Inside the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino

It is Hispanic Heritage Month and today we're taking you inside the new home of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino. Let's get Stephanie Ramirez and she's there with more details on what people can expect. Hi Steph. Hey we also got to sit down with the founding director. We had a lot of questions but here is the new home. It is a very big deal for the museum here. They've been searching for a permanent home for a few years now. It was actually back in 2020 when President Trump signed the act that established the first national museum dedicated to telling the stories of Latinos in the United States. Last month is when the Smithsonian announced its arts and industries building will now become the National Museum of the American Latino. It's upwards of 258,000 square feet with four corner pavilions measuring around 40 feet square and three stories tall. Some hurdles along the way included potential threats to funding the building of a dedicated museum. There's also still the requirement that Congress approve any space selected to construct a new museum building on federal land. I'm told out of 27 sites on and off federal property they decided on a Smithsonian building already in existence. This allows them to more easily move forward. The historic arts and industries building opened in 1881 as the first U.S. National Museum. The American Latino Museum's founding director says moving here allows them to carry on the Smithsonian's traditions right in the heart of national mall. Now this big step also comes as a pivotal time in this country amid increased immigration enforcement impacting many Latino families and it comes amid heightened scrutiny of the Smithsonian museums by the Trump administration. So we asked the director can there be a true accounting of the history of Latinos in the U.S. if you're not able to discuss colonialism, immigration, deportation and discrimination. It's about telling all the stories and once you do that you'll have a balanced account of what our story is in the United States. So we'll cover activism, we'll cover immigration. Those are key things and part of my story, part of your story that must be included in there. But the way we approach it, the way we tell these stories is the important part of it. We're not a museum ideology, we're a museum that's based on academia and scholarship and that's really important to us. Now director Samanio says they're still a decade or so away from opening their permanent museum building. It's going to cost around a billion dollars and be a 50-50 split between federal and private funding. The director also told me they've now raised more than 72 million dollars to move forward on some key items like selecting an architect to retrofit the building. In the meantime they've been traveling the country collecting different Latino stories. They do have programming for Hispanic History Month and an exhibit you can check out today. We'll have more coming up in the next hour.