The Journey of the National Museum of the American Latino

Eduardo Díaz:

The real genesis of all of this was the Willful Neglect report. Immediately after the report was issued, the Smithsonian began efforts to do outreach in the community. I can remember hosting a meeting in San Antonio, where I was the director of cultural affairs with Miguel Bretos from the Smithsonian.

In 1997, the Center for Latino Initiatives was formed at the Smithsonian. That morphed into the Smithsonian Latino Center, which then merged with the National Museum of the American Latino. That’s the organization I became the director of in 2008.

Estuardo Rodriguez:

That report helped establish the need for a future American Latino museum, but it wasn’t until 2004 that my team at the Raben Group really got things rolling. At that time, we met with then-Congressman Xavier Becerra and that led to my team volunteering our efforts to create an outside advisory board that would simply spread the word on why the creation of the museum was so important.

It seemed a no-brainer to want to bring more attention to this from around the country to create a museum that stood side-by-side with all of the other iconic museums that tell America’s story.

We spent 2005 to 2008 introducing legislation, gathering support from different companies, nonprofits, elected officials, and municipalities writing resolutions in support of passing the National Museum of the American Latino Commission bill. It finally passed in 2008 as a bipartisan bill. It was important for us to make sure that we’re able to bring the Latino community, with all of its different perspectives and political ideologies, together, and that’s where Danny [Vargas] comes in.

Danny Vargas:

I reached out to my congressman in 2006 or 2007, encouraging them to support the commission bill and asking if I could be appointed if it passed. My motivation stems from the fact that none of us are one thing as Latinos. I am a veteran. I’m also a business owner. We’re all an amalgamation of identities.

One of the things that was important to me was to make sure the narrative about our community was addressed in a different way than it had been by the public previously. We saw ourselves in media as drug dealers, or cholos. I wanted to help recraft the narrative.

Díaz:

When the commission was approved, they authored what was called The Latino Theme Study, which is still in use today. It was a group of diverse Latino scholars who collected different essays on subject matter they thought should be dealt with by the future museum. This was a very smart move because they understood it was the future curators who would have the discretion to determine what would be presented to the public.

Rodriguez:

That commission has a two-year window where they were supposed to present their findings to the White House and Congress. They came in under budget and faster than their deadline required.

Vargas:

When that group first came together, it was people from all walks of life: Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, people from the arts, people from business, Democrats, Republicans—and very few of us knew each other. But we very quickly came together as a family in that first meeting. It was clear to everyone that this was a legacy initiative where we began to change the perception of our community within ourselves. That change has to happen within you before it can happen by society at large.

Díaz:

At the same time, efforts to get the museum moving forward were continually stalled or thwarted in Congress.

Rodriguez:

We realized that once the commission bill was done, there were some significant challenges ahead. Getting a bill that would authorize the creation of the museum would require a much larger and more formal initiative.

Over ten years, we hosted annual design contests for the museum, annual awards events, screenings; anything to get the word out.

While the Friends of the Museum was assembling a motivated and high-profile collection of business partners, celebrities, and political allies from both sides of the aisle to help amplify the voices calling for the museum, those at the Smithsonian were making their own change from within.

Díaz:

It was 2015, and we had been waiting and waiting and waiting for passage of the construction legislation because then we could shift into building mode. But it just never happened. We had seen what the National Museum of African American History and Culture had done, which had functionally operated for six or seven years before they were able to officially open their museum in 2016. Maybe we could do that, too. We said, “Let’s build a gallery.”

So there we were, a staff of seven, and we had no plan. We had no space designated. We had no money. Fortunately, our advisory board had also grown frustrated with the lack of Congressional action, so they got us some planning money.

We went shopping for space and found 4,500 square feet of space that the American History Museum had on the first floor of the east wing that was being used for storage.

The museum was able to secure $10 million from the family of C. David Molina, a physician and entrepreneur, whose family sought to honor their father’s legacy by creating the Molina Family Latino Gallery at the Smithsonian. The gallery opened its doors in June 2022.

Díaz:

We’re incredibly grateful to the entire Molina family, and we’re so proud of what we’ve been able to create. Despite COVID hitting in the middle of this entire process, we were able to open the gallery just three weeks late. That’s a small miracle in and of itself.

So right now, the National Museum of the American Latino is operating as the Molina Family Latino Gallery. That is how we see it. We have a scholarly advisory committee in place. We’re already collecting. We’re seeking additional storage for that collection. Between March and December [of 2022], we will have visited thirty-eight cities and ten regions, and we are just interacting with different communities to get feedback and build relationships.

We’re already acting like a museum. We’re hiring collection staff, registrars, and collection managers.

In December 2020, plans for the National Museum of the American Latino were finally approved by Congress after nearly thirty years. In a time when the only thing Americans seem to agree on is that they cannot agree on anything, the Friends of the Museum spent over a decade figuring out how to unite Congress on at least one issue.

Vargas:

In 2011, when the first bill was introduced, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen [the first Cuban American elected to the US Congress and first Republican woman elected from Florida] was a cosponsor. She was with us from the beginning. But we were never able to break even forty cosponsors for the bill. Whatever the framing was, we just couldn’t get people to come together on this.

We identified potential leaders and champions on the Republican side of things and worked to create a more bipartisan effort. We brought more people into the tent and reworked our messaging. We brought together a coalition of over one hundred different national organizations.