The idea of a Latino museum originated in a Clinton-era reportREF authored by the chair and co-chair of the task force charged with it, Raul Yzaguirre and Mari Carmen Aponte. Yzaguirre was one of the founding members and second president of the 1960s radical leftist group La Raza (The Race), and Aponte was on La Raza’s board. Their 1994 report charged the Smithsonian with systemic exclusion and underrepresentation in all aspects of its operations, claiming that such marginalization could only be the result of racism. The report also twisted history, by, for example stating, “Because of both indigenous roots and Spanish heritage, Latinos predate the British in the Americas,” loosely using a term that applies to the entire hemisphere. The report, in other words, amounted to a heavy-handed attempt to shame the Smithsonian and the government into accepting its recommendations. These included racial preferences in hiring and promotion and, notably, that the Smithsonian “begin immediately to do the groundwork needed to assure the establishment of one or more museums portraying the historical, cultural, and artistic achievements of U.S. Hispanics.”

That laid the groundwork for Congress to create in 2008 the “Commission to Study the Potential Creation of a National Museum of the American Latino.”REF President Bush, in his last full year in office, facing a hostile Congress after suffering a major shellacking in the 2006 elections, signed the commission into law on May 8, 2008. The commission’s recommendation in May 2011 urged the creation of the museum, wrapping the idea in patriotic language: “The time has come for the creation of a new museum on the National Mall, the place where our nation’s most important monuments are located, where we conduct the business of our Congress, pay tribute to our veterans, gather to inaugurate our Presidents and where we give full voice to our freedom of speech.”REF The leftist group La Raza’s fingerprints were all over this report as well, with its members participating in the commission and the activist group promoting its work. The museum, in other words, is intended to perpetuate societal divisions that La Raza helped create in the first place, and the process that led to it is a textbook example of the Left’s March Through the Institutions.

Congress should end this madness and cut off funding for the museum.

Enshrining La Raza’s Life Work

The commission’s report said that “the museum will make Latinos proud of their heritage” and “serve as a permanent place for Latinos in U.S. history.” The museum, in other words, represented a culmination of decades of work by La Raza, and Yzaguirre personally, to forge a Hispanic category that had to be officialized in government papers, creating an identity where one had hitherto not existed, one cobbled out of very different nationalities, races, and traditions. What the activist organizations sought was a minority group that felt separate from the mainstream—and even aggrieved by it—to whom the very real suffering of black Americans could be analogized. The category of Hispanics, Yzaguirre wrote in 1974, “would best convey their national minority group status. There is a difference between a minority group and a national origin group—a difference recognized in terms of national economic and social policies.”REF

These were all preposterous propositions, but the political implications in terms of power and funding were crystal clear. Vilma Martínez of the Mexican American Legal and Educational Fund (MALDEF), a far-Left activist group also deeply involved in the writing of both museum reports, was very clear about why these activists sought the Hispanic identity: “We are trying to get our just share of political influence and federal funds.”REF The fact that this was about political power was not lost on Congressman Daniel Flood (D–PA), who asked militants at a 1969 hearing: “Are you forming a bloc? Are we financing the formation of a bloc?”REF But preposterous as they may have been, these were propositions that the bureaucracy and petrified Republican officeholders came to not only reluctantly accept but even gleefully defend.

The Latino museum, thus, would enshrine on the National Mall La Raza’s life work. Its activist promoters used the same scare tactics and promises of patriotic intent (which were forgotten before the ink had dried on the signed enacting bill) that they had employed with such success with the bureaucracy and Republicans in the 1960s and ‘70s to create the Hispanic ethnic category in the first place. Founded in 1968 with seed money from the Ford Foundation, La Raza—today called UnidosUS—had devoted itself from the start to creating an official “Hispanic” group, first compelling the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to so in 1977 with OMB Policy Directive No. 15 and then forcing the Census Bureau to add the category to the decennial census for the first time in 1980.REF

Up until that time, immigrants from all over the world had been catalogued according to traditional races. Immigrants from, say, Uruguay who were black were logged as black in government documents, and those who were white were counted accordingly. Nation of origin was the important factor. In her very good 2014 book Making Hispanics, the progressive Berkeley sociology professor Cristina Mora recounts how the Census Bureau had resisted the creation of the panethnic community. “For census officials, this omission reflected a consistent empirical finding: Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans and Cuban Americans overwhelmingly considered themselves to be separate groups.”REF Mora quotes a Census official as saying that “they didn’t really” identify with each other, and more tellingly, they “didn’t really know what Hispanics meant.” The term, in fact, was used only in New Mexico, “primarily by more upwardly mobile Mexican Americans … to assert a European identity and distance themselves from Mexican immigrants.”REF But after OMB and the Census created the group, all immigrants from lands between the Rio Grande and Tierra del Fuego were somehow consigned to a category apart: Hispanics. Another minority group was created. Latino was later added as another name for the same group by activists who thought that Hispanic was too redolent of the colonial power Spain (and who apparently never heard of the area around Rome called Latium). But the two terms are interchangeable.

More importantly, the reasoning behind constructing the category is such that a “Hispanic museum,” if built, would have to treat these Americans as victims. The museum would be a physical expression of the idea that the real bond between members of the group was shared discrimination. Public Law 94-311—the first and only law in U.S. history that identifies an ethnic group and whose stated objective was to “implement an affirmative action program”—specifically stated that what Hispanics have in common is being the target of bigotry. It maintains that “a large number of Americans of Spanish origin or descent suffer from racial, social, economic, and political discrimination and are denied the basic opportunities they deserve as American citizens and which should enable them to begin to lift themselves out of the poverty they now endure.”

Therefore, what united this new Hispanic group was neither culture, ethnicity, race, nor even language (Brazilians—33 percent of the people in Latin America—speak Portuguese, while many million others speak Indian languages) but being victims of discrimination.REF When La Raza militants urged the government to create the group in 1973, their argument likewise was that these Americans “were a disadvantaged minority group that deserved representation in data.”REF Portraying Hispanics as victims is thus not a bug that can be fixed; it is a factory feature of a Latino museum. La Raza even held off adding Cuban Americans to the category until it could find an organization that “accepted a disadvantaged minority status.”REF Accepting a subordinate status is a pre-condition to inclusion in the category. That this may be an extremely offensive stereotype is immaterial to those who sought separation, division, and set-asides back when racial preferences were the order of the day.

There was segregation against Mexican Americans, to be sure, especially in South Texas, though nothing on the scale of the horrific persecution of blacks in parts of the South. There was also poverty in areas such as the Rio Grande Valley, though, again, it was roughly comparable to that of such other rural subsets as the Scots Irish in Appalachia or the Cajuns of Louisiana. So the use of victim status as the bonding agent for the group was political and ideological, especially because residents of the valley themselves chafed at being denominated as such by activists. A massive 1970 study by UCLA paid by the Ford Foundation discovered, much to chagrin of the scholars, “that merely calling Mexican-Americans a ‘minority’ and implying that the population is the victim of prejudice and discrimination has caused irritation among many.” The researchers also found that Mexican Americans—even those with dark complexions and thus most visibly susceptible to prejudice—could achieve success even in the most benighted parts of Texas. Moreover, the immigrants coming in from Latin America did not immigrate here to see themselves, or be seen, as members of a subordinate caste but to have a chance at the American Dream. This is why, after the decision to wrap the new Hispanic identity around victimhood was made, it became the job of the activists to instill into the children of the new immigrants—and those with longer pedigree alike—the aggrieved feelings of oppression. That, as this report makes clear, is the mission the Latino museum is now dedicated to carry forward.

This far-fetched notion that shared victimhood actually constitutes a race is widely shared in the academy. UCLA Chicana studies professor Laura Gomez practically devotes her oft-quoted book Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism—a 2022 NPR Book of the Year—to this idea. The webpage for the book claims that “it is only recently that Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Central Americans, and others are seeing themselves (and being seen by others) under the banner of a cohesive racial identity. And the catalyst for this emergent identity … has been the ferocity of anti-Latino racism.”REF

The Road to Approval

The activists used the 11 years between the commission’s report and the signing of the bill that created the museum to lay down the infrastructure required to achieve this key milestone in the Left’s advance on our institutions. To work Congress, the activists approached the Raben Group, which was known for its lobbying work for La Raza, the abortionist group NARAL, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and the NAACP.REF In 2004, Raben founded Friends of the National Museum of the American Latino, which was to be its lobbying vehicle to muscle this milestone through Congress, and which received its formal tax-exempt status in 2014.REF Raben boasts that it practically wrote the legislation that eventually passed Congress in 2020: “We led a national campaign to create a Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino. Working with Congress and the White House for almost 20 years, we advanced legislation to authorize the building of a museum on the National Mall.”REF

The activists, clearly, understood how the U.S. government works. Their strategy was to sow victimization and transform America into a majority-minority country, at first simply by changing how people were counted and then solidifying the new identity in a museum. It was, by definition, subversive of America’s assimilationist ethos. But the activists and their new lobbyists rightly intuited that there were politicians who would calculate that supporting the museum might be good for their electoral prospects. They also knew they needed Republicans to back the effort and thus cleverly camouflaged their efforts with patriotic language. They were able to convince enough Republicans to go along in Congress.

“Our Story: One of family, patriotism, hard work, ingenuity, and pride in the country we’ve all built together. American Latinos are veterans, artists, athletes, business leaders—active participants in every walk of life.” These stirring red, white, and blue sentiments are found on the website of Friends of the Museum. Joaquin Castro, the very progressive chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus—a Democratic pressure group that does not let Republicans join—equally sounded an atypical patriotic tone when the House of Representatives passed a bill approving the museum in mid-2020: “The Latino story is an American story, and our history is a central thread in the history of our nation. Latinos have fought in every U.S. war.”REF

To be sure, no part of this pro-America story would be included in the museum exhibits that the public has been able to see so far—or in those that we know had to be canceled for being ant-capitalist. Instead, as we shall soon see, what has been put on display are collections that depict Hispanics as victims. Veterans have been mentioned but only in order to praise Army deserters.

In 2020, the lobbyists and activists got Texas’s senior Senator John Cornyn, a Republican, to sponsor the bill to create the museum. “Close to 40 percent of all Texans identify as Hispanic, and their history is an integral part of Texas history that must be recognized and remembered,” read Senator Cornyn’s statement. “By creating a new museum in the Smithsonian Institution, we can honor American Latino contributions and highlight their stories for future generations.”REF The bill creating the museum was tucked into the almost $1 trillion omnibus bill that Trump called a “disgrace.”REF

One man stood in the way of the museum’s creation: Senator Mike Lee (R–UT), who saw clearly what was afoot and tried to block the vote as late as mid-December. “The last thing we need is to further divide an already divided nation with an array of segregated, separate-but-equal museums for hyphenated identity groups,” Lee said at the time. “At this moment in the history of our diverse nation, we need our federal government and the Smithsonian Institution itself to pull us closer together and not further apart.” The Smithsonian, he added, “should not have an exclusive museum of American Latino history or a museum of women’s history or museum of American men’s history or Mormon history or Asian-American history or Catholic history. American history is an inclusive story that should unite us.”

Lee faced withering opposition from colleagues. One good example was this comment from Senator Susan Collins (R–ME): “I could not help but wonder as I heard the comments of my colleague from Utah whether he also tried to block the museum celebrating and telling the history of African Americans. It seems wrong that one senator can block consideration of a bill that would have overwhelming support by a majority of this body.”REF On December 27, Trump signed the omnibus bill, saying he was doing so only because “it is my responsibility to protect the people of our country from the economic devastation and hardship” brought on by COVID-19.

The Museum Becomes Reality

The newly approved Latino museum revealed in spectacular fashion that its critics had been right all along. In June 2022, only two years after approval, the administrators of the museum opened a gallery at the National Museum of American History to showcase what was coming down the line. The set of different collections were called ¡Presente!, a term with a long association with leftist defiance. The exhibit was housed in the Molina Family Gallery.

After reviewing the gallery’s contents when it first went public, three authors—Alfonso Aguilar, now at Parents Defending Education; Joshua Trevino at the Texas Public Policy Foundation (now also splitting his time at the America First Policy Institute); and Mike Gonzalez of The Heritage Foundation (the author of this report)—wrote an article in The Hill newspaper calling it “disgraceful” and saying that its only redeeming quality was that it made clear why the museum must not be funded. ¡Presente!, we wrote, “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.”REF The exhibits made it abundantly clear that all the promises that the activists, the creators of the museum, and their lobbyists had made were written in sand.

The Texas Revolution? It was presented at the Molina Gallery not as a heroic struggle of 1835–1836 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. We added:

Nowhere to be found are the Hispanic contributions to the American founding, most notably in the campaigns of the Spanish commander Bernardo de Gálvez against British forces in Louisiana and Florida. Similarly, the half-Spanish commander of the Union fleet at Mobile Bay, Admiral David Farragut of “damn the torpedoes” fame, is absent. Jose de la Luz Saenz, a Tejano who volunteered for service in World War I and returned to found the League of United Latin American Citizens, is missing. So too are modern-day Hispanic heroes of American wars like Medal of Honor recipients (and proud south-Texas Mexican-Americans) Roy P. Benavidez and Freddy Gonzalez.

Repercussions

That article—and others by the three authors that followed—had a direct impact on the museum. First, Jorge Zamanillo, the archeologist who had been named the founding director of the Latino museum in February 2022, cancelled within three months a second exhibition that was to follow ¡Presente! at the Molina Gallery. Second, the publicity that ensued finally stirred some Republicans into action, and House appropriators defunded the museum in mid-2023.

The second exhibition was to be about Hispanics and civil rights (once again, drawing the false analogy between black Americans and Americans of Latin ancestry). The two historians chosen to work on the project were Johanna Fernandez of Baruch College in New York—who has made it her life’s cause to lobby for the release of cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal—and Felipe Hinojosa of Baylor University, a sympathizer of the Marxist liberation theology.REF In a 2023 podcast, Hinojosa even credited liberation theology with helping Hispanics “reject this notion that they were to just assimilate and become white Americans, to take on a brown identity.” That, he said, “was a beautiful moment.”REF

In 2023, Time magazine reported, “After the Hill op-ed came out, Zamanillo started fielding angry calls from members of Congress and former members of Congress.… Fernandez and Hinojosa say that in the weeks that followed they began to feel pressure from the leaders of the museum to hammer home positive themes in American history.”REF Then, “On Nov. 28, 2022, Fernandez and Hinojosa got an email from Zamanillo informing them that their exhibit would be put on hold.” It would be replaced by an exhibit on salsa music. In a Zoom call with Fernandez and Hinojosa that followed his cancellation email, Zamanillo said that “the exhibits at the Molina were as much about fundraising for the history museum as they were about raising awareness about Latino history,” according to Time.

The museum’s defunding came on July 19, 2023, when the House Appropriations Committee passed the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies bill, which said, “None of the funds made available by this Act shall be obligated for the planning, design, or construction” of the Latino museum.REF Representative Mario Diaz-Balart (R–FL), who is of Cuban origin, had heard the criticism and led other members of his party on the party-line 33–27 vote. That bit of bravery was short-lived, however. In a statement dated July 27, 2023, Diaz-Balart disclosed that he and Tony Gonzales (R–TX) had led a delegation of Hispanic Republicans to a meeting with Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch III. The statement said, “After meeting with Smithsonian leadership, it is clear, that finally, the message has been heard. The Institution understood the unfortunate and even insulting portrayal the gallery had of our community. Based on the conversation, the Smithsonian has seriously committed to rectifying its actions. Procedural changes in the review of content and leadership have been made.”REF Funding was soon restored after that. One of the Cuban exhibits was soon changed to reflect the historical fact that Cubans fled political persecution. Representative Monica de la Cruz (R–TX) was later added to the museum’s board. Nothing else, however, changed after that. The institution understood that strategic cosmetic changes and empty promises can get a lot accomplished in Washington, DC.

“The Death of the West”

Not six months later, in January 2024, Zamanillo hired as the museum’s chief curator someone whose work has been so offensive that she was featured in a book called The Death of the West. Tey Marianna Nunn, the new associate director of content and interpretation, does personify how little had changed, or can change, after Bunch’s empty promises.

A Latino studies PhD, Nunn casually employs critical race theory’s jargon, whether discussing “Chicano and Latino art historical critical theory practice”REF or the ultimate grievance cliché, “we didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.”REF In a revealing 2015 talk “Decolonizing the Arts,” Nunn railed against the art market’s dependence on an “Anglo-centric market, on Anglo ideas of what is real, or native, or Hispanic art.” She complained bitterly that in the early 20th century, Anglo transplants (a group in which she supposedly lumps all “white” non-Hispanic Americans, whether Italian, Irish, Armenian, or sometimes actually WASP) focused too much on “traditional and primitive Nuevo Mexicano art.” That focus on tradition has left modern New Mexican artists to subversively work at “recontextualizing and resisting and rewriting the aesthetics rules and regulation imposed in the early 20th century.”REF New Mexican artists, she told her audience, have a political cause, and that is dealing with prejudice. “It is an art historical myth that Hispanic New Mexican artists are folk artisans, are not political, and are not asserting identity, do not have a cause, have not been displaced and are not dealing with prejudice.”

Much worse is the work Nunn has done herself recontextualizing art. In 2001 she was the curator of an exhibit—which was shown on Holy Week, no less—that featured Our Lady of Guadalupe naked, save for a bikini of roses. Rather than the meek Guadalupe venerated by Catholics, especially throughout Latin America, the Virgin was depicted with bare midriff and legs, boxing gloves, and a cloak engraved with the symbols of the Aztec moon goddess Coyolxauhqui. The incident drew Pat Buchanan’s attention. He included it in his 2002 bestseller The Death of the West, a book about how the 1960s counterculture is an attempt to destroy the West. In it he remarked how Nunn was “puzzled” at the fact that angry demonstrators had shown up at Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art. “Art, it is said, is the mirror of the soul,” wrote Buchanan. “T. S. Eliot called art the incarnation of a people’s religion. If that is true, who or what inhabits the souls of these ‘artists’?”REF

Why does a museum that has already come under criticism hire people such as Fernandez, Hinojosa, and Nunn? One answer is that the Left’s ideological capture of museum-related professions has been almost complete. In 2016, Verdant Labs conducted a study based on campaign contribution data from the Federal Election Commission that revealed widespread political bias in the field:

• Museum directors: 89 Democrats for every 11 Republicans
• Museum curators: 94 Democrats for every six Republicans
• Art conservators: 100 percent Democrats
• Art historians: 96 Democrats for every four Republicans
• Art administrators: 96 Democrats for every four Republicans
• Art advisors: 91 Democrats for every nine Republicans
• Archaeologists: 94 Democrats for every six Republicans
• Historians: 88 Democrats for every 12 RepublicansREF

Bunch has a demonstrated bias toward woke narratives, using his time at the Smithsonian to elevate Black Lives Matter, communist icon Angela Davis, and diversity, equity and inclusion. More telling, Bunch was a champion of the 1619 Project, which set out to reframe U.S. history. “Everybody that thought about the 1619 Project, whether they liked it or disagreed with it, saw that the Smithsonian had fingerprints on it. And that, to me, was a great victory,” he told the Smithsonian magazine in 2019.REF Embracing a product as historically inaccurate as the 1619 Project calls into question Bunch’s ceaseless claims to put scholarship above all else.

The public record is thinner for Zamanillo, though it hardly inspires confidence. In the Smithsonian press release announcing his appointment, he is quoted as saying that he wants in the new museum “powerful stories that capture the adversity faced over centuries by Latinos in the U.S.”REF As for the Latino museum’s 18-member advisory board at the time of the hiring, as Aguilar and Gonzalez pointed out in a 2023 article, it was 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.”REF

But even if either Bunch or Zamanillo, or the board, had wanted to appoint conservative curators, which appears doubtful, they would be hard put to find any.

Trump Is Re-Elected

Donald Trump was re-elected in November 2024, and in March 2025 he issued an executive order calling for the Smithsonian to be cleaned out. Its first paragraph seemed to have been written with the Latino museum in mind:

Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.REF

The executive order went on to declare “that future appropriations to the Smithsonian Institution prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”

When the Smithsonian apparently dragged its feet on purging woke interpretations of history from its museums, President Trump went further. In an August 12 letter, the Administration informed Bunch that it was putting the entire complex under review.REF

In his fiscal year (FY) 2026 budget request to Congress in May, the President requested that funding for the Latino museum be zeroed out: “The President’s FY 2026 Budget does not fund the development of the National Museum of the American Latino,” read the Smithsonian’s FY2026 Budget Justification to Congress. “Instead, the request returns the Smithsonian to the integrated approach previously used to share the collections throughout the Institution that chronicle American Latino history and culture. That approach was led by the Smithsonian Latino Center (SLC), which promoted the Latino presence within the Smithsonian’s collections, programs, and educational content.”REF

The Administration followed up all these actions on August 21 by posting 22 examples of woke outrages by the Smithsonian museums, with five of them coming from ¡Presente! and online content. One of them was content educating users “on their identity being Latinx, LGBTQ+, and disabled.” Another characterized the Texas Revolution as a “massive defense of slavery waged by ‘white Anglo Saxon’ settlers against anti-slavery Mexicans fighting for freedom, not a Texan war of independence from Mexico.” Yet another asserted that “what unites Latinas and Latinos” is Black Lives Matter.REF

Yet, despite this abundant and abominable record, members of the Appropriations Committees of both houses of Congress have apparently decided to test the White House’s willingness to stand its ground by voting to fund the museum. The Senate bill, which passed the committee in July on a 25–2 vote—so with most Republicans voting for it—even contained a hostile amendment:

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.REF

Why the Latino Museum Should Not Be Built

Why these congressmen acted in this manner is a mystery, as the Latino museum project is clearly athwart of America’s interests. To recap:

• This museum enshrines the balkanizing views and dreams of the radical groups most hostile to American unity.
• When selling the idea of the museum, La Raza hired its lobbyists, the Raben Group, which also goes to bat for abortionists and the extortionist SPLC.
• Definitionally, the museum can depict Americans of Latin ancestry only as victims of an oppressive America. This means that American taxpayers will be asked to fork over money for a project that will, by design, denigrate their country and promote separation.
• What examples we have seen of the museum’s offerings amply demonstrate that this will be the case. ¡Presente!, the exhibition that was to follow it, and the content already on the web faithfully follow critical race theory, gender theory, intersectionality, etc.
• When it came time to garner support in Washington, its supporters tucked it inside an amendment that was part of a must-pass omnibus bill.
• The leaders of the museum—from Bunch to Zamanillo to Nunn—are all committed to an oppressor-oppressed paradigm that has its origins in Marx’s manifesto whether they are aware of it or not.
• There are not enough conservative museum professionals to staff one single museum.

Conclusion

Somehow, the involvement of La Raza, MALDEF, the Raben Group, NARAL, and the SPLC around this museum apparently did not arouse suspicion among enough Republicans to get this monstrosity canceled. But now it is different. President Trump has offered a way forward—sharing artifacts and collections among the Smithsonian’s 21 museums. Local museums dedicated to real communities—such as the Cuban Museum of the Cuban Diaspora in Miami and the Museum of South Texas History in the Rio Grande Valley, which explores Tejano culture—do a wonderful job. That may be because they are closer to the communities they represent. Most importantly, those communities are real, not imagined, with a common history, an actual geographical area, and common traditions. Let’s take up Trump’s idea and use local content from these museums instead of wasting money on another monument to leftist victimhood.

Mike Gonzalez is Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow in the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation.