Eulalia Guzmán

Controversial Mexican archaeologist who challenged male-dominated historical narratives

Eulalia Guzmán (1890–1985) disrupted Mexican academia through her unorthodox approaches to indigenous history. As the first female archaeology graduate from Mexico's National Museum (1921), she led excavations challenging official Aztec-centric narratives.

Her 1949 discovery of Ixcateopan bones, claimed to be Cuauhtémoc's remains, sparked decades-long debates about pre-Columbian heritage preservation. Though later disproven, this controversy forced institutional reforms in Mexican archaeology's treatment of oral histories.

Guzmán's feminist pedagogy transformed rural education through her Cultural Missions program, teaching indigenous communities to document their own histories. Her 1934 book Mexican Folkways pioneered ethno-history methodologies later adopted by UNESCO, despite being dismissed by contemporaries as 'sentimental anthropology.'