‘Congress should not allow the development of a museum that is going to be used to push a radical agenda of grievances.’
A coalition of more than 20 Latino scholars and community leaders are asking Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to defund the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino, as outlined in the president’s discretionary budget request.
The Trump administration’s discretionary budget request for the fiscal year 2026 would eliminate separate funding for the National Museum of the American Latino, authorized but not yet built, as well as the Anacostia Community Museum, which celebrates Black history and culture. The request would return the Smithsonian to the integrated approach previously used to incorporate Latino programming throughout various museums. The request further reestablishes the Smithsonian Latino Center with funding of $5.8 million to oversee this integrated approach.
“President Trump is right that it’s time to take back our institutions of culture,” said Alfonso Aguilar, director of Hispanic engagement at the American Principles Project and co-signer of the letter. “That’s why he wants to defund this woke travesty. Congress should not allow the development of a museum that is going to be used to push a radical agenda of grievances and anti-American ideologies.”
The museum, authorized in the omnibus spending bill of 2020, does not yet have a building but maintains a permanent exhibition in the National Museum of American History titled Presente! A Latino History of the United States.
“Sadly, this Museum is being used to present to the public a culturally Marxist depiction of the experiences of Hispanics in America,” the letter states. “The Museum’s flagship exhibit, in fact, proposes that the history of Americans of Hispanic origin should be reduced to a ‘struggle for justice’ to achieve a mostly Leftist agenda ‘on labor, education access, fair housing, and more recently, immigration and justice reform, LGBT rights…’. Accordingly, Hispanics are pervasively portrayed as an oppressed people and their Spanish heritage and Christian roots ignored or disparaged.”
Aguilar, one of the leaders of the coalition, previously criticized the Latino exhibit at the National Museum of American History and called it a “hothouse to curate grievances against the United States” in an op-ed he coauthored in 2022.
“The exhibit, and the museum it previews, are profoundly disconnected from the actual Latino experience and cultures in the United States,” he wrote at the time. “It elevates only leftist ideologues, celebrates transexual activists, denigrates Christianity, denounces capitalism, condemns the West, portrays the United States as iniquitous and oppressive and badly distorts history.”
The op-ed, which called on Congress to defund the proposed museum, cited the exhibit’s failure to mention Hispanic contributions to the American founding, modern-day Hispanic heroes of American wars, and left-wing and Marxist dictators in Latin America. The exhibit ignores the diversity of ideas in the Hispanic community and reduces the identity and history of Hispanics in the U.S. to a Marxist struggle for justice, he said.
“Certainly there have been injustices, but the balance is very positive,” Aguilar told National Review in an interview regarding the Hispanic experience in the United States. He said the exhibits do not reflect the values of the Hispanic community.
The proposed integrated approach overseen by the Smithsonian Latino Center would be more responsible and easier for Congress to manage than a full museum. Aguilar argues.
“It’s not that it doesn’t want to highlight the contributions of Hispanics to our country, but that it wants to do it in a responsible way that celebrates America,” Aguilar said. “The best way to do it is as it was done in the past, through an office within the Smithsonian, but not having a stand-alone museum.”
The re-established Smithsonian Latino Center will develop exhibits and programs on Latino history, support Latino research, and promote professional development opportunities for Latino youth leaders and emerging scholars, according to the Smithsonian 2026 budget justification to Congress.
Defunding the museum forms part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on revisionist history and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the nation’s museums and arts institutions. In a March executive order, the president directed the vice president to spearhead an effort to remove race-centered ideology from the Smithsonian museums.
After a meeting with the Board of Regents, of which Vice President Vance is a member, Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch announced a review of the institution’s practices, policies, and personnel to ensure nonpartisanship in a statement last week. Days later, National Portrait Gallery Director Kim Sajet stepped down after the president singled her out in a Truth Social post for being an advocate of DEI and said he was firing her.
The Smithsonian did not immediately respond to a request for comment.