The Museum and the Graves explores the link between archaeology, violence, and power in Mexico, focusing on two key scenes: the museum and the forensic. In both, the exhibition or concealment of human remains reveals how the State and its agents (archaeologists, anthropologists) construct narratives about the past and present. Through what she calls "figurative anamnesis," the author proposes a critical reading of these scenes, which are not merely empirical but symbolic constructions that re-enact forms of sacrifice and sovereignty. Far from being vestiges of a surviving pre-Hispanic past, these images of death respond to ideological mechanisms that reproduce social inequality and colonial difference. In this powerful essay, Álvarez dismantles the political use of atavism by elites and shows how the global circulation of these images reinforces a geopolitics of knowledge that sustains the civilizational imaginaries of Eurocentric modernity.