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Opinion


DEFUND THE SMITHSONIAN’S LATINO MUSEUM — A WOKE INDOCTRINATION FACTORY

By Mike Gonzalez

Published Dec. 24, 2023, 1:39 p.m. ET

Funding for the Smithsonian’s Latino Museum is in limbo as both parties wrangle
over budget spending — and there it should stay until Congress can repeal its
enabling statute entirely.

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Who’d oppose a museum? For starters, anyone whose consciences have been awakened
by the sight of anti-Israeli demonstrations since Oct. 7.

Americans are discovering that teaching new generations to look at life through
the “oppressor vs. oppressed” prism, as the museum does, has been a horrendous
mistake.

That is why Republicans cut funding for the museum in November.

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Yet some Republicans and Democrats have palled around with Smithsonian Director
Lonnie Bunch and openly discussed the future site of the Latino museum.

Some GOP staffers and lawmakers are privately seeking a compromise. They tell me
they can make the museum a model for all the future Smithsonian museums that
will be erected for each “marginalized” group (yes, Republicans speak this way
in private).

5
“An Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio” by artist Amalia Mesa-Bains. AP

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5
The museum is accused of looking at the world through an “oppressor vs.
oppressed” lens. AP


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In September, a bill called for an LGBTQ museum on the National Mall.

But the curators the Latino Museum hires make it clear they mean to turn the
Latino museum into another woke-indoctrination camp, which is what the other
museums would be, too.

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The statements of the museum’s director, Jorge Zamanillo — touted by some
Republicans as a savior — also inspire no confidence.

The record of the museum’s first exhibit, already on display elsewhere on the
National Mall, has been itself disgraceful, elevating leftist ideologues and
transexual activists while ignoring the everyday experience of Hispanics.

5
The National Museum of the American Latino should focus on the everyday concerns
of those in the community. Getty Images/iStockphoto

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Listen to comments this week by Johanna Fernandez of Baruch College, whom the
Smithsonian hired in 2020 to curate what was going to be the Latino Museum’s
second exhibit.

She worked for two years on the exhibition until Zamanillo yanked it, fearful
that it would attract further negative coverage.

Fernandez has identified an entire category of oppressors: Florida’s
Cuban-Americans.

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In comments published recently by Madrid’s ABC, one of Spain’s leading
newspapers, Fernandez painted with a wide brush.

“These Cubans were literally part of the dominant class in Cuba that supported a
dictator and were in favor of the prolongation of slavery in Cuba. Slavery ended
late in Cuba. . . . So, these people are part of a dominant class that is
autocratic and dictatorial and predominantly white. They came here and were
welcomed by the US government in the midst of the Cold War. Everything was given
to them. They were immediately granted US citizenship.”

These Cuban bad hombres, added Fernandez, are working with the Heritage
Foundation in a “deliberate intent to mold the historic narrative at its
convenience, minimizing and even censuring Latin history.”

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Ahem. I work at Heritage, have been among the leaders of the campaign to expose
the museum and was born in Cuba (though I came here as a minor half a century
ago).

So excuse me if I feel somewhat included.

It would take far too much space to rebut all these unhinged calumnies point by
point, so suffice it to say that my family had a distinguished history of
battling Fulgencio Batista (the dictator Fernandez mentions).

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5
Johanna Fernandez asserts that there was dominant class of Cubans that were
affiliated with the dictatorship. AP

Fernandez is a professor with a political agenda, who also just happens to be
bad at history.

Hers is the mindset that produces Hamas-embracing kids.

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Yet Zamanillo is no better.


SEE ALSO

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FOR RACE RESEARCH: ‘DARKEST HISTORY’

The museum’s first exhibit doesn’t just display an anti-American bias, but
animus against Spain and the Catholic Church (betraying that its enemy is really
Western Civilization).

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A group of Spanish citizens wrote to Zamanillo last year expressing their
concerns.

His reaction? He treated them like an insolent rabble whom he had to put in
their place.

The exhibit would emphasize only the suffering of the colonial subjects,
“without centering explorers, conquistadores, and missionaries,” wrote Zamanillo
in the language of the woke art-history world.

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The exhibit, said the letter (a copy of which I possess), intentionally showed
only “historical injustices” such as slavery, “the creation of social
hierarchies” and “U.S. Manifest Destiny.”

“The indefensible outcome of European colonization was the usurpation of
indigenous lands, willful and unintentional human genocide, intentional cultural
erasure and replacement,” he added. The stories of “Latina and Latino ancestors
who endured colonization . . . take center stage.”

In other words, there is to be no full picture that explores all of history and
its artifacts.

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It will be oppressor vs. oppressed in black and white — Rousseau’s “Noble
Savage” redux.

The Latino Museum, whose official name is the National Museum of the American
Latino, is a political project.

Its aim is to teach the young and future generations to see themselves as
victims of America, so they can destroy it from within.

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The museum’s exhibition does not cast a favorable light on colonizers. Getty
Images/iStockphoto

Hispanics are now 60 million strong, fully one-fifth of the American population,
so that would make for a lot of aggrieved people.

The bill that approved its construction — along with a women’s museum — was
tucked into the gargantuan 2020 omnibus bill that President Trump saw no option
but to sign.

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What do you think? Post a comment.

The legislation can, and must, be repealed.

Keep the thing defunded, until it is possible to do so.

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Otherwise, the Mall will have to be renamed Grievances Row.

Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at the
Heritage Foundation. His last book was “BLM, The Making of a New Marxist
Revolution.”


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Filed under congress ,  hamas ,  hispanics ,  museums ,  smithsonian institution
,  woke culture ,  12/24/23
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