Trump’s War on Latino Art

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION HAS MADE no secret that it wants to reshape art in America.

The president went on a social media tirade last month deriding the Smithsonian museums as places where “everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been—Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

The argument, as the White House makes it, is that Trump simply wants art to promote patriotic American values. But what the administration is really engaging in is censorship. And increasingly, the target is a familiar one: immigrants.

After the president’s rant, the White House website proudly proclaimed that “President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian.” Among the evidence cited was “a [sic] exhibit at the American History Museum” that “depicts migrants watching Independence Day fireworks ‘through an opening in the U.S.-Mexico border wall.”’

Oh, the horror.

The White House website also claims the caption beside that image “says America’s founders ‘feared non-White immigration.’” But that’s not what it says: The caption’s actual text—“many U.S. politicians, as early as Benjamin Franklin, have feared non-White immigration”—is historically accurate. But that’s a mild inconvenience in the administration’s broader efforts to suppress Hispanic art.

The White House also denounced the Smithsonian’s planned National Museum of the American Latino, which has been represented by a website and a temporary gallery in another museum, for an “anti-American exhibit” that “defines Latino history as centuries of victimhood and exploitation” and characterizes U.S. history as rooted in “colonization.” The White House took issue with accounts in the exhibit of undocumented immigrants “fighting to belong” as well as a famous quote I’ve heard in Mexican-American circles my entire career: “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.”

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery hasn’t escaped unscathed, either, thanks to its display of a painting “commemorating the act of illegally crossing the ‘inclusive and exclusionary’ southern border—even making it a finalist for one of its awards.”

The White House targeting of immigrant-related art has roiled people in the art community, who told me they...