El Museo del Barrio

Since its inception "El Museo", museum in Spanish, is the pre-eminant art exhibition venue of Puerto Rican/Latin American art, certainly in NYC, if not also the country. Its theater is also state-of-the-art. Located in the geographic neighborhood of East Harlem, home to over 38 different working-class ethnic groups at one time or another, the Puerto Rican community settled there in 1900, just two years after tje Cuban War for Independence, which is taught in the U.S. as the "Spanish-American War". Post WWII, "White Flight" to the suburbs brought about it becoming a ghetto/slum & with it all the trappings of impoverishment reaching a zenith in 1960. By then, "El Barrio", the Neighborhood, had been coined & it became the cradle (la cuna) of the Puerto Rican community. The decade of the 1960s brought about heroic establishment of many institutions with a focus of Puerto Ricans & other non-European communities in NYC who were also neglected & doing without adequate social services, education, & medical attention. El Museo del Barrio is among them. In 2021, there is a renewed interest from Whites to live closer to their jobs. This has brought about unwanted changes, encroachment, and displacement. Housing once abandoned and unkept, but inhabited, were torned down. Their replacements are above the means of most living in the decrepit conditions for more than 4 decades. The cultural identity of El Museo continues to be at risk as funders, developers, government, & corporate industry all work in tandem to appease incoming middle-class professionals who are following the trend of ridding institutions of their ties to the ethnic groups that created them and the need to have them. There is no diversity in homogeneity nor the "melting pot". Diversity comes as an "ensalada", a salad (bowl), to be precise.