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One of the Smithsonian museums the White House singled out late last week for its egregious progressive narratives doesn’t even exist yet: the Latino Museum. And because it has given every indication that it will be another woke abomination, it should never come into being.
So it’s a mystery why Republicans in the appropriations committees of both houses of Congress are thwarting President Donald Trump’s requests to zero out spending on the Latino Museum and return instead to the old and less divisive idea of sharing collections across many museums, rather than having a “Latino” museum where that part of the American story is segregated off.
Trump has launched a major campaign to ensure that all the museums run by the Smithsonian Institution present America in an accurate fashion, not in the negative light in which the country has been depicted for decades, one that exaggerates all blemishes like a funhouse mirror.
That effort, which comes in the form of an administration review of the 21 museums that comprise the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum complex, comes not a minute too soon.
But let’s not kid ourselves. Cleaning out the museums and liberating them from the clutches of very woke curators won’t be easy.
As I explained last week, the ideological capture of the museum industry has been almost complete. Democrats dominate well over 90% of the curators, conservators, historians, and other professionals who work on museum exhibits.
Why build the Latino Museum when we know beforehand that it will go out of its way to become an incubator of grievances, to convince the growing segment of the country with Iberian ancestry that they are victims in America?
Last week, the White House posted a document that included multiple examples of the museums trashing America, including several by the Latino Museum, even though it only has one existing exhibition.
Officially called National Museum of the American Latino, and derided by its critics as the “LatinX Museum” (though some of its more befuddled defenders also call it LatinX, unaware of how Americans with Hispanic background revile that term), it was approved in late 2020 — in an almost $1 trillion omnibus bill monstrosity that Trump was forced to sign.
Ground has not been broken yet, and Congress has not even approved a site. But the Latino Museum has already demonstrated what happens to cultural institutions captured by the Left.
Its one existing collection — the Molina Family Latino Gallery, which has been displayed for the past couple of years at the National Museum of American History — gives a shameful representation of Americans with roots in Latin America, Spain, or Portugal.
After reviewing the gallery’s contents when it first went public in 2022, Alfonso Aguilar, now at Parents Defending Education, Joshua Trevino of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and I wrote that it was, quite frankly, disgraceful. Its only redeeming quality is that it makes clear why the forthcoming National Museum of the American Latino must not be funded. The Latino exhibit simply erases the existence of Hispanics who love, contribute to, and benefit from the promise of American liberty. That is to say, it erases the Hispanic majority.
The Texas Revolution? It was not the heroic struggle of 1835-36 fought by both English- and Spanish-speaking colonists to liberate themselves from the Santa Anna dictatorship, but a defense of slavery against abolitionist Mexico.
The Cuban exile? It was not Cubans seeking freedom from a communist dictatorship that has destroyed their island and still uses terror against the population. No. According to the Latino Museum, it was all prompted by economics, not politics.
The leftist dictators Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Plutarco Elias Calles, and Daniel Ortega? Not named once. Instead, the Molina gallery highlights Fulgencio Batista and Rafael Trujillo, who ruled 70 years ago or more, and accuses the United States of giving them support.
All of which illustrates an important point. Since Trump began his jihad to get museums that use taxpayer money to tell a more balanced history, progressive Democrats have been squealing about how he wants to “whitewash” American history and not present history as it is.
But it is the very lefty curators, conservators, and directors working at museums who present a totally distorted view of history. At the Molina gallery, the three bogeymen of history are, in descending order, the U.S., Spain, and the Catholic Church.
Well, what do they think Argentines, Cubans, Peruvians, Dominicans, Mexicans, etc. have in common? They may comprise the synthetic category of “Hispanics” contrived by the U.S. census in 1980, but what they really share is that their countries of origin were colonized by Catholic Iberian powers, and they or their ancestors have chosen to come to the U.S. to find liberty and prosperity.
And that is the Latino Museum’s first and only existing exhibit. A second exhibit that was being curated had to be canceled by a new museum director, Jorge Zamanillo, in 2022. That second exhibition was going to highlight a Marxist-Leninist gang from the 1960s, the Young Lords, and explain to Hispanics that capitalism was bad for them.
As Time magazine put it then, two scholars who had been working on the project, Felipe Hinojosa of Baylor University and Johanna Fernandez of Baruch College, believed that the exhibit was terminated “because they planned to feature a variety of countercultural organizations of the 1960s that questioned how well American democracy was meeting the needs of its citizens under a capitalist system.”
The din raised by the likes of Trevino, Aguilar, and me was such that Zamanillo told the pair that the new exhibit would “interfere with funding.”
What would have happened if we had not raised the alarm? And why were Hinojosa and Fernandez chosen in the first place? Hinojosa sympathizes with the Marxist Liberation Theology, while Fernandez has made it her life’s cause to lobby for the release of cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Likely because no other curator would be better, as we see with the numbers showing that 95% of them are progressive.
Which perhaps explains why Tey Marianna Nunn was hired as the Latino Museum’s chief curator in 2024. Prior to that, Nunn was responsible for an infamous 2001 exhibit scheduled to run on Holy Week, no less, at Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art. It featured a semi-naked Our Lady of Guadalupe.
In an article earlier this year, Aguilar and I wrote, “Rather than the meek Guadalupe of tradition, the Virgin was depicted with bare midriff and legs, sporting a bikini of roses, boxing gloves, and a cloak engraved with the symbols of the Aztec moon goddess ‘Coyolxauhqui.’”
In other words, add sacrilege to wokeness.
The conservative lion Pat Buchanan actually featured Nunn in his 2001 bestseller The Death of the West, a book about how the 1960s’ counterculture is an attempt to destroy the West.
But it’s not just the curators. As Aguilar and I pointed out in a 2023 article, the museum’s 18-member Scholarly Advisory Committee is dominated by “woke professors, researchers, and activists whose work focuses on advancing culturally Marxist concepts like critical race theory and gender and queer theory. Many teach the academically questionable subject of ‘Latinx’ studies.”
This is what the members of the Senate’s appropriation committee, including Republicans, have just funded again in the bill that just passed their committee, 26 to 2. Not just that, but they added a hostile amendment that read:
“None of the funds made available by this or any other Act may be used to close, halt development of, merge with or transfer to another function or program, reduce funding, or otherwise diminish the operations of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum or the National Museum of the American Latino.”
Earlier in the year, Trump had asked for the opposite — to cut off the funding and return to the so-called Smithsonian Latino Center of old, where collections on the culture and history of these Americans would be shared across the complex’s many museums, rather than sectioning it off in a segregated institution.
And in the last few weeks, Trump announced he was putting all the Smithsonian museums under review and released an article showing how biased these museums are, quoting the scholarship by Trevino, Aguilar, and me.
THE SMITHSONIAN IS LONG OVERDUE FOR A HOUSECLEANING
The other museums are already in existence, however. Not the Latino Museum.
Knowing what we know, and knowing that conservatives need to take back the culture, why fund the Latino Museum? Why build it?