 "Photo: Nadia Tamez-Robledo / The Pan American")
Celebrities like actress Eva Longoria Parker and producer Emilio Estefan joined the Washington, D.C. ranks including Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis as members of the National Museum of the American Latino Commission last month. The task was planning a museum dedicated to documenting the exploits of Latino culture.
Since the Oct. 13 announcement that the team of 23 would compile research on the logistics of the project, the question of what will be included in the museum arises. National Museum of the American Latino Community Commission Act was signed into law on May 8, 2008 giving the committee two years and $3.2 million to complete their research.
With numbers from a 2008 study by the Census Bureau showing that Hispanics make up 15.4 percent of the population, a group that boasts members from over 20 countries of origin across three continents, the committee will not likely have a shortage of possibilities to choose from.
Still, students like 22-year-old art major Beatriz Guzman have a hard time seeing themselves reflected in the image of the Latino portrayed in mainstream media today. The heart of the museum decision is identity: and how people see themselves and are perceived.
Now living in Edinburg, Guzman grew up in Reynosa while her brother and father lived and worked in Texas; she and her mother focusing their attention on getting paperwork in order to move to the United Sates. She prefers not to subscribe to any ethnic labels.
“People don’t treat you the same as a Mexican even though you were born over there, or if you were born over here, they don’t treat you the same as an American,” she said. “They see you as an outsider. You never have a feel of belonging to a community because you’re always crossing [the border].”
Going between countries, Guzman said she was constantly worried about being allowed to return home to either side when at the checkpoint, something not everyone who has grown up in the Valley can relate to.
“They’ve never [experienced] the fear of the Border Patrol not letting you in or out,” she said. “Yeah, there’s that fear that the Border Patrol is going to come after them, but it’s not that fear of crossing all the time.”
As for the portrayals and representation of culture in mainstream media, Guzman is skeptical.
Guzman said that there is a lack of Latino art at the galleries she has visited, including the Latino-inspired exhibit “America Americas” at the University of Texas at Austin. The National Museum of the American Latino could change that.
“I would like to see a true representation of [Latino] art,” she said. “Not only small drawings but a big collection. They should let them portray themselves.”
OTHER VOICES
If Guzman represents the Latino who moves between two separate but connected worlds, 23-year-old Michael Lopez stands on the other side of the spectrum. The Edinburg native and broadcast journalism major at UTPA prefers to identify himself as American.
Lopez studied the Chicano Rights Movement in his Mexican-American Language, Literature and Culture class and feels that Latino leaders such as Cesar Chavez were ultimately not able to bring the issues of the Hispanic community to the forefront the way black leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X did.
“Even in California, there’s only been a little bit of progress,” he said, citing issues such as racism, the border wall and controversial road signs apparently depicting a family of illegal immigrants crossing over. “If you want to talk about Cesar Chavez, yeah, you could, but if you wanted to give him a grade over all, it’s like a D.”
On the whole, Lopez said that not even residents of the Rio Grande Valley are knowledgeable about the contributions of their own, such as those of esteemed Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldua. A Hargill native and UTPA graduate, her works on mestiza identity and queer theory are studied worldwide.
“If you ask a lot of people, no one’s going to know about her,” he said. “That’s kind of depressing because her book is actually very huge. For no one to know [about her] where she’s from, and no one really knows that she’s dead already, that’s pretty sad.”
As for his take on the National Museum of the American Latino, one thing Lopez would like to see is a telling of history from a Latino point of view.
“They don’t really tell us the full story of the Alamo. They should talk about why [Mexican soldiers] went in,” he said of the Texas Rebellion. “That’s why Santa Ana tried to reclaim it back. Explain the whole story of the Alamo, not just Davy Crockett.”
MANY DIFFERENT METHODS
Modern accomplishments including literature, writing, poetry and other art should be highlighted, said English major Jose Julian Canales.
“It’s sort of glossed over I think. We hear a lot about it because of FESTIBA. We celebrate our culture and the writing and achievements [of Latinos], but in the mainstream, it’s sort of ignored,” the 24-year-old Alton resident said. “It’s a culture of the now and, ‘Who cares where they came from? This is what’s happening,’ especially the mainstream media.”
Canales and his family moved to Alton from Reynosa when he was six years old and, like Guzman, his mix of backgrounds isn’t necessarily part of the basic image of Latinos those outside the Valley think of. To Canales, the struggles of many Latinos are not necessarily automatically his due to race.
“Everybody has their individual story, their individual history, and we can’t be clumped up into the giant Latino community, because Latinos in the United States have had their history, they grew up here,” he said. “Especially the younger generation, they might not have been discriminated against like their parents or their grandparents who came from [another country]. I can’t identify with that sort of Latino history. I haven’t experienced any discrimination or anything.”
The accomplishments of people like astronaut Jose Hernandez, who spoke on campus about his experiences at HESTEC last month, do not get the attention of people nationally.
“In the region, we celebrate it,” Canales said. “The country as a whole wants to be representative of everything instead of the minority individual who does something, and I think there needs to be a venue for that sort of thing on the national stage, not just the regional.”
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