It was only a matter of time. A half-century of intense cultural preoccupation with hyphenated American identity has been giving birth to the hyphenated American museum. Such institutions pay tribute to the hyphen, examining the ways Hispanic-Americans or Arab-Americans or African-Americans or other groups have been changed by the encounter of two worlds, and how, in turn, these groups have made their own indelible contributions.
But creating a hyphenated museum is not always a smooth enterprise, as can be sensed at the Museo Alameda, which opened here to great fanfare on April 13. This US$12 million Latino-American museum, built at the edge of the city's Market Square, suffers from conceptual problems that show just how difficult a challenge that hyphen can be.
The museum, its literature explains, intends to tell "the story of the Latino experience in America through art, history and culture." It is, the museum says, "an American story." And though it has no collection of its own, with its 3,700m2 (1,858 of which are devoted to exhibitions), the Alameda calls itself "the largest Latino museum in the country." It expects 400,000 visitors a year, which would make it "the most visited museum in the region." (At its opening weekend festivities, some 20,000 visitors were admitted.)
This is also the right place for an exploration of Latin American cultures and their impact. More than half of San Antonio's 1.2 million residents are Hispanic. San Antonio's history is itself tightly hyphenated, ranging from its embattled past — the Alamo is a 20-minute walk from the museum — to the complex resentments, reconciliations and intermingling cultures of the present.
Last month, the 10-day Fiesta San Antonio opened, at which some 200,000 revelers took part in a parade. Organized a century ago as a commemoration of the Alamo and eventual Anglo triumph, the fiesta now has an accent leaning to the left side of the hyphen.
Similar dynamic hyphenation lies at the museum's origin: It grew out of a continuing effort by the Alameda National Center for Latino Arts and Culture to restore the Alameda Theater. Not far from the museum, this stunning 2,400-seat 1949 movie palace was once a center of Latino-American life.
Two grand murals, inaccessible inside the still-closed theater, are condensed and replicated at the museum: one depicts the Hispanic past, invoking the Aztecs, the conquistadors and the influence of Spain; the other celebrates the American past, highlighted by the Lone Star of Texas and the building of the American West. Hyphenation, indeed.
So what is the museum's approach? Henry R. Munoz III, the museum's founding chairman, has said that despite the existence of other Hispanic and Mexican-American museums in the US, "there is really no museum presenting the American experience as seen through the eyes of the Latino."
Surely, though, the Hispanic experience is not unrepresented in museums; in fact, the nearby San Antonio Museum of Art has one of the nation's most important collections of ancient and contemporary Latin American art. But Munoz means that the Alameda would more closely resemble the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian: It would be about identity, its shape and subject determined by the people concerned. Some criticism has been leveled at the Mexican dominance here, but Laura Esparza, the museum's director, says the focus is on the intermingling of varied Hispanic and American cultures.
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