A lovely article by Nina Shapira appearing in the Seattle Times
When Rogelio Riojas looks at 1950s farmworker cabins, transplanted from Eastern Washington to a new museum of Latinx history in Washington, things quickly get personal.
Two small shingled cabins — outfitted with furniture, dishes and other objects from the time — are not just history for Riojas, president and CEO of Sea Mar Community Health Centers. They’re a snapshot of his childhood.
Taking a break this week from preparations for Thursday’s opening, as workers around him drilled and painted, the 69-year-old Riojas recalled living in such cabins with his parents and 11 siblings. The big family would often occupy two of them. “You would find a place to sleep, sometimes a bed, sometimes on the floor,” he said.
Riojas has long had a dream to build a museum that would tell the story of families like his. He roped several other farmworkers’ children into the project, including architect José Bazan and historians Jerry Garcia and Erasmo Gamboa. And so was born the Sea Mar Museum of Chicano/a/Latino/a Culture, a mouthful of a name that avoids the simpler, gender-neutral term “Latinx” in favor of terms used in the periods portrayed.
The project in Seattle is the first of its kind, according to officials there and at other museums around the state. Free of charge to visitors, it fills two large rooms, 8,500 square feet in all, within a newly constructed building on the edge of South Park that also houses a Sea Mar adolescent health clinic, community center and Spanish-language radio station KKMO El Rey.
The telling of this history, through artifacts and photos, has a mission — to document the often-overlooked contributions of the Latinx population and counter the narrative describing immigrants and their offspring as a drain on society.
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“We came here to work,” Riojas said. “Over the years, we have been a big part of the success of the agricultural industry in this state.”
The museum aims to tell another story, too, he said, of farmworkers’ children who got an education and became professionals and social-justice activists. It highlights the role of the University of Washington, which in the 1960s started an affirmative-action program that sent recruiters to Eastern Washington towns like Othello, where one of them found a teenage Riojas.
Mexican Americans are the focus, at least for now. Garcia, who worked at Northern Arizona and Eastern Washington universities before joining Sea Mar as vice president of the museum and other programs, said that’s because Washington didn’t get a critical mass of other Latin American immigrants until civil wars sent them fleeing here in the ’80s.