Now on Time.com, TIME’s Olivia B. Waxman reports on the controversy within the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino — a debate about how the story of the American Latino should be told to an international audience.
TIME’s Olivia B. Waxman writes: “For the last two years, historians had been working on an exhibit about the history of Latino youth movements that would help serve as a preview for the new museum…But after pushback from conservative Latinos in the private sector and the halls of Congress, that exhibit is on hold. A new one on salsa and Latin music is being developed in its place, the Smithsonian confirmed to TIME.” http://bit.ly/3LoE5jC
Read the exclusive story here: http://bit.ly/3LoE5jC
HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE STORY:
On how he felt pressure from the museum to stick to positive themes in American history and steer clear of militant figures and controversy, one of the developers of the paused exhibit and a professor of History at Baylor University, Felipe Hinojosa, tells TIME: “The tragedy and really the story here…is around who controls the future of Latino history…They would rather have this sort of linear immigrant American story of coming to this country, finding opportunity, succeeding, assimilation, rather than slapping the Puerto Rican flag to the top of the Statue of Liberty in 1977 in New York.”
On a conversation he had with the museum’s director Jorge Zamanillo, Hinojosa, tells TIME: “The only sense that we got directly from him was that this was a fundraising issue and that an exhibit like ours was simply not going to raise the kind of money that the museum needed to raise in order to be operational in 10 years.”
On the nation’s knowledge of Latino history, associate professor of history at Baruch College and one of the developers of the paused exhibit, Johanna Fernandez tells TIME: “We live in La-La Land…White Americans, Black Americans, Latino Americans walking around, really not understanding who we are, why we’re here, and how we got to this place. What’s so dangerous about honestly grappling with the history of this country?”