This is not the first time a Kahlo exhibition has made a splash in London; the Victoria and Albert Museum’s “Frida Kahlo: Making Herself Up” show in 2018 was one of the fastest-selling in the museum’s history. The Tate’s exhibition traces Kahlo’s early influences and her mastery of self-portraiture across ten rooms, and includes personal items such as corsets, huipiles and jewellery, made available with the support of INBAL.
Critic Hettie Judah wrote in The Guardian of how commercialisation has flattened Kahlo into a “beautiful but tragic figure” far less complex than the sharp-edged woman she really was, but the Tate’s co-curator Beatriz García-Velasco defended the show’s embrace of Kahlo’s mass appeal. She asserts that Kahlo’s universal accessibility reflects the genuine diversity of communities — Chicano artists, feminist movements, disability activists, queer culture — who have claimed her as their own, and that the mass production of her image can be read as a form of democratic ownership as much as a capitalist one.
The exhibition itself leans into this tension, placing Kahlo’s own work alongside pieces by artists she has influenced, from graphic artist Rio Yañez’s satirical “Ghetto Frida” character to Camila Fontenele de Miranda’s participatory portrait project inviting the public in Brazil to dress as Kahlo, contrasting mass-market merchandise with handmade devotional objects that treat Kahlo as a secular saint within the communities that revere her.
Financial Times critic Jackie Wullschläger also found some fault with the exhibition — for a surprising lack of Frida. She noted the show includes only 24 of Kahlo’s paintings (few of them major works), with more than half the galleries devoted to what she considered an overreach into post-1970s identity politics. Her praise is reserved instead for the handful of authentic Kahlo works on display, singling out the miniature “Girl with a Death Mask” and “Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird” for their power even at small scale, and for the installations of Kahlo’s personal possessions. Wullschläger sees Kahlo’s individuality as an artist, not the identity-politics framework applied to her, as the impetus behind her enduring appeal.
The Gelman Saga Drags On
Frida is also the star of the ongoing drama over the Gelman Collection, which includes 18 of her works.
The Colectivo en Defensa de la Colección Gelman, a self-appointed (and according to some, self-important) coalition of artists, historians, lawyers and critics, has filed the first in a planned series of lawsuits seeking to annul the agreement that permits the 160-piece collection — which also includes pieces by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and María Izquierdo — to leave the country for temporary exhibit in Spain. About 30 of the 160 works of art are classified as national artistic monuments, but it seems the Colectivo is seeking to block the temporary export of all 160.
The collection was the subject of decades of legal wrangling after Natasha Gelman’s death and was acquired in 2023 by the Zambrano family, who pledged it as collateral for a personal loan managed by Banco Santander; it was subsequently rebranded the “Gelman Santander” collection. Under a tripartite agreement between the Zambranos, Santander and Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL), the works — currently on show at Mexico City’s Museum of Modern Art, where they have drawn more than 300,000 visitors — are due to travel to Spain in September to inaugurate Santander’s Faro Santander cultural space, under a five-year arrangement, with the possibility of extension. The temporary export of national monuments and the renewal of such export licenses is permitted under Mexican law.
Lawsuits challenging the agreement began reaching federal district courts on 26 June, filed individually by certain members of the cultural community (just three so far) to establish legal standing. Lawyers Jesús Soledad and Lilia Mendoza argue somewhat technically that Mexican heritage law requires an individual export permit for each work declared a Monument, with its condition, conservation guarantees and return terms assessed case by case. Instead, the collection’s protected works were bundled into a single agreement allowing them to leave the country as a block.
The suits name INBAL’s leadership and the Culture Ministry as defendants; Santander itself has not yet been named, since the public version of the agreement does not specify the bank by name, though the presiding judge may choose to add it.
Curator Francisco Berzunza, perhaps hoping to apotheosize his moment of fame into broad leadership of Mexican culture, claimed the arrangement could set a precedent for future exports of protected Mexican art, (even though such exports are allowed) while political scientist and commentator Denise Dresser, writing from Madrid, said she would file her own legal challenge, framing the case as a matter of the constitutional right to culture. Members have stressed the action is not opposed to the international exhibition of Mexican art in principle, nor motivated by political disagreement; they say they would welcome any arrangement that keeps the collection intact under its historic name and establishes a permanent, publicly accessible showcase in Mexico.
For INBAL and the Santander Foundation, the Gelman deal is being held up as a case of “responsible circulation” of Mexican heritage rather than a backdoor privatisation, and fully compliant with existing law. They stress that the owners remain Mexican, that Monument‑status works will continue to be subject to individual permits and conservation checks, and that the 160‑piece Gelman Santander collection is due back in Mexico once the loan term concludes, with any Kahlo or other piece still under the 1984 decree unable to be sold on the open market in any case. From this perspective, allowing the works to tour major international venues while keeping legal caps on their sale value is a way to leverage cultural diplomacy without dismantling the heritage protections activists are trying to defend. And they argue the law needs to apply in all cases, not just when it suits certain people.
The lawsuits do not halt the planned September export, but lawyers say the court could order a suspension if it agrees to hear the case, with initial rulings expected in the first half of July.
Rock Art Restored
After looters used saws and drilling equipment to try to extract ancient rock art at cave sites in Cuatro Ciénegas, Coahuila in January 2025, the damage was described as irreversible. Their attempt technically failed, but in the process they fractured the rock face into numerous fragments, with thousands ultimately recovered and placed in safekeeping. Vibrations from the looting also caused secondary rockfalls, extending the damage beyond the immediately targeted areas and compromising the integrity of the site.
This week, INAH’s team of restoration specialists has concluded the country’s first comprehensive restoration of rock art at the site.
The recovery unfolded in three stages. The first involved recovering fragments both deliberately detached and dislodged by the looting; the second, conducted over a month off-site, saw each piece documented, classified and given initial conservation treatment — essential groundwork for later repositioning fragments with precision. The third and most demanding phase took place on-site over two and a half months, complicated by the location’s remoteness: the seven restorers, most travelling from Mexico City since Coahuila currently has no local specialists in this area of conservation, worked with scaffolding and costly, specialised equipment. Team member Hilda Serrano Juárez likened the reconstruction to assembling a large jigsaw puzzle, requiring careful attention to the rock’s texture, colour and crystalline structure to return each piece to its original position. The team ultimately restored coherence to the compositions’ visual narrative, while leaving the scars of the damage visible as a record of what occurred.
Restorer Ana Paula Moisés Preciado characterised the looting not as ordinary theft but as an assault on an irreplaceable historical record — one that silenced the voices of the desert-dwelling peoples who had lived there centuries earlier. Patricia Mondragón Ramos, who led fieldwork, added that the scale of the damage disrupted not just material but the visual and symbolic narrative of the murals themselves.
The rock shelters where the paintings are estimated to be 500 to 5,000 years old and belong to a broader network of archaeological sites in the region. The imagery recovered in the restoration offers a rare window into the worldview of Coahuila’s early inhabitants — hunter-gatherer peoples who occupied the region over many millennia and whose broader cultural tradition is often referred to as the Desert Culture. The intervention itself uncovered previously undocumented pictorial details in the process, opening new lines of research into that history.
Both INAH officials and the restoration team stressed that the project’s conclusion does not mark the end of responsibility for the site: safeguarding it going forward, they said, will depend on continued vigilance, preventive conservation strategies, and sustained engagement from local communities, visitors and government at all levels.
Ancient Jungle Citadel Explored
Archaeologists have confirmed the discovery of Minanbé, a Maya city that survived in near-pristine condition within the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in Campeche. INAH announced the find, made by a joint Mexican-Slovenian team led by archaeologist Ivan Šprajc.
The site’s name is inspired by its remote location, derived from the Yucatec Maya mina’an (”there is not”) and be (”road”). Unlike other sites the team has surveyed, no old logging tracks lead to Minanbé, and researchers had to cut through several kilometres of dense jungle on quad bikes and then on foot to reach the ruins. Šprajc noted that it is the first site his team has found in three years with no evidence of looting.
Aerial lidar scans of the area were first taken 13 years ago, but this was the first season in which specialists were able to explore the roughly 15-hectare site on the ground. Their survey uncovered a temple pyramid over 13 metres tall, built in the Río Bec architectural style — noted for its fine masonry and decorative moulding, and characteristic of the Late Classic period. The team also documented 14 stelae and altars, including Stela 1, which despite erosion still shows a ruler depicted decapitating a figure with a blade.
Inscriptions, ceramics and architectural style indicate the city reached its peak between roughly 600 and 900 CE, coinciding with the golden age of nearby Calakmul, one of the great Maya metropolises. Epigraphist Octavio Esparza Olguín, who examined photographs of the monuments, suggested that the carved date of 849 CE on one stela places most of the monuments close to the eve of the Maya collapse in the Central Lowlands. Some monuments at the site were found fragmented, which researchers believe may reflect deliberate alteration by later inhabitants whose beliefs had diverged from those of the city’s builders.
Šprajc, who has led previous discoveries in the region including the city of Ocomtún, described the find as fitting a familiar regional pattern: land likely adapted for intensive agriculture, with the settlement’s power peaking during the Late Classic period before the wider collapse of Lowland Maya civilisation.
World Press Photo Competition Marks a Milestone in CDMX
World Press Photo 2026 opened at the Franz Mayer Museum on 24 June, marking the exhibition’s 27th year at the museum and coinciding with the competition’s 70th anniversary. This year’s edition is accompanied for the first time by a companion show, El Archivo (The Archive), which draws 33 previously unseen prints from World Press Photo’s Amsterdam headquarters — a collection of more than 20,000 images spanning seven decades. Curated for the Franz Mayer by Martha Echeverría, the combined exhibitions bring together 144 images selected from over 57,000 submissions by 3,747 photographers from 141 countries.
The main competition centres on abuses of power by governments. This year’s winning image — by American photographer Carol Guzy — depicts a corridor where US immigration officers (ICE) hold undocumented asylum seekers before deportation. Other themes running through the selection include climate change, represented by the winning Mexican entry documenting flooding linked to global warming and pollution, and life in conflict and post-conflict zones such as Gaza and Syria. The Mexican winner, César Rodríguez, will lead two related public programmes: a workshop on editing documentary projects and a talk reflecting on the challenges of covering climate change’s impact across Mexico.
“El Archivo”, housed in a separate gallery, includes historic winning images such as the photograph of a woman standing before a tank during the Tiananmen Square protests and the widely reproduced (and disputed) 1968 Saigon execution photograph long attributed to Eddie Adams. Franz Mayer director Giovana Jaspersen has described the retrospective as coinciding meaningfully with the museum’s own 40th anniversary, offering a chance to trace the evolution of photojournalism’s visual language.
Pirates in the Library
Piracy accounts for roughly half of all books sold in Mexico, according to recently published research. Quetzalli de la Concha Pichardo, a lawyer specialising in intellectual property and vice-president of the Mexican Centre for Copyright Protection and Promotion (CeMPro), has described how this industrialised piracy now diverts more than 50 per cent of what Mexico’s publishing industry should be producing, in a business she estimates could exceed 19,000 million pesos.
CeMPro, working with the National Chamber of the Mexican Publishing Industry (Caniem), has spent the first half of 2026 mapping the scale of the trade, ahead of presenting its findings to the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI) and the federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR). The mapping has identified clandestine warehouses and production sites concentrated in and around Mexico City — including Iztapalapa, Naucalpan and Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl — as well as a growing distribution network reaching Puebla, Veracruz, Oaxaca, Querétaro, Michoacán and Jalisco. Pirated books produced in Mexico are, De la Concha said, now travelling onward through Central America; El Universal has traced sales as far as Colombia and Peru, with Mexican ISBNs serving as a giveaway of origin.
The last full economic impact study on this topic, from the Coalition for Legal Access to Culture, dates to 2015 and put the value of pirated creative content — spanning books, music and audiovisual material — at around 16,000 million pesos; De la Concha suggests the true figure today is likely 15–20 per cent higher.
Piracy’s share of the book market has grown steadily: from two in ten titles some 15 years ago, according to a 2021 UNAM bulletin, to now roughly five in ten. Pirated editions have also become harder to spot. Where 1990s counterfeits required unwieldy printing plates and produced visibly poor photocopies, De la Concha said improving technology has professionalised the trade even as pirated titles have become only marginally cheaper — around 20 per cent below the cover price, rather than the steep discounts once typical. NielsenIQ BookData put the average retail price of a book in Mexico at 275.8 pesos in 2025, rising to 308.81 pesos for non-fiction.
No genre or audience is exempt. Targets range from general-interest bestsellers — pirated editions of former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s books circulate widely — to educational staples such as Álgebra de Baldor and the primary-school reading text Juguemos a Leer. Pirate operations can run print runs of up to 20,000 copies of a single title, compared with the 1,500–2,000 copies typical of a legitimate Mexican print edition; in one case, a clandestine press seized in 2019 held 20,000 counterfeit copies of a single novel. Textbook publishers alone report losses exceeding 35 per cent of potential sales to piracy, and the trade is visibly concentrated around Mexico City’s Centro Histórico, including the streets of Donceles, Templo Mayor, Eje Central and around the Alameda Central.
Industrial-scale book piracy can also function as a channel for laundering proceeds from other illicit businesses. A 2025 diagnostic from the National Citizen Observatory (ONC) identified some points of sale for pirated goods as also dealing in firearms and small-scale drug sales, and noted a blurred line between informality, illegality and organised crime across piracy markets generally.
Digital piracy compounds the problem: Caniem estimates 48 per cent of e-book consumption in Mexico is illegal, largely through unauthorised PDF files shared via search engines, social media and messaging platforms. Since 2022, a partnership between Caniem, CeMPro and Mercado Libre — the only online marketplace so far to take systematic action — has used automated detection to reduce pirated listings on the platform by 32 per cent, though enforcement teams still take down some 22,000 sites a month distributing unauthorised titles. Piracy is reportedly growing on other digital marketplaces, including Amazon, Temu and TikTok, which have yet to introduce comparable controls.
Mexico’s legal framework provides for penalties of six months to six years’ imprisonment, plus fines, for the unauthorised commercial use of copyrighted works under Article 424 of the Federal Criminal Code. In May 2024, the Supreme Court upheld provisions strengthening digital copyright protection, including Article 114 Octies, which allows online service providers to remove unauthorised content following notice from rights holders or a competent authority. A 2020 reform also made book piracy a crime that can be prosecuted ex officio — meaning any citizen or authority can trigger action, not only the affected rights holder.
Despite this, no major seizure operation targeting book piracy has taken place since 2019, and De la Concha said the World Cup has further diverted public security resources away from the informal-commerce zones where pirated books are typically sold.
Como Pato Merlín, No Hay Dos
It’s official: Merlín, the duck who went from waddling alongside Karla Gómez and her son selling bottled water on Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma to inadvertently becoming a mascot for the 2026 World Cup, has been trademarked.
The duck’s sudden popularity triggered attempts by outside parties to register “Pato Merlín” as a trademark, prompting Mexico’s Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI) to intervene and confirm the trademark belongs to the Gómez family. Viral figures — human or otherwise — routinely face this risk, since they often delay formal trademark registration until after they’ve already built an audience, leaving a window in which others can attempt to file first.
Brands including Netflix, Volaris, IHOP México and the Atlante football club have moved quickly to associate themselves with Merlín, while influencer Poncho de Nigris reportedly offered over 500,000 pesos to buy the duck, an offer the family declined as Merlín is considered part of the household. FIFA itself invited the family to film inside Estadio Azteca, though Merlín was barred from entering to watch games under the venue’s animal policy.
The duck’s wild popularity has even prompted proposed legislation in Mexico City’s Congress. Deputy Luisa Fernanda Ledesma Alpízar of Movimiento Ciudadano has introduced a bill, informally dubbed the “Ley Merlín”, to amend Article 5 of the city’s Animal Protection and Welfare Law. The proposal would require that a reasonable share of income generated by animals through social media, advertising, or similar activities be directed towards their own welfare, covering food, veterinary care, medication, surgery, rehabilitation, housing, environmental enrichment and elder care. Ledesma Alpízar has argued that existing law addresses animal cruelty but does not account for cases in which an animal helps generate commercial revenue.
Chatter Box
Popular Culture: Mexico’s federal Culture Ministry has reported an 18 per cent rise in visits to museums and archaeological sites over the past two years, totalling more than 57 million visitors across venues run by INAH and INBAL. Culture Minister Claudia Curiel de Icaza said visits rose specifically from 20 million to 24 million between 2025 and 2026 alone — a 20 per cent annual increase. Curiel de Icaza linked part of the growth to “Mundial Social”, the government’s World Cup-linked cultural programme, which has directed roughly 400 million pesos into infrastructure at Teotihuacán, the National Museum of Anthropology and the Palacio de Bellas Artes. She cited exhibitions including “Roberto Montenegro: Muralismo Fuera de la Norma” and “AztLÁN, Túnel del Tiempo” (billed as the first Chicano-art show at Bellas Artes), an aerial photography exhibition on pre-Hispanic ball courts, and Annie Leibovitz’s football-themed photography project, alongside guided archaeological tours continuing into July. The ministry made no mention of “Relatos Modernos”, the contested Gelman-Santander collection exhibition, which has drawn some 300,000 visitors amid ongoing controversy over its planned (temporary) export to Spain.
Castle for Rent?: The Culture Ministry has defended renting Chapultepec Castle to FIFA for 1.3 million pesos to host a gala dinner for over 200 international representatives ahead of the World Cup, describing the arrangement as an act of cultural diplomacy that gave Mexico visibility as host nation. The ministry rejected a complaint filed with the Attorney General’s Office by INAH researchers, saying INAH’s director had already discussed the matter with them and that no law or regulation was broken, since the payment represented a standard usage fee. President Sheinbaum said prosecutors would still need to investigate, separately from any administrative resolution. INAH researchers argued that neither Mexico’s federal monuments law nor INBAL and Culture Ministry regulations permit renting out museums or archaeological sites, and filed a formal complaint against those responsible. PAN legislators backed the complaint, with Deputy Federico Döring warning that accepting the arrangement would set a precedent for future private use of the castle. The castle has previously been rented out for hundreds of events, so the latest skirmish seems mostly political and anti FIFA related.
Cervantino Festival Announces 2026 Programme: The 54th Festival Internacional Cervantino (FIC) will run from 3 to 18 October in Guanajuato, bringing together 2,746 artists from 28 countries across 94 shows and 212 performances at 17 venues. Guanajuato governor Libia Dennise García Muñoz Ledo announced that France will serve as guest of honour, marking 200 years of diplomatic relations with Mexico. This edition will be the first to include representatives from 20 Mexican states, broadening the festival’s domestic reach. More than 1,400 Guanajuato-based artists will take part, alongside community-focused initiatives such as Proyecto Ruelas and the Escenario de la Gente. García Muñoz Ledo traced the festival’s origins to the Entremeses Cervantinos staged in Guanajuato’s Plazuela de San Roque, crediting the University of Guanajuato’s role in the event’s development. This year’s programme spans six artistic disciplines, 20 Guanajuato-originated projects and 22 exhibitions under the State Visual Arts Programme.
El Rey at 100: A new exhibition, “El Hijo del Pueblo”, has opened at the Casa de Cultura San Rafael in Mexico City to mark the centenary of composer José Alfredo Jiménez’s birth, featuring photographs, personal documents, notebooks and objects curated by his daughter, Paloma Jiménez Gálvez. Highlights include the composer’s earliest songwriting notebook, containing lyrics for “El Jinete” and “El Siete Mares” alongside previously unpublished material. The show traces his path from composer to performer and actor, and highlights his ties to the San Rafael neighbourhood, where he was discovered while working as a waiter and later married. The exhibition runs until 18 July. Separately, musician Eduardo Magallanes has just completed arrangements for a previously unreleased Jiménez composition, “Amor Prohibido”, which is being prepared for release alongside other unpublished songs.
Tenochtitlan’s Ball Court Briefly Opens: The only visible fragment of Tenochtitlan’s ball court, or Teotlachco, lies beneath the Hotel Catedral on Guatemala Street in Mexico City’s historic centre, discovered during excavations in 2014. The ball court served a ritual and religious function tied to Mexica cosmology, where the game symbolised the earth’s surface and a portal to the underworld, and where rulers themselves sometimes played. Over 3,000 ball courts have been documented across Mesoamerica, with 1,233 identified in Mexico alone. The site, part of the underground museum at the Temple of Ehécatl-Quetzalcóatl, is now open to guided tours by appointment, Tuesday to Saturday, until 19 July, when archaeologists will resume excavation work. Access is included in the Museo del Templo Mayor’s admission fee.
Culture Outing
Museo Textil de los Pueblos Indígenas y Afromexicanos
Mexico City welcomes a new museum celebrating the country’s textile heritage with the opening of the Museo Textil de los Pueblos Indígenas y Afromexicanos (MUT) in the Casa del Marqués del Apartado, facing the Templo Mayor. Developed by the federal Culture Ministry and Fonart, it showcases 210 pieces across 16 permanent galleries, celebrating indigenous and Afro-Mexican textile traditions. The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10am–6pm; admission is 95 pesos, free for children and artisans.
Culture Conversation
José Calafell on Ciberdiálogos
As Latin America director of publishing house Grupo Planeta, Calafell offers insider insight into literature and the book industry, its growth across Latin America, and a surprisingly optimistic take on its future, in this interview with León Krauze.