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The growing controversy over the Smithsonian Institution’s planned Latino Museum makes one thing perfectly clear: the once august organization can no longer be trusted to refrain from “decolonizing” history.
The recent revelation that it hired two radical professors to create a second precursor to the museum, an exhibition intended to make Hispanics question capitalism, makes its tendencies clear. The Smithsonian recently got cold feet and suspended the museum’s second exhibition late last year after critics complained that the first precursor exhibition was absurdly Marxist.
As two of three critics who sounded the alarm in a column for The Hill newspaper last August, we’re glad we helped get the Smithsonian to hit the pause button on yet another project to radicalize Hispanics by to tell them that they are victims. in America.
SMITHSONIAN SUSPENDS LATINO EXHIBITION AFTER CRITICS CALL PREVIOUS VERSION ‘SHAMEFUL’, ‘MARXIST’
But we also take no pleasure in being proven right again that the upcoming National Museum of the Latino American was created to promote a left-wing view of the experience of Hispanics in the United States, and that Congress should abandon the project altogether delete.
You just have to remember that the museum’s 18-member Scholarly is Advisory Committee, which is responsible for reviewing all exhibitions, is almost entirely dominated by woke professors, researchers, and activists whose work focuses on advancing cultural Marxist concepts such as critical race theory and gender and queer theory. Many teach the academically questionable subject of “Latinx” studies.
What can you expect from this museum?
The first exhibition, ‘Presente! A Latino History of the United States,” made it clear to us after it opened its doors at the National History Museum in June 2022, that the upcoming museum – created by Congress in the massive omnibus COVID bill in the Last Days of 2020, which have yet to be built, will be used to curate neither art nor history, but grievances and resentments against the United States.
The Smithsonian has suspended an upcoming Latin American exhibition after critics condemned an earlier exhibition as “Marxist.” (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
That the second exhibition – ostensibly dedicated to ‘civil rights’ – would be more of the same, or worse, should now prove this to everyone else.
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A time magazine article This month it emerged that two scientists – Felipe Hinojosa of Baylor University and Johanna Fernandez of Baruch College – had been working on the second exhibition for two years. In an email dated November 28, 2022, it was also revealed that the Smithsonian had told them to stop. In a subsequent phone conversation, Latino Museum director Jorge Zamanillo told them that their exhibit would hinder funding.
It was perhaps inevitable that Hispanics would find themselves in the middle of the culture wars. The group now includes nearly one-fifth of the U.S. population.
Hinojosa and Fernandez were not told why, but Time additionally reports that “they believe it was because they planned to spotlight a variety of 1960s countercultural organizations that questioned how well American democracy was meeting the needs of its citizens under a capitalist system. .”
Time reported that the Smithsonian confirmed that the exhibit had been discontinued, adding that a new exhibit on salsa and Latin music is being developed instead.
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The article quotes Hinojosa as saying, “The tragedy and really the story here is about who controls the future of Latino history.”
Hinojosa isn’t wrong. We think it would be dangerous for professors like him and Fernandez, or the members of the Museum’s Scientific Advisory Committee, to control the way the history of these immigrant groups is told. Taxpayers certainly should not fund an effort to divide America.
FILE – In this May 1, 2017, file photo, people wait in line to enter the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Cultural on the National Mall in Washington. (AP)
Quick investigation reveals that Fernandez is a socialist who is also lobbying for the release of police killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. She edited a prison book by Mumia, and in a 2021 Workers’ World Party webinar, Fernandez said Mumia is “critical of the state and of capitalism. This means that he represents a continuity in the Black radical tradition, a continuity in Black radical origins from the 1960s to the present.”
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Hinojosa, in turn, sympathizes with Latin American liberation theology, which proposes that the Church should be an instrument of mobilization and even revolution to overthrow the traditional structures of society. Hinojosa advocates the preservation of Hispanics as a distinct group within the US, rejects assimilation, and would undoubtedly have used the now-suspended exhibition to promote this separatism.
They are now 60 million strong and are starting to drift to the right, and the progressives are getting desperate.
“What the 1960s and 1970s did for Latinos, especially the rise of liberation theology, was that they were able to see themselves in a whole new way, that they were able to reframe their identity, that they were able to reject the idea that they were only had to assimilate and white Americans, to adopt a brown identity, a sense of difference and a connection to indigenous roots… that was a beautiful moment,” Hinojosa told a podcaster in 2021.
These are the people the Smithsonian hires to shape the identity of Hispanics.
It was perhaps inevitable that Hispanics would find themselves in the middle of the culture wars. The group now includes nearly one-fifth of the U.S. population. They are now 60 million strong and are starting to drift to the right, and the progressives are getting desperate.
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Congress seemed to understand what was going on, and the House Appropriations Committee passed a funding bill last July that cut the museum’s funding. But Republican members of Congress subsequently met with Smithsonian leaders later that month who offered assurances that they had learned their lesson. Sources tell us that Smithsonian leaders told members they had “fired” people, presumably a reference to Fernandez and Hinojosa.
But members of the House of Representatives must understand that they have apparently been lied to. Despite bipartisan assurances from the Smithsonian leadership, the museum is controlled by woke academic elites who only want to recruit Hispanics for the victimized Olympics.
Alfonso Aguilar is chairman of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles.
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