Latinos deserve a Smithsonian museum
On Dec. 10, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah singlehandedly blocked a bipartisan effort to set up the National Museum of the American Latino, part of a proposed expansion of the Smithsonian Institution.
Lee argued that creating such a museum would be divisive, and that unlike Black and Native Americans, who have dedicated Smithsonian museums, Latinxs have not been “uniquely, deliberately and systemically excluded” and therefore did not deserve their own space.
It was that last part that really stuck with me. It lingered because it went against much of what I’ve come to learn about the history of Latinxs in the United States.
Mike Lee must not be familiar with his own state’s history. Otherwise he would know that what he calls Utah used to be part of Mexico — as were California, Nevada and Arizona and parts of Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming — and that it joined the Union only after President James K. Polk, not content with annexing Texas in 1845, used a border dispute as pretext to declare war against Mexico and go on a blatant land grab that fulfilled America’s so-called Manifest Destiny.
And if Mike Lee doesn’t know about that, what chance is there that he or millions like him know about the thousands of lynchings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans across the Southwest that followed for nearly a century afterward?
What’s the likelihood that they would know that La Matanza and the Porvenir massacre were carried out by the Texas Rangers?
Or that decades later, the Eisenhower administration would launch “Operation Wetback,” a mass deportation campaign that resulted in many American citizens being uprooted and kicked out of their own homes?
Or what about the fact that Latinx soldiers were disproportionately killed in action during the Vietnam War, but we’ll never know just how many because the U.S. government classified them as racially white?
These and other incidents are often overlooked, which is tragic because of what they say about history — it tends to repeat itself.
An even bigger tragedy is that none of our history is really being told outside of the university. It took going to college in another part of the country for me to learn about the very land where I grew up.
I’m not alone in this. Back in October, Mario T. Garcia, a professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at UC Santa Barbara, told me that many of his freshmen are surprised to learn that the history of our people is foundational to the story of this nation because it had never been taught to them.
“The very names of our cities and our mountain ranges and our rivers,” Garcia said, “I say to my students, ‘Those names didn’t come with the Mayflower.’ ”
In an op-ed published by The Times on Wednesday, Stephen Pitti, a professor of history, American studies, and ethnicity, race and migration at Yale University, argued that the best antidote for the widespread ignorance of American Latinx history is the museum Mike Lee objected to.
“A new national museum would be able to tackle this complex narrative under one roof,” Pitti wrote.
Pitti’s right: What this country doesn’t know about
Latinxs could certainly fill a museum, and it’s long overdue that one be built — one that not only chronicles the injustices but also highlights the myriad contributions made by people with roots in Latin America over the course of centuries.
Relying on the Smithsonian to incorporate more exhibits about Latinx history and culture, as Lee suggested, isn’t going to cut it. My colleague Carolina Miranda has written that the institution has failed to do that since it released a selfassessment in 1994 that called this exclusion a “willful neglect.”
Thankfully, the National Museum of the American Latino isn’t dead yet. Congress can still approve the creation of this muchneeded space by adding to the spending bill that funds our government.
Even if the effort fails, the fact remains: You can’t properly capture the story of America without properly capturing Latinx stories. The museum would bring us one step closer to that.