House Votes to Create a National Museum of the American Latino

The report, issued by a 15-member task force that was appointed by the Smithsonian’s secretary himself, cited how few Hispanics had roles in the Smithsonian’s top management or were featured in the “notable Americans” section of the National Portrait Gallery.

Three years later, the Smithsonian Latino Center was created to ensure that the contributions of the demographic were represented throughout the museum system.

But despite calls for a museum dedicated entirely to Latino Americans, it wasn’t until 2008 that Congress passed legislation authorizing a commission to plot out the specifics.

At the time, the National Museum of the American Indian had recently opened and the National Museum of African American History and Culture was in the works, contributing to an unwillingness in Washington to offer the same level of federal funding to another new museum.

The report by the commission, released in 2011, proposed a 310,000-square-foot building, roughly the same size as the African-American museum, that would be situated prominently on the National Mall. It assured legislators that the museum would need no federal appropriations in the first six years after it was established, relying instead on private funding. The report estimated that the project would cost $600 million and set a private fund-raising goal of $300 million. The commission identified possible locations on the National Mall where the museum could be constructed, but nothing has been finalized.