The work toward a National Latino museum has started, again
By Victor Landa, NewsTaco
Estuardo Rodriguez leans into a conversation to make two points: his sights are set on a National Latino Museum on the Mall in Washington D.C., but to get there he’s banking on small steps and lots of money – $3.5 million, to be exact, for starters.
You get the feeling, talking to Estuardo, that he’s had this conversation many times before. He’s the Executive Director of the Friends of the National Museum of the American Latino, with the charge of breathing life into the Latino Museum idea.
[pullquote]… efforts to get a bill introduced in Congress were backed by a mere promise of funding for a study.[/pullquote]There’s part Sisyphus in what he’s doing
This is the third time that the idea of a National Latino Museum has been taken to Capitol Hill. If you want a museum on the National Mall, as part of the Smithsonian Institution, you need legislation to make it happen, and twice already that effort has rolled to the bottom.
Estuardo will tell you that it’s an overdue idea, that U.S. Latinos deserve a place among the country’s premier educational museums. He’ll tell you that because no new construction is permitted on the Mall, there’s only one building left that can house such a venue – the Smithsonian Arts and Industry building. He’ll also tell you that other groups want the site as well, for an Innovation Museum or a Women’s History museum. And he’ll tell you that in order to get the needed legislation you have to go to Congress with a feasibility study in hand.
That’s been the problem in the past. Efforts to get a bill introduced in Congress were backed by promises of funding for studies, and that hasn’t been good enough.
[pullquote]”The brick and mortar part of the museum will cost $325 million, at least.”[/pullquote]One step at a time
Estuardo wants to raise the $3.5 million first, do the study, then take it to Congress. So he travels around the country, talking to people, leaning in to make his points, banking on their help to raise the needed funds.
“The brick and mortar part of the museum will cost $325 million, at least,” he said. But for now he’s working on the first step, to raise one percent of the total for the study to get the legislature to pay attention. He’s hoping to have everything ready for 2016 – it’ll be a good year for easy votes in Congress to curry Latino favor.
His short order is to raise awareness and money. He’s concentrating on wealthy Latinos, and there are plenty of them. He’s organized town-hall meetings at Rice University and USC. He meets one-on-one with potential donors and he’s organizing large events in the nation’s major cities.
And that’s the easy part
It hasn’t been easy and he knows that the harder work is yet to come. If the Latino museum is approved, the heavy lifting and refereeing of the diverse Latino interests will be difficult. “But,” he says with a wry smile, “that’ll be someone else’s problem. My work ends when we get the Museum approved by Congress.”
He leans back, then, and lets the weight of that thought sit on its own.
[Photo courtesy of South Florida Food and Wine, New America Alliance]
