Early in the coming year, we will celebrate 40 years since the decree establishing the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage was published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación (Official Journal of the Federation); a paper that had been adopted in Paris on October 24, 1972. Now endorsed by the Mexican Government, it was made public on January 24, 1984, and handed over to the Director General of the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO). It is noteworthy that the Paris Convention encouraged the countries to care for valuable heritage-both cultural and natural-that was threatened and required protection for the benefit of future generations. The agreement offered a system of international cooperation and assistance to preserve and protect heritage that each country would receive from UNESCO; furthermore, it demanded resource assignment and investment from the participating States so as to implement their heritage care tasks.

Hence, in the framework of this event, those of us who work at Intervención wish to highlight the enduring commitment and work conducted over 13 years and 28 numbers wherein this specialized publication has fostered the identification, protection, conservation, and dissemination of natural and cultural heritage. There is no doubt that its work has been relevant since it has consolidated an editorial space for analysis, reflection, and academic exchange among cultural heritage stakeholders.

Therefore, in accordance with this line of interest, the contents of this journal's current number include an essay and three research articles that raise concerns for heritage among professionals from diverse contexts, latitudes, and disciplines. It likewise contains a review of a course and another of a map collection, while also-I rejoice along with our readers-revives the section called SHOWCASE, which involves a conservation, restoration, or museological process accompanied by a large number of images.

The opening ESSAY in this number, by Benjamín J. M. Martínez Castañeda, Queer Museum: A Possibility, is a proposal that exposes the power dynamics that permeate the museum as an institution and its discourse, along with the asymmetries that mold it. It identifies both the hegemonic and heteronormative strategies that have been part of its formation and have made subjectivities invisible, alongside of course, the emotions and affections that accompany them. This piece revolves around the possibility of questioning the museum and its narratives with the aim of achieving a site that is open to the construction of other ways of thinking and acting, that generates more plural subjects. The author points out that the Queer Museum is a different proposal, created as an ideal in favor of the construction of spaces that represent and question the diverse subjectivities so that a common way of inhabiting can be built from the museum.

The second work that figures in the section of RESEARCH ARTICLE is by Jannen Contreras Vargas, entitled An Eagle and a Quiver that Have Highly Offended the Mexican Nation; it is a highly interesting text where the author retraces the historical, technological, and iconographic fate of the sculpture El Caballito, by the architect Manuel Tolsá. It emphasizes the elements stated in the title: the first is the quiver, located under one of the horse’s hooves, while the second, the eagle, was removed by chisel according to sources, which led the author to trace the wanderings of this equestrian statue of King Charles IV of Spain through different parts of Mexico City, from its creation and placement in the main square in 1803 to its subsequent transfer to Tolsá square in 1979.

The research sustains the hypothesis that the eagle was indeed briefly added to the sculpture during a previous intervention, while the quiver and arrows do not symbolize the humiliation of the Mexica Empire, a proposal that gains argumentative strength firstly by delving into the characteristics of the production chain and the sequence of technological decisions that marked the sculpture’s construction, followed by a vast iconographic analysis of Charles IV’s attributes according to the Neoclassical historical and cultural context, whose factors help clarify the origins of the eagle and quiver.

Another work included is the RESEARCH ARTICLE by Jéssica Tarine Moitinho de Lima, Bárbara Sepúlvreda, and Sue Anne Regina Ferreira da Costa, Systematics, Taxonomy and Management: A Case Study on the Implementation of a Digital Repository in the Collection of Natural Heritage in the Amazon. Indeed, the article delves into an environment intrinsically linked to natural and cultural heritage, in particular its registry, control, and dissemination. It analyzes the implementation of a computerized documentation system, called Tainacan, on the natural and scientific collection in the custody of the Pará Federal University in Brazil.

The article addresses the documentation processes as sources of information that foster comprehension-in this case, of the natural collection-and facilitate its dissemination. The project recognizes the institutional efforts to integrate the university’s collection, which began in 2016, and reveals the unification of the identification metadata, the conservation and historical analysis, as well as 55 registration fields, 14 of which are obligatory.

The third RESEARCH ARTICLE, by Lizeth Patricia Russy-Velandia and María Camila Patiño Ramírez, Design and Evaluation of Biosensor Prototypes as a System to Detect Microbiological Risks for Organic Collections in Storage, focuses on the necessary-indeed, imperative-assessment of the risk to which cultural heritage may be exposed during storage. The authors developed two experimental phases to determine the characteristics, composition, and environmental conditions required for prototypes to function as microbiological risk detection systems. The first delved into the types of support, culture medium, and pH indicators to design prototypes; the second incorporated a lower number of variables, to note the importance of environmental conditions for prototypes to function.

As for the returning section SHOWCASE, it features a text by Mercedes Murguía Meca and Yolanda Madrid Alanís, Saint Elías, Links in a Sculptural Chain of Two Artists, on the statue of the aforementioned saint in the templo de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción (Temple of Our Lady of the Assumption), in Tlapanaloya, in the state of Mexico, which was restored in the Seminario-Taller de Restauración de Escultura Policromada (STREP, Polychrome Sculpture Restoration Seminar-Workshop), which provides an interesting review of the concept of unit as seen by Paul Philippot who, setting it out through the practical exercise of said cultural object, places it at the heart of the conflict between historical and aesthetic instances. It also reflects on the importance of broadening the concept of a unit to integrate artistic and stylistic tendencies. Thus, it invites us to think of the cultural asset from the point of view of a wider unit at the time of intervention.

As for the REVIEWS, María Sánchez Vega covers the course From Space to Data: Smart Survey Methods in Architecture and Archaeology, held in January 2023 at the Museo Nacional de Historia (MNH, National History Museum), Castillo de Chapultepec. It reveals the international solidarity Mexico received following the earthquakes of 2017, particularly the technical assistance provided by the Government of Hungary through the technical aid agreement it signed with Mexico in 2020. This permitted the acquisition of materials, equipment, and software to reinforce the Laboratorio de Imagen y Análisis Dimensional (LIAD, Laboratory for Image and Dimensional Analysis) in the Coordinación Nacional de Monumentos Históricos (CNMH, National Coordination of Historical Monuments), as well as organizing this course to facilitate the use of technologies, such as digital photogrammetry and three-dimensional models, given by Zsolt Vasáros and Mór Bendegúz Takáts, Hungarian experts.

Meanwhile, the ARCHIVE REVIEW was entrusted to Yeselda Chavarin Pineda, Miguel Ángel Valera Pérez, and María Guadalupe Tenorio Arvide, whose text A Look at the Map Library of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, México; transports the reader to the imposing and valuable Jorge A. Vivó Escoto collection. It is noteworthy that the map library was created in 1979, in the Earth Sciences Center, and subsequently expanded its activities due to the creation of the cartography laboratory, becoming a wider display. It is currently coordinated by the Departamento de Investigación en Ciencias Agrícolas (DICA, Agricultural Sciences Research Department), whose collection comprises over 13,000 documents organized in different collections and classified according to the geographical zone represented.

As noted, this issue presents the reader with a substantial number of works that, from their own specific areas of expertise, converge on caring for both aspects of heritage, cultural and natural. These texts also spontaneously recall the relevance of the 1980s signature of the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, adopted in Paris on November 23, 1972, whose official platform doubtlessly fostered our country’s practice of caring for heritage.

This is the sum of contributions in the current number of Intervención which, bear in mind, has a permanent interest in our readers finding a statement or reflection within the texts that can be incorporated into professional exercise as a quality framework grounded in theory and practice.