The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino (NMAL) recently established their Scholarly Advisory Committee and named Latin American and Latinx Studies Professor Lisandro Pérez, Ph.D., as one of its 18 members. Together this council of leaders, encompassing a wide array of disciplines and backgrounds, will review possible exhibitions, initiatives, and programs to be featured at this highly anticipated museum. We connected with Pérez to learn more about the NMAL and his vision for its future.

How have you been involved with the NMAL?
My involvement with the Smithsonian goes back to the early 1990s when I participated in a national consortium of university-based Latino research centers. It was called the Inter-University Program for Latino Research. This group played a large role in establishing the Smithsonian’s Latino Center, and the Latino Center is the precursor for the NMAL.

As part of that early involvement with the Smithsonian, I also served on the Latino Advisory Committee of the National Museum of American History from 1994 to 2001, weighing in on Latino-oriented content for that museum. I have followed the efforts over the years to create the Museum, including a great deal of political heavy lifting. Let me emphasize that the NMAL has been created, as an entity, but it does not yet exist. It has yet to be built and furnished with its content. Money has to be raised to do that. I’m on the Scholarly Advisory Committee, which will be primarily involved with the content of the Museum.

NMAL will mean so much to our John Jay community and Latinx communities across this country, and beyond. Can you express why it’s so important that a museum like this exists?
A museum is first and foremost about education, especially the education of our young people. One of the purposes that drives my work, especially my latest book, Sugar, Cigars, and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York, is to give young Latina/os a sense of history. Young people, like our students at John Jay and Latino New Yorkers, should have a sense that historically they belong in this city. People who were born where they were born, or where their parents were born, walked these same sidewalks, not just now, but decades or even a century or two ago. Their ancestors did extraordinary things as artists, writers, financiers, workers, and may even have been involved in the creation of nations in the places where they came from.

To do this on a national scale, to be personally involved in an effort in which young Latinos, such as my granddaughter, can walk into this Museum and learn the story of their origins is a great and very meaningful responsibility.

What does it mean to you to be on the Advisory Committee? Are there any projects, exhibitions, initiatives, or topics that you’re particularly interested in seeing created at the museum?
Although it is an honor, I don’t really see it that way. It’s an assignment, a very important one that will involve a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. I anticipate that the Advisory Committee will meet several times a year, for entire days, parsing out what should be the best way to reflect, represent, and document the Latino presence in the U.S., encompassing all its dimensions and diversity. That’s the challenge. While we can depict common experiences and histories of Latinos in the U.S., we must also present the different histories of the diverse nationalities that converged in this country. It will be a daunting task because the diversity of the Latino experience is so broad.

The Advisory Committee purposely reflects that diversity, with scholars who are experts in those specific national histories. Few scholars, if any, are experts on the entire Latino experience—we tend to work on specific nationalities, be it Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, or a number of other nationalities. My contributions will be primarily in bringing out the history and culture of Cubans in the U.S. This is something that I’m passionate about because it is my history and my story. It’s something that explains to me why I am here instead of where I was born.

In the meetings we will try to reach consensus and recommendations on how to balance and coalesce different Latino histories into a coherent and powerful Museum. My experience with this type of work is that planning the content of a museum is one of the hardest things scholars can do. When you write a book or an article you frequently have some liberty with the length, but a brick-and-mortar museum is unrelenting in the limitations of space. There’s only X amount of square feet and that’s it, a zero-sum game. For something to be included, something else has to be left out.

Do you envision any projects, trips, classes, or initiatives that could involve John Jay students and the museum?
Absolutely, like I said, it’s all about education. I have taken groups of John Jay students to El Museo del Barrio on 5th Avenue, to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and to museums and other places in Miami and all over Cuba. I can easily see a program having John Jay students travel to D.C. to experience the Museum. I also anticipate there may be internships there for John Jay students.

If you could accomplish three things by being on the NMAL Scholarly Advisory Committee, what would you want those three things to be?
The first would be to effectively advocate for, and contribute to, the appropriate presentation of the history and culture of Latinos, and especially Cubans, in this museum. I want to help create a presentation that my granddaughter will be proud to see. The second would be to advocate for educational programs for young people of all ages. I especially want to focus on internships for college students. That way we can continue to grow a pipeline of scholars interested in Latino history and culture. And, my third one would be to have fun and learn from my colleagues on the Committee.