The National Museum of the American Latino, Museal Rhetoric, and the Policeability of Latinx Communities

Public controversies involving the Smithsonian index more than simple disagreement over its contents or subject matter. As a public institution founded in and for the U.S., the Smithsonian embodies a tangled array of attitudes, ambitions, and anxieties associated with “American” identity that complicate reductive views of disputes about it. Taking up recent controversies involving the National Museum of the American Latino (NMAL), this essay illuminates how senatorial clashes over the perceived merits or faults of installing “Latino” representation at the Smithsonian reveal a shared yet enduring commitment to cultivating and intensifying the policeability of Latinx communities. Fulfilling along an aesthetic axis what Gilberto Rosas terms a “managed violence,” this museal rhetoric reveals not only disagreement concerning a museum dedicated to “Latino” communities at the Smithsonian, but, too, competing stances over how visible to make the interest in the policeability of Latinx communities in the service of the U.S. settler colonial state. I conclude that the in/visibility of policeability provides and/or forecloses opportunities for escaping unmanaged violence(s).