The Long March Toward a National Latino Museum

On a recent trip to Washington, D.C., I visited the new Molina Family Latino Gallery, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. It opened to the public in June, and its first exhibit, “¡Presente!,” attempts to fit hundreds of years of Latinx history in the United States—a narrative arcing from Spanish colonization to this day—into a single forty-five-hundred-square-foot room. The exhibit opens with a ceremonial-dance dress, handmade by descendants of the Genízaro people, who were enslaved by Spaniards and by other tribes in what is now New Mexico, and ends with a first-person oral-history interactive from a dozen prominent Latinx personalities, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa. In between, hundreds of objects, photographs, paintings, and prints depict mostly Mexican American, Cuban American, and Puerto Rican history and culture. (These are the largest and most storied groups; future exhibits will focus on others.) On the threshold of the gallery, there are touch screens where visitors can scroll through information on topics such as what differentiates the terms “Hispanic,” “Latino,” and “Latinx”; the cultural and socioeconomic demographics of various communities; and polling data on the Latinx electorate.

The first section looks at colonization, with a focus on the resistance of Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans. Among the striking objects on view are a ceramic bust of Po’Pay, the leader of the Pueblo Revolt, in 1680, by the Cochiti Pueblo artist Virgil Ortiz, and an illustration of a Black man breaking a chain with his clenched fist, made by the Puerto Rican artist Augusto Marín to commemorate the centennial of the abolition of slavery on the island, in 1873. The next section is on Texas Independence and the Mexican-American and Spanish-American wars. The goal here is to showcase how U.S. expansionism “impacted the story of the oldest U.S. Latino communities.” In an animated video, a man is seen walking, above the caption, “We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us”—a well-known reference to the Mexican population that found itself, as territories were conquered and annexed, in Texas, California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. This section also looks at the U.S. colonization of Puerto Rico, which began after the Spanish-American War, and the independence movement led by Pedro Albizu Campos. “These historical legacies of slavery, colonization, and war continue to shape U.S. and Latino history today,” a description reads.

After conquest comes migration, featuring a collection of personal objects and narratives from people who arrived fleeing wars or political regimes, such as Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Salvadorans; or who came looking for work and opportunity, as in the case of Dominicans, Mexicans, Peruvians, and Venezuelans; or who just became part of the country, if not full citizens of it—Puerto Ricans. A final section, about contributions to the society and the culture, highlights the work of Latinx activists in the national struggle for civil and social rights.

My favorite piece in the exhibit is one that was commissioned for it, the “Tree of Life” (“El Árbol de la Vida”), a fifty-three-inch-tall clay sculpture by the San Antonio-based artist Verónica Castillo. Castillo comes from a Pueblan family of artists who have been sculpting trees of life for three generations. This tree stands on a painted dome base, and its branches loop back onto its trunk in a pretzel-like pattern. Flowers, animals, and figurines populate the tree: a butterfly representing the Dreamers, and an eagle for the United Farm Workers; a woman holding a megaphone, another with a poster that reads “Huelga” (“Strike”); and figurines of the farmworker leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and of Emma Tenayuca, who organized a famous pecan shellers’ strike in Texas in the nineteen-thirties, among others. There is a tiny clay poster of the Young Lords, the social-justice organization started in Chicago by Puerto Rican former street-gang members in the nineteen-sixties, hanging from a branch, and another with a Black Power fist and the name of Carlos Cooks, a Dominican immigrant who was a key member of Marcus Garvey’s Black Nationalist movement in the nineteen-forties.

The tree poetically depicts the ongoing history of la lucha, the struggle for civil rights and recognition. The theme fits not just the history of the Latinx population but that of the exhibit itself—of how it came to be housed in what is a repurposed storage room on the museum’s first floor. In fact, the show is a placeholder for a much larger and more comprehensive project, the first Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino, the plans for which were approved in December, 2020, after thirty years of effort. But it was the fight for civil rights, and the academic and political debates that accompanied it, that initially brought about a review of how American history had been presented to the American public. One conclusion of those debates was that the Smithsonian Institution—the publicly funded museum that was created by the government in 1846 (with a bequest from the British scientist James Smithson), and is now the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex—had underrepresented, and in many cases ignored, the role of communities of color.

First came the discovery, during the nineteen-eighties, that the Smithsonian held the remains of thousands of Native Americans as part of its collections, and that led to legislation, in 1989, calling for the establishment of a National Museum of the American Indian, which opened in 2004. In 1991, an effort was launched to address the representation of Black Americans at the Smithsonian, which led to the establishment of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which President Barack Obama inaugurated in 2016. In 1993, the Smithsonian appointed a Task Force on Latino Issues that, a year later, released a report titled “Willful Neglect,” which found that Latinx people had “contributed significantly to every phase and aspect of American history and culture,” and “yet the Institution almost entirely excludes and ignores Latinos in nearly every aspect of its operations.” Among other measures, the report recommended the creation of “one or more museums portraying the historical, cultural, and artistic achievements of U.S. Hispanics.” Approximately twenty-five million Latinx people lived in the country then, accounting for about nine per cent of the total population. They were underrepresented not only in museums and history textbooks; in 1996, the nonprofit NALEO (National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials) Educational Fund counted just 3,783 Latinx elected officials nationwide.

That lack of clout at the national level translated into very slow steps. First, the Smithsonian appointed a Latinx counsellor to the secretary (as the head of the institution is known), Miguel Bretos, who collaborated with a working group, to release a plan called “Towards a Shared Vision,” in 1997. It argued that the Latinx presence should not be concentrated in one part of the Smithsonian but be dispersed throughout its museums. As a result, a Smithsonian Center for Latino Initiatives was created. (It was later renamed the Smithsonian Latino Center.) In 2003, a decade after the task force had been appointed, Xavier Becerra—who is now President Biden’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, but at that time was a congressman from California—pushed for a bill to create a commission to study the potential creation of a national museum of the American Latino. It was approved five years later. By that time, there were about fifty million Latinx people in the country—twice as many as at the time of the “Willful Neglect” report, making up seventeen per cent of the population. The number of Latinx elected officials had grown to 5,475, almost a fifty-per-cent increase from 1996.

A couple of more years went by before the commission submitted a report calling for, again, the creation of a museum. Henry Muñoz III, a designer, businessman, and activist from San Antonio (and the son of two prominent labor and civil-rights organizers) who chaired the commission, told me that, as a critical part of that effort, in 2009, the Latino Center digitized exhibits to create a virtual “museum without having the walls of a museum” that was shared across the nation, in partnership with community centers. (In 2013, Obama appointed Muñoz the national finance chair of the Democratic National Committee; he now chairs the board of trustees of the new museum.)

Finally, in December, 2020, the report’s proposal for a museum was added to the $2.3-trillion omnibus spending package, which passed Congress with bipartisan support. So the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino was nominally established under the Presidency of Donald Trump. (The same bill created a Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum.) The victory was only possible owing to “the growth of power and influence of the groups that carried it through,” Jorge Zamanillo, the museum’s founding director, told me. The Latinx population now makes up nearly twenty per cent of the country, with more than sixty-two million people. Their political representation is still underwhelming, but has reached 6,883 elected officials.