¡No Mas!: Time to Halt Funding of Smithsonian’s Latino Museum

On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump decisively dismantled the Biden administration’s wasteful and immoral “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives.

An easy and obvious next step in this bold effort to “dewokefy” federal institutions and cut waste would be to put a halt to the recently established Smithsonian Museum of the American Latino.

DEI, as Trump explained in his several executive orders exorcising DEI’s extreme ideological agenda from the federal government and its contractors, fosters confrontation based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity. The Latino Museum, unfortunately, has become a tool of the cultural Left to push its dystopian narrative about the experiences of Hispanics in the United States.

The museum came into being under circumstances on which the country has decidedly turned the page. Backers sneaked it into the $1 trillion omnibus monstrosity in late 2020 and passed it in the last crazy days of that December, as the country was convulsing from COVID-19, chaotic Black Lives Matter riots, and the contested election.

Its leaders lost no time in turning it into another DEI project. Its standing exhibit “Presente! A Latino History of the United States”—temporarily housed at the National Museum of American History—revels in “Latinx” and “queer” identity politics, trades in barely hidden Marxian tropes about the “marginalized,” harbors “postnationalist” ideas, and reaches for more than the usual dash of anti-Christian blasphemy and anti-Western ethos.

Its second planned exhibition was curated by Johanna Fernandez and Felipe Hinojosa—one an activist who has devoted her life to freeing from prison the cop-killing Mumia Abu-Jamal and the other an admirer of liberation theology—and would have described how capitalism harmed Latino communities.

Museum leaders, however, concerned that they could lose their funding after a few of us denounced the museum’s biases, decided at the last minute to cancel the exhibit.

House Republicans went ahead with the funding cut, only to reinstate it after receiving empty promises to create a more balanced presentation of the facts from Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch.

Yet, despite Bunch’s assurances, nothing has changed at the museum. If anything, they have doubled down on their commitment to their culturally Marxist depiction of Hispanics in America.

The woke standing exhibit hasn’t been taken down or its content altered. The Museum’s Scholarly Advisory Committee continues to be dominated by activist professors and researchers with expertise in critical race theory and gender and queer theory.

Moreover, the museum last year named as its top curator Tey Marianna Nunn, a Latino studies Ph.D. who seems to embody the current beliefs of the art world that the West should commit ritual cultural suicide.

Nunn is equally at ease discussing “Chicano and Latino art historical and critical theory practice,” “postnational discourse,” how to “decolonize” museums and art, the fate of “Latinx-owned” entities, and decrying how “Anglo transplants” appropriated the culture of her native New Mexico. Not surprisingly, she likes to repeat the ultimate grievance cliché: “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.”

She is known for an infamous 2001 exhibit at Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art that featured a semi-naked rendition of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a religious and cultural icon venerated throughout the Americas.

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.” The ensemble was held aloft by a saucy, bare-breasted angel.

According to a dissertation on the public scandal that followed, New Mexicans were “up in arms before the exhibit even opened” after they saw the exhibition’s brochure. “Community activists and the Catholic community protested,” demanding the exhibition’s removal, and “from that moment on, protest rallies, prayer vigils, letters, emails, and phone calls infiltrated the historically rich space of New Mexico.”

The exhibition of this atrocity was scheduled for Holy Week, no less. It led to none other than longtime conservative warrior Pat Buchanan featuring Nunn in his 2001 bestseller “Death of the West”—a book about how the 1960s’ counterculture aims to destroy American and Western culture from within.

It’s not hard to deduce, therefore, that museum directors are intent in continuing a DEI approach in their portrayal of Hispanic history and culture.

The Trump administration should therefore ensure that Congress puts a halt to the further development of the museum. No new funding should be appropriated for it, and Congress should hold off authorizing a site for it on the National Mall. The ultimate goal should be to rescind the original authorization of the museum.

If that’s not done, the museum will continue to further divide society and “otherize” an amorphous group many of whose members have now voted for Trump and want to be treated like everyone else.

We do not need a Smithsonian Museum that sets out to instill grievances, a “postnational” outlook, or teaches Hispanics—a very diverse groups of people—that their heritage is being appropriated by grasping “Anglos.”

To spend money we don’t have on making one-fifth of the population sullen and resentful would indeed contribute to the death of the West and the American experiment.

Alfonso Aguilar is director of Hispanic engagement at the American Principles Project. Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

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