Conservatives are rallying behind President Donald Trump’s effort to defund the development of the National Museum of the American Latino.
A coalition letter lead by the American Principles Project sent to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., on Tuesday expressed support for Trump’s budget request ending funding for the development of the museum.
The letter, signed by 22 policy professionals and leaders of conservative Latino groups, detailed concerns about the plans for the newest Smithsonian museum. The museum, authorized in the omnibus spending bill of 2020, is “almost entirely” backed by “leftist activists,” according to the letter.
The Smithsonian project is still looking for a site on the National Mall but currently holds a prominent exhibition at the National Museum of American History.
The signatories also drew attention to the far-left roots of the museum’s origination. They noted that it is a project to “present the public a culturally Marxist depiction of Hispanics in America.” According to the letter, the primary exhibit proposes to focus on the Hispanic American “struggle for justice” on leftist social issues like education access, fair housing, immigration reform, and LGBTQ+ rights.
The letter noted that several key players in the museum’s planning project are themselves perpetrators of the disparaging portrayal of Hispanics as an “oppressed people.” The top curator, Tey Marianna Nunn, is a “controversial anti-Western scholar” who has focused on the “decolonization” of museums and “Chicano critical theory” in her research. Additionally, the Scholarly Advisory Committee for the museum is “almost completely controlled by woke professors and researchers that specialize in LatinX, gender, and queer theory.”
When asked for a comment from both the Smithsonian Institution and Nunn, the National Museum of the American Latino sent The Daily Signal a two-page fact sheet on the museum’s mission and funding.
The American Principles Project coalition letter praised an alternative—the Smithsonian Latino Center, an organization reestablished by the Trump administration’s budget plan. The Smithsonian Latino Center will focus on an “integrated approach” “highlighting the contributions of Hispanics to our shared history, economy, culture, and armed forces, and not on promoting ideology or grievances.”
Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy who signed the coalition letter, told The Daily Signal: “This museum cannot be built. If it is, it will be used by the Left as an incubator of never-ending grievances against the United States; a place where resentments are nursed.”
Gonzalez added, “The history of the many Americans with origins in Iberia and her colonies is part of the story of America and should not be hived off to a segregated institution nor put in the hands of woke curators.”
