USA Today Quotes Ileana Ros-Lehtinen on American Latino Museum

Akin Gump senior advisor Ileana Ros-Lehtinen was quoted by USA Today for its article “Smithsonian Latino museum takes big steps, but top question remains: Will it be on the National Mall?”

The article discusses recent and upcoming milestones in making the proposed National Museum of the American Latino a reality: the announcement in February of the museum’s first permanent director and the selection, by the end of 2022, of the museum’s location.

Ros-Lehtinen, a former Congresswoman from Florida, was a lead sponsor, in 2003, of legislation to create a commission to study such a museum’s feasibility. She now says the long wait has been worth it.

She said, “When I first got to Congress in 1989, I had my kids there and I'm thinking, ‘Wow, there's no museum that even has a little section for Latinos.’ And I was shocked by that.”

Ros-Lehtinen, who also served on the chairman’s advisory council of Friends of the National Museum of the American Latino, said that the lawmakers of both parties who had worked on legislation towards the museum’s creation originally didn’t thought that they could pull it off. But, she said, “[B]y God, we're so excited to see this almost come to fruition. It's been a wonderful bipartisan and bicameral act of love. I'm really excited about what's going to happen.”

On the topic of criticism she had heard from some who believed that the Latino experience should be reflected in a section of the Smithsonian Museum of American History rather than in its own museum, she said, “When we first started with our effort, people were saying, ‘You're going to be dividing the country, you're hyphenating Americans.’ And I said, ‘No, this is part of the great mosaic that is the United States of America. This is really to bring our country together.’ And I think it has.”