A Latino youth movement exhibition has reportedly been canceled by the Smithsonian Institution after another exhibition about Hispanic history caused widespread alarm over its content.
In 2021, the Smithsonian hired a group of curators to develop an exhibition about the Latino youth movement in the United States at the National Museum of the American Latino, located in the Molina Family Gallery, inside the Smithsonian Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C.
Among the group of experts who would work on curating the exhibition were historians Felipe Hinojosa and Johanna Fernandez, who noted that the museum planned this exhibition in great detail, even conducting surveys to find out if the topic was popular among the Latino community.
The exhibit was to highlight topics such as the first patient bill of rights written by the Puerto Rican activists, the Young Lords; the 1968 strikes in which Latino students protested discrimination in schools; and Latino activism toward recent immigrants that came to the United States.
“For me, this exhibit had everything to do with telling the story of how Latinos contributed to democratic and civil rights movements during the 1960s and 1970s,” Hinojosa told The Epoch Times. “I think in the United States, there’s a certain idea that the civil rights movement was led, to a large degree, by African Americans, but what I was hoping to contribute was the Latinos contributions in these movements and their significance,” he added.
“Even though we weren’t told outright why the exhibition was being paused, we were,” Fernandez said. “We knew there were concerns that the Latino museum should not exhibit anything that would create controversy,” she said, referring to the op-ed.
In this opinion article—published in The Hill two months after “Presente!” was inaugurated—experts Mike Gonzalez, Alfonso Aguilar, and Joshua Treviño pointed out that the exhibition was an “unabashedly Marxist portrayal of history, religion and economics” of Hispanics in the United States.
Although the criticism was toward the “Presente!” exhibition currently at the Smithsonian, the directors decided shortly thereafter to replace the on-the-works exhibition with a new exhibition about Latin music and salsa, according to the curators.
The director of the National Museum of the American Latino, Jorge Zamanillo, informed the group of historians that the exhibition would be put on hold, since the museum’s priority was fundraising and there needed to be a rethinking of what the exhibitions would look like, according to the curators.
“They were using the language of ‘pausing the exhibit’, but that has seemed to be an inaccurate term, because that assumes that there’s a plan moving forward of when the exhibit would resurrect, or take life again, and that’s never been communicated. Every indication that I’ve gotten is that this exhibition is essentially canceled and will never see the light of day, at least not in the National Museum of the American Latino or in the Molina gallery where it was scheduled to be exhibited,” Hinojosa said.
A Divided Exhibition
For Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and one of the authors of the op-ed in The Hill, the themes of both exhibitions aim to “create a narrative of conflict between Hispanics and the United States.”“They want the Hispanic to be full of resentment against his new country so that the American system can then be changed,” he told The Epoch Times. “This is all a cultural Marxist idea and we can’t let them do this.”
“It promotes this harmful idea that Hispanics are victims,” he added.
One of the most controversial allegations is the narrative regarding the Cubans who emigrated to the United States to flee the Cuban Revolution.
“I think it’s important to know that those who were fleeing the Cuban Revolution, were supporters of, in the main, of the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, one of the worst dictators in the history of Latin America, that was supported by the United States. So those folks who were fleeing a revolution that sought to overthrow dictatorships were embraced by the United States here,” Fernandez told The Epoch Times.
That narrative—shared by the current “Present!” exhibition—appears to have been a key point for some members of Congress, such as Reps. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-Fla.) and Tony Gonzales (D-Texas), to raise concerns about its content. In a press release, they pointed out that the exhibition shows Cubans as deserters and traitors, and that is why they threatened to withdraw funding.
After this, the museum decided to “seriously commit to rectifying its actions,” so funding was restored.
Gonzalez, from The Heritage Foundation, said he had “no confidence” in the promises the museum made.
“Immigrants from Latin America or Spain did not come to this country to fight against the American government or to change the American system. They came here because they wanted the freedom and prosperity of this country—they wanted to become an American and contribute to the great story of American endeavor,” he told The Epoch Times.
He and his co-authors wrote a second op-ed in The Hill in September, urging Congress to defund the museum and the “Present!” exhibition.
“Little attention is paid to the hard work, innovation and creativity of Hispanic entrepreneurs and small-business owners; the strength, unity and resiliency of Latino families; or the vitality of Hispanic churches,” they point out in the op-ed.