Miami native, son of Cubans to head Smithsonian's new Latino museum

18-year-old Jorge Zamanillo had never been in a major museum until a winter trip from Miami to Washington, D.C., which he spent inside the many Smithsonian museums.

"I fell in love with museums," the one-time trumpet player told CNN in an interview published Saturday.

"I changed my major immediately from music to anthropology."

He became an archaeologist, then a museum curator.

Zamanillo, now 53, was in charge of the History Miami Museum when he was hired as the founding director of the National Museum of the American Latino, which was authorized by Congress in December 2020.

"My parents were Cuban immigrants in the sixties. I grew up in Miami. Back then it wasn't even that Hispanic or that Latino," he said. 

"We were minorities for a long time. Now Miami is like 75% Spanish-speaking. But when I grew up there, the racism was obvious. And we always felt like in order to be American, you had to be more like everybody else that wasn't Cuban or Hispanic. And that's not a good thing."

The museum's first exhibit opened inside the National Museum of American History on Saturday. It does not have its own building or collection yet, so Zamanillo’s top priority is to raise $500 million to build them from scratch.

Zamanillo called the new gallery an “incubator space” for the future standalone museum.

“With the exhibitions we have in the Molina Gallery here over the next ten years, we're going to explore some of those things -- colonization, immigration, shaping this nation, setting those historical and cultural legacies,” he said.  

“What do they mean? People, their thoughts, their actions, their art, their music, those are all things that are definitely going to be included, because they are what shaped the American history narrative.”

Zamanillo has said that “Latino History is American history” and explained that a separate museum was important to tell the story from a different point of view.

“I want future generations to visit and see this story and how important it is in shaping the national narrative. I want Latino families and communities to come in here and say, 'I can't believe my story's actually being told on these walls,'” Zamanillo said.

“When I visited the museum when I was younger, I fell in love. I fell in love with museums. But I never saw my story being told here,” he added, referring the American History Museum his exhibit is housed in.

The new director dodged a question about when the museum would be built, saying that Congress would consider sites and make a decision by the end of the year.