A New National Museum of the American Latino Moves Forward as It Fights to Find Its Footing

The National Museum of the American Latino (NMAL) faces a Herculean challenge. Established in late 2020, nearly 30 years after it was first proposed, the Smithsonian component must represent the art, history, and culture of a diverse population of 64 million Latinx Americans, with roots in      more than 30 countries across North and Latin America and the Caribbean. Each of those communities, from Tejanos of Texas to Cubans in Miami and Puerto Ricans in New York, comes with vastly different histories, identities, and political orientations. That challenge isn’t lost on Jorge Zamanillo, named founding director of the museum in May 2022.

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“The museum is about bridging communities across the US, and bridging divides,” Zamanillo, the son of Cuban immigrants who fled to the US after the 1959 revolution, told ARTnews in a recent interview. The key challenge, he said, is “to create a space for dialogue and engagement and get a better and complete understanding of the total population.”

While NMAL has yet to establish a permanent home, it has cleared important hurdles under Zamanillo’s leadership. It has built a core team, gathered a well-connected board that includes some of the country’s most influential and high-profile Latinx public figures, including actress Eva Longoria, journalist Soledad O’Brien, and Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of the Knight Foundation, and raised $70 million of the projected $500 million in private funds needed to match the $500 million in public funds offered to construct a building and establish an endowment. At the grassroots level, NMAL also launched a multipronged listening program to gather information and input from communities nationwide, in the hope of generating the broad-based buy-in the project needs. Hosted in collaboration with local museums, community organizations, and universities as part of a deliberately inclusive national engagement strategy, these nearly 100 community conversations have tapped local leaders, educators, artists, and museum workers in 30 cities and 19 rural communities in 22 states so far. And in September, the museum unveiled a new strategic plan, brand, and logo. The top priorities: “kicking off awareness and advancement campaigns, acquiring seminal objects for the collection, and breaking ground for the museum building.”

The milestones may sound straightforward, yet advances on even these      objectives may prove challenging, as controversy and disagreement have dogged the institution from its infancy.

In 2022, shortly after Zamanillo joined, the museum opened its first exhibition, “¡Presente! A Latino History of the United States,” in the National Museum of American History’s Molina Family Latino Gallery, which will serve as NMAL’s exhibition space until it secures a permanent home. The exhibition attracted wide audiences—half a million people have visited since its opening in June 2022—but also garnered a scathing public review from some right-wing Latinx critics, who called the exhibition “disgraceful” and “unabashedly Marxist.” Then, last year, several members of congress, led by Mario Diaz-Balart, who represents parts of Miami and its suburbs, vowed to defund the museum entirely, saying the exhibition depicts Latinx people as “deserters, traitors, and victims of oppression.” After a meeting between Smithsonian officials and members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, however, Diaz-Balart changed position, even going so far as issuing a press release in July 2023 signaling his support and saying that “procedural changes in the review of content and leadership have been made,” regarding NMAL’s exhibitions.

According to a spokesman, no specific procedural changes have been announced or are in the works. But by November 2022, Zamanillo had already canceled NMAL’s next planned and potentially more controversial exhibition, which was set to cover Latinx youth movements and civil rights history. That exhibition had been in the works for two years. The New York Times reported last year that the decision was, at least in part, driven by fears of how it would be received politically and worries over fundraising. A member of the exhibition team that we spoke to confirmed that concerns about fundraising were communicated to them.

Zamanillo said that the decision to move away from the Latinx youth movements exhibition was about laying a foundation for the future and making sure museum activities reflected both his vision and insights gleaned from outreach to Latinx communities. “My shift when I first arrived here was to make sure that I was implementing my vision for the museum as a new director, as a founding director, all the exhibitions that were going to be on display for the next years in this gallery,” Zamanillo said, “I want to make sure that all the exhibitions moving forward are basically curated by myself, by our team, under my leadership.”

Though Zamanillo dismissed the team that had conceived and worked on the youth movement exhibition, he said that “it wasn’t to dismiss the work that was being done.” However, he remained noncommittal about whether the exhibition would ever be held.

“I wanted to make sure that we’re exploring different topics, like the music, food, ways, civil rights. It could be military veterans, Latino military veterans. It could be many things that we explore over the next 10 years,” he said.

A new exhibition, dubbed “Puro Ritmo: The Musical Journey of Salsa” and focusing on the roots and influence of salsa music, will open at Molina in spring 2026 instead. That show will serve as NMAL’s contribution to the Smithsonian’s commemoration of the US’s 250th anniversary. The hope, it seems, is that an exhibition on salsa will have both broad appeal and avoid the political fissures across the many communities that make up the nation’s Latinx population.

NMAL associate director of content and interpretation Tey Marianna Nunn told ARTnews that “Puro Ritmo” is a way to tap into one of the most popular aspects of Latinx culture while emphasizing its long history, from historical origins up to contemporary times. A Smithsonian veteran and former director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center Art Museum (NHCC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Nunn said the exhibition and the museum will seek to celebrate Latinx Americans’ cultural multiplicity.

“Collecting Latino histories and art and culture is a hot topic right now. Many museums are hiring Latino curators for different things and there’s a market out there for right now,” Nunn said. “In our case, we’re not just doing it to fill in a story in a mainstream museum for representation. We’re doing it to fill out and celebrate a national story.” NMAL is far from the only institution exploring Latinx culture, history, and art. In addition to NHCC, there is New York’s Museo del Barrio, Chicago’s National Museum of Mexican Art, Southern California’s Museum of Latin American Art, and the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture, among many others. Those institutions, according to prominent Afro-Latinx curator Maria Elena Ortiz, do critical work that NMAL can lean on as it builds.

But they also typically focus on only one or a few diasporic communities; NMAL aims to bring those threads together and fill a wider gap. Until NMAL has its own home, the Molina Gallery exhibits are a step toward that goal. The members of the Latino art communities that we reached out to tend to support that vision. “What doesn’t exist is an organization that can encompass all the different Latinx experiences, that incorporate Chicanos, the Tejanos, the people that were crossed by the border, the people that are new to the country, the people that left … dictatorship[s],” Ortiz told ARTnews. “It could be very neat if that’s part of their goal—an official intersection of the narratives between all those stories.”

A curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and currently guest curator for the Museo del Barrio 2024 Trienal—ongoing until February—Ortiz has worked with the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) on the Latinx objects in its collection. She has yet to hear from NMAL, however.

And if NMAL truly wants to represent the diversity of the Latinx experience, it will have to mend some fences. The exhibition on Latinx youth movements was, according to members of the exhibition team, 65 percent complete when it was abruptly canceled by Zamanillo in November 2022. By that time, many veterans of the activist movement had spent hours providing the project their stories and testimony. One group of women who participated in the 1968 East Los Angeles student walkouts sent a letter to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch (previously founding director of the NMAAHC)) demanding answers. They got no response. Some in the art and academic communities told ARTnews they still feel that trust has been broken; they won’t work with the museum until these concerns are addressed.

Felipe Hinojosa, a professor at Baylor University, the author of Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio, and a member of the exhibition’s curatorial team, told ARTnews that he is still looking for answers to why it was shelved. But he still believes deeply in the Museum’s core mission and acknowledges the difficult context the NMAL leadership is working within. As Hinojosa said, “The Smithsonian is a part of the federal government. So, I understand that, and I understand museum curators and officials wanting to be very, very careful in terms of how they do this.”

Hinojosa said he is most concerned about the impact the political pressure campaigns might have on its direction. The question remains: how best to navigate that inevitable ongoing turbulence, especially with regard to transparency and who gets a seat at the table. “I think what [Congressman] Mario Díaz-Balart and others are going to find out is that there’s probably going to be other things down the road that they’re not going to like,” he said. “And here we go again.”

The risk, in this historian’s view, is what happens then: “This is going to be a kind of nonstop back and forth over who gets to tell this story and who gets to tell the Latino story.”

According to Hinojosa’s perspective as a historian, the story the team wanted the movement exhibit to tell was a very American one with broad appeal: “I think if you [had] seen our exhibit, at least this is what we are working toward, that people would have seen American democracy in action, … how young people did the most American thing ever, which is come together, organize and fight for their rights as people with dignity and people that deserve to be treated as first-class citizens. That, to me, is going to be the struggle going forward.”

The problem for Hinojosa and others on the team was a lack of communication from Zamanillo on the specific pushback and funding challenges the museum was facing that led to the exhibition’s abrupt cancellation. “All we got was a note saying Lonnie had signed off on it. All we got was Lonnie not responding to the women,” he said, which left the exhibition team to do damage control and apologize to the activists, organizers, archivists, and curators who had already contributed.

For Julio Ricardo Varela, an MSNBC columnist and founder of the Latino Newsletter, the political battles and calls to defund NMAL over the museum’s content and ideology are a frustrating distraction. “No matter their political ideology, everyone needs to look at the bigger picture,” Varela told ARTnews. “The bigger picture is where are we represented in Washington, DC? Where is our presence in Washington, DC? That’s it. Everything else we can talk about filling in the details, but if you’re not for that, then that’s not American.”

Varela has been a loud proponent of “Build It on the Mall,” a push to get NMAL’s site on the National Mall near the other major institutions and monuments. But securing a site has been another challenge for the nascent institution. The proposed Tidal Basin site has yet to receive congressional approval and, along with the one dedicated for the new American Women’s History Museum (AWHM), is controlled by the National Park Service as part of a reserve “no build zone” in order to preserve the beauty and openness of the Mall. The National Capital Planning Commission has described the sites as having significant challenges. Bunch, for his part, wrote a Washington Post op-ed in late 2022 defending the sites, writing that they “are optimal for broadening the American narrative and expanding our civic discourse.”

NMAL’s supporters feel much the same. The National Mall Tidal Basin site would mean a symbolic seat at the nation’s table, a signpost and affirmation that Latinx identity is an essential part of US national identity. Varela said he sees the protracted struggle to make the vision a reality, however, as a sign that Latinx Americans’ political clout remains limited. The proof, according to Varela?

“It’s 2024 and this effort’s been going on for decades, and you’re so close to the finish line, and I haven’t seen anything substantial to suggest that this is going to be a done deal,” he said.

There has been some movement, however. This past August, Republican Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis, who represents Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn, introduced the SHAWL Act. The bill would grant the Smithsonian authority to develop those preferred sites that are currently under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service for the NMAL and the AWHM. That crucial legislation needs to pass by the end of the year for the project to stay on track. Notably, the bill has 91 sponsors, with roughly even support from Republicans and Democrats. The act is in committee while Congress was in recess for the election. With Trump now set to re-enter the presidency, and Republicans taking control of Congress, it’s anybody’s guess where the bill goes from here.

Read more of our “2024: Year in Review” coverage here.