Latinizing Culture: Art, Museums, and the Politics of U.S. Multicultural Encompassment

Abstract

It is now common in El Barrio, the East Harlem community that has long served as an important Puerto Rican enclave in New City, to hear people complaining about the Latinization of the area. During recent visit, I was particularly curious about the pessimistic outlook of Puerto Rican artist who referred to the area as a fading epitaph of the past, suggesting that its days as key reference for Puerto Ricans in the city were numbered. Indeed, El Barrio has undergone major transformations since Puerto Ricans began to stake claim on the area in the 1930s and 1940s. More and more its residents are also Dominicans, Mexicans, and Central Americans, following citywide patterns feeding nascent pan-Latino identity in the new Nueva York (Flores 1996). These demographic changes are evident everywhere in the area, from the type of commerce, with taquerias (taco shops) emerging alongside bodegas, to the area's cultural institutions, which have shifted their original Puerto Rican focus to encompass the changing population. Thus the still-unopened Julia de Burgos cultural center, originally conceived almost ten years ago by group of Puerto Rican activists in El Barrio, is now known as the Julia de Burgos Latino Cultural Center; and El Museo del Barrio (i.e., the neighborhood museum), born out of the struggles of Puerto Rican activists for greater representation in the late 1960s, now claims to also represent all Latino and Latin American cultures in the United States. These developments, however, have not been free of controversy. The transformation of El Museo del Barrio's mission is now very much at the center of debate among Puerto Rican artists and activists who, while important in founding the earliest cultural initiatives in El Barrio, are now feeling marginalized by the Latinization of what they had come to know as Puerto Rican institution. For one, these changes are occurring in neighborhood that, although undergoing diversification, once served as the birthplace of Puerto Rican activism