San Gabriel Valley Tribune – National Latino Museum

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San Gabriel Valley Tribune newspaper:

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Locals welcome call for national Latino museum

By James Figueroa, Staff Writer
Posted: 05/05/2011 11:47:57 PM PDT

A presidential commission called Thursday for the creation of a national museum devoted to American Latino history and culture to be located next to the Capitol as part of the Smithsonian Institution.

Coinciding with the celebration of Cinco de Mayo, the commission submitted a report to the White House and Congress backing such an endeavor.

The proposal for the Smithsonian American Latino Museum drew strong support from both local Latinos and top ranks of the Obama administration, among them interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, who grew up in the San Gabriel Valley.

Many contributions of Latinos, dating back to before the nation’s founding, have never been recognized, Salazar said.

“My own view is America’s strength in the future is dependent upon America being inclusive of all of its people,” he said.

Salazar, one of the highest ranking Hispanics in government, pledged to help raise millions of dollars to privately fund the construction. He said organizers may need to raise more than half the money if the federal budget is a roadblock.

The commission, which included Eva Longoria from TV’s “Desperate Housewives” and producer Emilio Estefan, spent a year hearing comments from more than 100,000 people on the need for such a museum.

They returned with a lengthy report that lays out the contributions of Latinos in the United States and the lack of Latino heritage in other museums.



“Latinos have played a very important role in the development of the nation’s work force and economy,” said Rep. Grace Napolitano, D-Santa Fe Springs, who has been involved in the process since the commission formed in 2008.

Elevating recognition of Latino culture through a national museum could help Americans gain an understanding that goes beyond wide-brimmed hats and Cinco de Mayo festivals, local Latinos said.

“We should recognize the contributions of Latinos in general,” said Ana Pescador, the executive director at the Latino Museum of Art, History and Culture in downtown Los Angeles.

Area students often visit the Latino Museum’s tiny building for classwork, one of the few places to find a large amount of information about Latino history, Pescador said.

Greater Los Angeles boasts a few other Latino museums, including La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, which recently opened near Los Angeles’ Olvera Street, and the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach.

Locally, El Monte boasts La Historia Historical Society museum, which chronicles Latino, Native American and Asian history in El Monte. And San Gabriel Valley-area museums have often held exhibits to recognize the area’s Latino roots.

The Monrovia Historical Museum held a Latino photo exhibit last September, in celebration of Mexico’s independence day, that brought to light several Latino families’ history in the area dating to the 1800s.

“It’s an undiscovered gem. A lot of the history has been passed down orally,” said Rena Delgado, a spokeswoman for the Monrovia Historical Society.

Delgado’s grandparents – whose roots can be traced to Whittier and Texas – were among the Latinos in the U.S. who suppressed their own history and culture in an effort to assimilate.

“They felt we would be ostracized if we were Spanish speakers,” Delgado said. “They really wanted to identify with the American dream.”

Most available information only skims the surface of Latino history in the U.S., said Randy Ertll, the executive director of Pasadena’s El Centro de Accion Social.

“Things are mainly focused on a Hispanic heritage month,” Ertll said. “We need to go beyond that. We need to have more of an in-depth museum to learn what thousands of Latinos have contributed to this country.

“There’s a lot of untold history, hidden history that needs to come out.”

A Latino museum would join the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and its planned National Museum of African American History and Culture, slated to open in four years. There has been some hesitance in Congress to add more ethnic museums for fear that they appeal to segregated audiences.

The commission tried to head off such arguments from the start.

“This is not a museum for Latinos. This is a museum that more fully describes what the American story is,” commission chairman Henry R. Munoz III said. “The historical myth of the United States begins with 1776 and the Mayflower, totally ignoring the fact that we were here well before then and have been contributors to the development of this country in every single way.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report

james.figueroa@sgvn.com

626-962-8811, ext. 2236


Former Salvadoran General Dies

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Rene Emilio Ponce dies at 64; Salvadoran general blamed for killing of six priests during civil war in 1989

He served as defense minister and army chief of staff in the last half of the Cold War-era conflict that ended in 1992, becoming one of the U.S.-backed government’s most important military strategists.

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Rene Emilio Ponce | 1947-2011Rene Emilio Ponce holds an alleged copy of an urban guerilla manual that was seized along with several types of firearms along the Honduras-Nicaragua border in a shipment of materials bound for Salvadoran rebels in 1989. (Associated Press / May 2, 2011)
By Alex Renderos and Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles TimesMay 4, 2011

Reporting from San Salvador and Mexico City — Rene Emilio Ponce, the once-powerful army general blamed for one of the most egregious atrocities in El Salvador’s civil war, the killing of six Roman Catholic priests, has died. He was 64.

Ponce died Monday at the Military Hospital in San Salvador, the capital, after being admitted last week in critical condition with heart trouble, El Salvador’s Defense Ministry said in a statement.

Ponce served as defense minister and army chief of staff in the last half of the Cold War-era conflict that ended in 1992, becoming one of the U.S.-backed government’s most important military strategists.

A United Nations truth commission after the war determined that Ponce had ordered the assassination of the country’s leading Jesuit priest, Ignacio Ellacuria, rector of the Jesuit-run University of Central America.

Ellacuria, suspected by the army of supporting leftist guerrillas, was slain on Nov. 16, 1989, along with five other priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter because the orders instructed that no witnesses be left behind, the commission said.

Though promoted to general a year after the massacre, Ponce was forced to step down as defense minister in 1993, when the commission’s report was released.

For most of the bitter, 12-year war, in which more than 75,000 people were killed in Central America’s smallest country, Ponce enjoyed the support of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations even though — declassified diplomatic cables later revealed — U.S. officials were aware of his abysmal human rights record. The U.S. spent billions of dollars in the 1980s to equip and train the Salvadoran army and to shore up the government.

At the time of his death, Ponce faced a lawsuit in a Spanish court. The suit, filed by relatives of the slain priests, accuses Ponce and 13 other former military officers of assassination and crimes against humanity.

Unrepentant, apparently, to the end, Ponce always maintained that he and his 32,000-member army fulfilled their mission to stem “communist aggression.”

Though he rarely discussed the matter in public, Ponce told a Salvadoran interviewer in 2009 that he did not give the order to kill the Jesuits and that suggestions that he did so were part of a leftist conspiracy to besmirch his name.

“It is unjust because I dedicated 30 years of my life to defend my country, and in the most difficult moments I led the armed forces strategically to defend a system threatened by an internationally backed communist aggression,” he said.

“I regret nothing that I did in benefit of my nation … defending the institutionalism of the state and its constitutional system,” he added. “The Jesuits were victims of the circumstances.”

The Jesuits were killed at the height of a major guerrilla offensive that, for only the second time in the entire war, swept through the capital. It became a turning point in the conflict because it convinced most observers that neither the U.S.-backed right-wing government nor the Cuban-backed leftist guerrillas could win militarily. Peace negotiations began the next year.

Thanks in part to a postwar amnesty law, no senior military officer was punished for the Jesuits’ murders.

Much has changed in El Salvador since those years. The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, as the guerrillas who Ponce fought were known, is today a political party; its candidate was elected president in 2009.

Still, the death of Ponce revived memories and tensions Monday in a country that in many ways remains deeply polarized.

The Defense Ministry expressed “profound” sorrow for the death of “the distinguished general.” Army officials noted that Ponce was serving as president of the Salvadoran Military Veterans Assn. when he died, leading marches a couple of years ago to defend the amnesty law that shielded officers from prosecution.

But human rights activists said the only thing they were sorry about was that Ponce was never formally charged or tried.

“I regret that the general died with total impunity,” said Maria Silvia Guillen, head of an independent human rights organization. “I think it is sad that the Salvadoran people have lost an opportunity for the truth about who was responsible to be established officially, with first and last name.

“I would have hoped for a historic moment when justice could have been served.”

Ponce was born in 1947 in the city of Sensuntepeque in El Salvador’s central Cabanas province, an area that saw heavy fighting during the war. He was part of the much-feared 1966 military graduating class known as La Tandona, whose members eventually dominated the top ranks of El Salvador’s armed forces.

Ponce is survived by his wife and three children.

wilkinson@latimes.com

Special correspondent Renderos reported from San Salvador; Wilkinson from Mexico City.

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times


FOX 11 – GOOD DAY L.A.

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