Latinos are a culturally, demographically, andgeographically diverse population. According to the 2000 census, persons of Mexican origin form the largest Latino population in the United States, numbering more than 20 million, followed by Puerto Ricans at 3.4 million, and Cuban-Americans at more than 1.2 million. The latest U.S. Census figures show that Latinos are the second-largest minority in the country, with 35.3 million people, about 13 percent of the total population. By 2010 Latinos will be the largest single ethnic group, accounting for nearly half.

After World War II, Latinos in the United States became aware of their growing size and potential political power, and sought to develop different aspects of their socio-economical, political, and cultural life. The Chicano and Puerto Rican movements that began in the 1960s were rooted in American history. Like the Civil Rights Movement, they evolved from a struggle for self-determination and self-definition as well as a growing awareness of the contributions of Latino Americans in the United States. These movements brought about change for the Latino community through political activism, creative outlets, and a renewed sense of identity.

During this time and the years that followed, four Latino museums were founded with the goal of engaging and supporting their communities. El Museo del Barrio was founded in New York City in 1969 by artist and teacher Rafael Montanez Ortiz. The Mexican Museum in San Francisco was founded in 1975 by artist Peter Rodrìguez. Chicago’s Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum was founded in 1982 by a high school history teacher named Carlos Tortolero and a group of educators. And the Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin, Tex., was founded in 1983 by artists and activists Sylvia Orozco, Pio Pulido, and Sam Coronado. These four museums were among the first to showcase the works of Latinos and collect, promote, and exhibit the works of Chicano/a, Mexican, and Puerto Rican art and culture. Their founders strove to provide positive resources at a time when there was a serious lack of outreach to Latinos from mainstream institutions, many of which historically had excluded Latino artists.

As institutions that grew out of their communities with historically strong ties to the people and the cultures they continue to serve today, these Latino museums can offer some valuable lessons to mainstream museums about what it means to engage and reflect the values and aspirations of a community.

El Museo del Barrio

Susana Torruella Leval, director of El Museo del Barrio, describes the museum’s founders as “Puerto Rican educators, artists, and community activists who got together here in El Barrio . . . [and] wanted to establish an institution that would survive and last.” Born of the legacy of cultural activism, El Museo del Barrio was founded in 1969 by a group of Puerto Rican parents, educators, artists, and community activists in New York’s East Harlem. The context surrounding its founding was the national Civil Rights Movement and the campaign to diversify New York’s art world, during which major art institutions in New York were urged to decentralize their collections and represent a variety of non-European cultures in their collections and programs.

In the late 1960s, Martin W. Frey, superintendent of New York’s School District 4 in Central and East Harlem, was under pressure from parents and community activists to implement cultural enrichment programs for Puerto Rican children. Frey appointed artist-educator Rafael Montañez Ortiz to create educational materials for district schools on Puerto Rican history, culture, folklore, and art. Montañez Ortiz was hired primarily to serve the population of East Harlem, known as el barrio, where the majority of the Puerto Rican population lived. As an artist, activist, and teacher, he was aware of the urgent need to create cultural resources for Puerto Ricans of all ages.

In 1971, El Museo del Barrio became a nonprofit institution dedicated to Puerto Rican heritage. In the years that followed, the museum established itself as a leader among institutions devoted to interpreting Puerto Rican and Latino culture. It also becamea vital and central part of the local community. Leval was appointed director of El Museo del Barrio in 1994, a position she holds today.

The museum’s educational programs and public activities are drawn from the permanent collection, and are presented to the public through exhibitions and related lectures, forums, workshops, and seminars. One of El Museo’s more notable exhibitions was “Voices from Our Communities: Perspectives on a Decade of Collecting at El Museo del Barrio,” which ran June 12-Sept. 16, 2001. It accomplished two important objectives, raising awareness of the richness of El Museo’s permanent collection and showing the depth and diversity of El Museo’s constituency and audiences. “Taino: Ancient Voyagers of the Caribbean,” now on permanent exhibition, is comprised of selected works from the Taino culture that flourished from 1200 to 1500 A.D. on several Caribbean islands. It is the most comprehensive exhibit of its kind in a U.S. museum, and provides visitors with an overall view of the history, cosmology, art, and culture of the Taino.

The Mexican Museum

In 1975, artist Peter Rodrìguez founded the Mexican Museum, located in the heart of San Francisco’s Latino community, the Mission District. The Mexican Museum is acknowledged by many as the first American institution devoted to Chicano and Mexican art and culture. Rodrìguez became its first director and remained in the position until 1984. Similar to Sylvia Orozco, the director of Mexic-Arte Museum, Rodrìguez was inspired by his early visits to Mexico. He came back to the United States eager to tell about and exhibit the treasures of Mexican culture and with a dream of creating a center for the purpose of educating various communities about the richness of Mexican culture.

In 1982, the Mexican Museum moved into the Fort Mason Center and was led by different directors until 1997, when Lorraine García-Nakata was appointed executive director. Citing health problems, she resigned in April 2002. “In retrospect,” says García-Nakata, “the 1990s at the museum very much mirrored what was happening in the United States. It was a time of losing and gaining important ground, a period when the community had to ask itself a fundamental question: how important is the museum, and what are we each willing to contribute in order that it may continue? The fact that the museum received an affirmative answer from enough people in the community to bring it to its current state was its greatest and most important accomplishment in the 1990s.”

The Mexican Museum has been described as a first-voice institution; that is, it communicates the primacy of Latino self-definition and interpretation. As the museum’s Web site notes, “It utilizes Latino cultural expression as a lens for examining parallel experiences shared by the many cultural communities that constitute the Americas. This philosophy grows from the understanding that a community consists of many influences, histories, and experiences simultaneously.”

The museum’s permanent collection grew from Rodrìguez’s own personal collection of Mexican art and now includes more than 14,000 objects consisting of Pre-conquest, Colonial, Popular, Mexican, Latino contemporary, and Chicano art. “Street SmArt,” one of the museum’s best-known programs, was developed in partnership with Mission Housing and Development Corporation, an organization that develops and manages low- to moderate-income housing in San Francisco. According to museum staff, “Street SmArt” serves as a direct response to the scarcity of after-school programming in the primarily Latino Mission District. Its workshops, offered to participants free of charge, address the needs of young people ages 5 to 18 who live at the corporation’s housing sites. The Mexican Museum also has a free Family Sunday series designed to strengthen family ties; and exhibition and curriculum guides that enable teachers to interpret the museum’s exhibitions to their students.

The Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum

Founded in 1982, the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum (MFACM) evolved out of a commitment to awaken the city of Chicago to the wealth and breadth of Mexican culture, and to stimulate and preserve an appreciation of the arts of Mexico in the city’s large Mexican community.

Its expanded space, which opened in April 2001, allows for 6,000 extra square feet of exhibition space, an education center, a new gift store, a new main entrance, a library, an interactive computer gallery, classrooms, and a climate-controlled art vault.  The museum also is planning to create a National Memorial Plaza for Mexican-American veterans, the first national memorial to honor all Mexican-American servicemen and women. According to MFACM staff, numerous individuals and organizations in the community overwhelmingly support the idea, and acclaimed Chicano artist Luis Jimènez has been selected to create the memorial.

Throughout the museum field and among members of the public, MFACM is recognized as the first Mexican cultural center-museum in the Midwest and the largest in the nation. “The museum is for every Mexican in the world,” says Director Tortolero. “Our honor is at stake. We want both the local community and the mainstream world to visit . . . so that we can break down some of the barriers. . . . If only our own people come here, we will have failed in our mission. We really believe that this is a place for everyone.”

MFACM is located in the heart of the Pilsen community in Chicago, the largest Mexican community in the Midwest. A primary goal is to stimulate and preserve the knowledge and appreciation of Mexican culture as a culture sin fronteras (“without borders”) that includes traditional and contemporary artistic expressions of Mexico and of the Mexican communities in the United States.

As a leading community-based arts organization, MFACM has accepted the responsibility and welcomes the opportunity to address critical contemporary topics such as cultural diversity, freedom of expression, first-voice issues, public funding in the arts, and arts and community development. The museum currently participates in three important partnerships. MAPS—the acronym for Museums and Public Schools: A New Direction for Teaching Chicago’s Children (see Museum News, March/April 2000, page 60)—is an innovative, collaborative program between museums and the city’s parks and the Chicago Public Schools that seeks to integrate the rich and varied resources of nine great museums into the local classroom curriculum. Park Voyagers, a collaboration with the Chicago Park District, is designed to provide Chicago youth with educational and experiential enrichment in an informal setting; children and parents are invited to participate in after-school programs and evening sessions, as well as guided visits to the museum. Furthermore, MFACM is proud of its ongoing relationship with Mexico’s El Museo del Templo Mayor (The Aztec Main Temple Museum). In 1992, a sister-museum agreement was signed to further the bonds of friendship between MFACM and El Museo del Templo Mayor. The Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum is also the first and only Latino museum accredited by the American Association of Museums.

Tortolero believes that the museum’s success is due to its location and that his museum and the community share a reciprocal experience. Without the community the museum would not have such a strong presence, but without the museum the community would not take such pride in its culture. That is why MFACM does not charge admission, creating a sense of ownership among the community residents.

The Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum’s permanent collection is featured in “Mexicanidad,” a comprehensive cultural exhibition that explores aspects of ancient Mexico, colonial Mexico, modern Mexico, contemporary Mexico, and the Mexican experience in the United States. The exhibition concept derives from the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) and identifies the shared aesthetics, beliefs, and customs that characterize Mexican culture today. More than 60 percent of the exhibition consists of artwork from the permanent collection. The museum supplements its permanent collection with works from other U.S. museums, museums in Mexico, and individual collectors.

The most intriguing examples of the museum’s youth initiative are its radio station and youth museum, which target the primarily Mexican American community of Pilsen. Radio Arte-WRTE 90.5 FM and the Yollocalli Youth Museum serve to provide positive resources for young people in the Pilsen neighborhood and “confirm the museum’s commitment to the young people of our community,” says Tortolero.

Mexic-Arte Museum

Mexic-Arte Museum’s mission states that the institution is dedicated to cultural enrichment and education through the presentation and promotion of traditional and contemporary Mexican, Latino, and Latin American art and culture.

Artist, co-founder, and current director Sylvia Orozco was a student at the University of Texas at Austin during the late 1970s. At that time, she joined the Austin-based League of United Chicano Artists (LUCHA) and the Mujeres Artistas de Sudoeste (Women Artists from the Southwest), a group of Chicanas who organized programs and exhibitions dealing with women’s issues.

Orozco longed to study the masters of Mexican art first-hand; she accepted a scholarship from the Mexican government and the Committee for Rural Democracy, co-sponsored by Raza Unida, a Chicano/a activist group, to study at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in the San Carlos Academy, the oldest art school in the Americas. There she met Pio Pulido, a painter who later teamed up with her for more than a decade at Mexic-Arte Museum. Together they catalogued exhibits and collected reference works on Mexican art. In 1983, Orozco returned to Austin, expressing a need to share Mexico’s rich culture with the community.

In July 1984, Orozco, Pulido, and artist Sam Coronado (who later founded Coronado Studios, a silkscreen printing workshop located in Austin’s Latino community) officially established Mexic-Arte Museum at Galeria Mexico. That year Orozco and her colleagues acquired some city funding for Austin’s first Day of the Dead Parade and Celebration. “People were nervous about it,” Orozco says of the first Dia de los Muertos parade. “Latinos and Anglos had never really met on the street that way. It was fear of the unknown.” In 1988, Mexic-Arte moved to downtown Austin where it continued its commitment to serving as a multicultural center that includes rather than excludes artists, actors, and musicians of different races.

In 1993, the museum established a sister-city relationship with the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Studio Museum in Mexico City, connecting Texas and Mexico through cultural exchanges. The partnership has enabled Mexic-Arte to showcase important exhibitions of Mexican art throughout the state of Texas, including works by Adolfo Mexiac, Rosario Cabrera, Jean Charlot, and others. For Orozco, it always has been important to include the Mexican influence in her efforts to make Mexic-Arte Museum a quality institution, equal to those found in Mexico. She strongly believes that one day the museum will be a world-class art museum that will display the full richness of Mexican culture. Linking today’s artists to Mexico’s past is her goal.

“We reach out to everyone,” Orozco says. “We are not elitists. We want the community to feel a sense of ownership, and provide a welcoming environment.”

As these museums expand their missions, facilities, and outreach efforts and continue to add to their credibility and approval within the community, they are experiencing growing pains. The Mexican Museum and Mexic-Arte Museum are each in the middle of a struggle to build larger and more Latino-diverse institutions. The Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum recently expanded its space, and El Museo del Barrio is looking into relocating. Relocation and growth add a serious burden to these grass-roots organizations. They were all created, in a sense, by the community itself, which they helped to define even as the community defined the museums.

In the Latino community, there is often concern that when new development occurs for museums such as these, they might “sell out” and become mainstream institutions. El Museo del Barrio, for example, was criticized by some in its Puerto Rican community for concentrating too much on other Latino communities as it expanded its mission, according to a January 2001 New York Times article. In defense of El Museo del Barrio, however, other members of the Latino community have praised the museum for recognizing that “El Barrio” of East Harlem has undergone huge demographic changes as it has welcomed diverse Latino communities in the last decade.

But these problems of identity were also familiar to mainstream museums at similar stages of their own development. As critic Michael Kimmelman points out (“Museums in a Quandary: Where Are the Ideals?” New York Verdana,Arial, August 2001), mainstream art museums “were conceived in the 19th century as places to improve public taste, to educate the middle classes. Self-improvement and commerce went hand in hand in the early history of museums, especially in the United States and Britain. But they were never places of consensus.”

“Let’s face it,” says Tortolero of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, “museums are very conservative institutions and are reluctant and afraid to take on the issue of the ‘culture’ of mainstream museums. Many of these institutions were created for the elite and never saw themselves as serving society as a whole. Now museums are reacting to the pressure to change. Unfortunately, this pressure usually comes from the outside, rather than inside, the institution, especially where funding sources are concerned. Many mainstream institutions have placed the issue of inclusiveness on the back burner.”

The challenges of Latino museums were and continue to be external and internal in nature, just as they are for mainstream museums. Those who use Latino museums as a resource for academic research, cultural activity, and personal identity are looking forward to their continuous growth. These museums should be applauded for their vision and willingness to focus on a historically rich and diverse culture. Their presentation of the full range of Latino art and cultural performances is something that everyone can enjoy and appreciate, Latinos and non-Latinos alike.