“This is a piece of activism,” said Henry R. Muñoz III, an architect who raised most of the money for the museum.
Few American cities are more exuberantly tied to life south of the border than San Antonio, where tourists flock to shop its Mexican markets, meander its River Walk and sip margaritas. But despite the persistent efforts of residents, no museum here showcased Hispanic arts. The new museum — the Museo Alameda affiliated with the Smithsonian, or MAS — “more,” in Spanish — changes that.
“It’s making history,” said Rosa Rosales, national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a rights group with 150,000 members, who came home to San Antonio from Washington for the opening. “Words cannot express the need. Our history has been ignored.”
To many here, it goes beyond the art. “This is a piece of activism,” said Henry R. Muñoz III, 47, an architectural executive and son of a legendary Mexican-American labor organizer, the shrewd and combative Henry Muñoz, who was known as the Fox.
The younger Muñoz began badgering the Smithsonian for help a dozen years ago and raised much of the $12 million construction cost from corporate donors.
More than half of San Antonio’s 1.2 million residents are Hispanic, compared to about 14 percent nationwide, and the growth shows few signs of slowing. Indeed, San Antonio, now the nation’s seventh-largest city (after New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia and Phoenix) grew nearly 10 percent from 2000 to 2005, with some of the influx coming from immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean.
“It’s la cuna — the crib, where the consciousness of the Mexican-American movement was born,” said Henry G. Cisneros, a former mayor and federal housing official.
San Antonio has gained a reputation for civility, as Hispanics, Anglos and others share power. In the last mayoral election, Hispanics gave the margin of victory to a former state judge, Phil Hardberger, over a city councilman, Julian Castro.
The museum is in a 39,000-square-foot former food market, sheathed in Mexican pink panels and punched tin with pinpoint light holes recalling a giant luminaria. It joins a growing cultural zone including a 1949 movie palace, the Alameda, being renovated for stage productions shared with the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.
The Smithsonian, which a study panel of Latino professionals condemned in 1994 for “a pattern of willful neglect” toward Hispanic culture, signed its first major affiliation agreement with the Museo Alameda, agreeing to loan treasures from its vast Washington holdings. It has since signed similar agreements with about 150 other institutions, including five other Hispanic museums, in 39 states.
For the opening exhibition, the Smithsonian lent a 21.04 carat Colombian emerald ring owned by the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, who was placed on the Mexican throne in 1864 (and executed three years later), and a basketball-size 1958 Vanguard satellite from NASA with rays recalling ancient Mayan images.
The celebration began Thursday with a dinner in Market Square that raised $2 million, adding to the leading corporate gifts of $5 million from the Ford Motor Company and Ford Foundation and $3 million from AT&T. Festivities were to culminate Friday night with a concert by Linda Ronstadt and other performers, including the huge mariachi band, which hopes to set a world record.
Perhaps no one was more excited than George Cortez, owner of a landmark San Antonio restaurant, Mi Tierra, just steps from the museum and from the Alameda theater where, he said, his grandmother first took him to see Mexican movies. “That’s what taught me to be proud,” he said.
The museum is more than a cultural attraction, he said: “In my heart, it’s keeping my father alive.”
Mr. Cortez, a painter who with other family members has turned his 600-seat, 24-hour restaurant into a shrine to famous San Antonio Latinos with murals and singers’ gowns, donated $1 million to endow a gallery in honor of his father, Pedro.
The elder Cortez came from Mexico in the 1930s, and when asked how, Mr. Cortez said that a great-aunt had gotten his father an American border officer’s uniform.
In 1941 in San Antonio, the elder Cortez, known as Pete, bought a three-table food shop for $150 and built it into Mi Tierra, eventually buying the entire block.
In 1993, following complaints that the Smithsonian was insular and discriminatory, Mr. Yzaguirre was named chairman of the Smithsonian Institution Task Force on Latino Issues. In a report issued the following year, the panel found that the Smithsonian “almost entirely excludes and ignores the Latino population.”
The conclusion, it said, was “glaringly obvious” in the lack of any component focusing on Latin American art, culture or history, and the minimal numbers of Latino employees.
The groundwork for the Alameda was laid in late 1995 when a visiting Smithsonian official met Mr. Cortez and Mr. Muñoz, chief executive and chairman of Kell Muñoz Architects, a leading minority-owned architecture firm in Texas. Other meetings with Smithsonian executives followed, including a rare dinner on the hallowed ground of the Alamo.
Meanwhile, the Smithsonian had ordered a follow-up report and a Smithsonian Latino Center was opened in Washington in 1997. Pilar O’Leary, the center’s director and a lawyer with roots in Colombia, said in an interview from Washington this week that the Alameda museum was a product of the Smithsonian’s new sensitivity and “a wonderful manifestation of the interest and importance of Latino culture.”
It could have far-reaching consequences, Ms. O’Leary said, possibly affecting how people view immigrants. “It may shape their mind-set on what this community is doing for the country,” she said.
