Erin Goodsell: Mike Lee should listen more, tweet less
Utah senator refuses to listen to people with different experiences.
(Bill Clark | Pool via AP)
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, takes a photo of a display before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Facebook and Twitter s actions around the closely contested election on Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2020, in Washington.
By Erin Goodsell | Special to The Tribune
| Dec. 18, 2020, 1:00 a.m.
An open letter to Sen. Mike Lee,
I am writing to express my disappointment that you single-handedly blocked the creation of a National Museum of the American Latino and a women’s history museum. I hope the proponents of those museums which were supported by years of studies and commissions and a bipartisan bill will be able to override your opposition.
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Ayala: I don t understand - A long-sought national Latino museum seemed about to become reality. Then a lone senator killed it.
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VIA Metropolitan Transit s board meeting at the West Side Multimodal Transit Center is the last for Chairman Henry Munoz III as former city manager Alex Briseno takes over on February 25, 2014.TOM REEL
The U.S. Senate’s failure to approve a bill creating the National Museum of the American Latino has Henry Muñoz reeling.
The effort to add a Latino museum to the Smithsonian’s other showpieces on the National Mall has been three decades in the making, and this year the goal seemed tantalizingly within reach.
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Last week, a Newsweek reporter filed a dispatch on a Senate bill that would lead to the creation of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino in Washington, D.C.
At the time, the vote seemed almost pro forma. A similar bill had sailed through the House in July, and many expected the Senate bill to pass by unanimous consent (Senate parlance for a voice vote). The bill would then move to the White House. And that, reported Newsweek, “would leave President Donald Trump to get it across the finish line before his term ends.” No small irony given Trump’s often disparaging remarks toward Mexicans, and the fact that his most significant nod to Latino culture in recent years was having himself photographed with a taco bowl.
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Lee argued that creating such a museum would be divisive, and that unlike Black and Native Americans, who have dedicated Smithsonian museums, Latinxs have not been “uniquely, deliberately and systemically excluded” and therefore did not deserve their own space.
It was that last part that really stuck with me. It lingered because it went against much of what I’ve come to learn about the history of Latinxs in the United States.
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Mike Lee must not be familiar with his own state’s history. Otherwise he would know that what he calls Utah used to be part of Mexico as were California, Nevada and Arizona and parts of Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming and that it joined the Union only after President James K. Polk, not content with annexing Texas in 1845, used a border dispute as pretext to declare war against Mexico and go on a blatant land grab that fulfilled