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#43: Latina Women’s Story Will Be Incorporated Into National Museum of the American People

The National Museum of the American People, in telling the story about the making of the American people, will incorporate the story of Hispanic and Latino Americans migrating and immigrating to the U.S. as well as those already on this land when taken over by the U.S.

The 2020 Census found that approximately 19 percent of the U.S. population is comprised of Hispanic or Latino Americans. The Latino population has grown considerably since 1960 when that population was fewer than 6 million, or merely 3.24 percent of the population. Latinos have and will continue to exert an enormous impact on social, cultural, political and economic life in the U.S.

Apart from First Peoples, every American, even if they were born in the U.S., can trace their lineage back to a different part of the world, some more recently than others. The 2020 Census reports that 13.7 percent of the U.S. population was born in another country. My mother and sister are part of that 13.7 percent; I am the first in my family to be born in the U.S. I am proud to be a first-generation Mexican American.

My mom and sister are part of the 25 percent of foreign-born immigrants from Mexico, the largest birthplace of origin for immigrants in the U.S., according to the Pew Research Center. Growing up in an immigrant household, I failed to see my culture and family’s migration story represented in education, pop culture and other areas of American life. To assimilate into the U.S., Latinos should not have to sacrifice any aspect of our culture, and what makes us great as Americans. My mom, sister, and I are strong women who are proud of our heritage, and there are many other Latinas who have paved the way for us to live empowered lives in the U.S.

Image: Josue Ladoo Pelegrin, Unsplash

Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 2009 gave me the first semblance of hope that I could contribute to my country, honor my ancestors, and find my place in the world. The child of Puerto Rican immigrants, Sotomayor was the first Latina to be confirmed to serve on the Supreme Court. Despite warnings of scrutiny at her confirmation, Sotomayor donned fire-engine red nails and semi-hoop earrings: a symbol of Latina adulthood and pride. Sotomayor’s refusal to sacrifice any aspect of her Latina identity on the bench is inspiring, and reminds Latinas like myself to show up unapologetically everyday. On my first day working at the Department of the Interior last year, I donned fire-engine-red nails – a reminder of those who came before me and to always “echarle ganas” – to always give my best effort in all my endeavors no matter what.

Accurately representing Latino history and culture in popular American spaces like museums matters. Therefore, a museum that will tell the story of all Americans, like the National Museum of the American People, is necessary. The National Museum of the American People will objectively tell the story of Latino immigrants, including Latinas, in all four chapters of the museum’s main exhibit. This museum will foster a sense of belonging to the U.S. by sharing the history of the mosaic of people that have come here and contribute to our national identity, like myself and my family.
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Sofia Casamassa is graduating from American University this Spring.

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#42: The 2020 Census and What It Means for the Future of the United States

The National Museum of the American People, in telling the story about the making of the American People, will tell the story of how people came to be Americans through immigration and migration.

The 2020 Census found that 13.7% of the United States population was born in another country, a statistic that mirrors the numbers of the 1920 Census. In 1920, the foreign-born population was 13.1%. Over the decades, the percentage of the foreign-born population has fluctuated, and with it, the culture and social landscape of America have changed as well.

The US Census in 2020 gave a snapshot of the current American People

According to World Population Review, in 2020 the five countries that account for the most immigrants in the U.S. are Mexico, India, China, the Philippines, and El Salvador. This is a sharp contrast to what immigration looked like one hundred years ago. Between 1880 and 1920, most immigrants came from Europe.

While some have said that immigration damages our country by introducing incompatible ideas and conflicting cultures, the exact opposite is true. Yes, immigrants bring their customs, traditions, and different cultures with them when they come to a new nation, but that is not by any means a bad thing. The Europeans who came during that 1880 to 1920 surge also brought their diverse traditions and cultures with them.

Immigration has frequently been a contentious issue throughout US history. Anti-immigrant sentiments led to policies like the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigrants from entering the country in 1882.

While resistance to immigration is nothing new, it is something that we, as a nation, should understand. Immigration is not something that the American People should fear; on the contrary, it is what makes this country so uniquely great. The growing number of foreign-born Americans is a sign of a bright future for our country.

As then-Senator Barack Obama said in his address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”

The National Museum of the American People will embrace all of the American People.

Regardless of where we all come from, what cultures and customs we brought with us, and what traditions have been passed through our family’s from generation to generation. We are all Americans now.

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#31: In the 21st Century Immigration Has Become a Major Issue in the US and the World

As the 21st Century dawned, the U.S. was attacked by foreign terrorists in New York and Washington using hijacked aircraft as weapons. Wars in the Middle East in response to those attacks led to a refugee crisis that has engulfed much of Europe. In the U.S., a crisis has been building on our southern border for an even longer period. There has been a steady focus on immigration over the last two decades.

The National Museum of the American People will be monitoring and marking events such as these, and events we don’t now anticipate, in future years as each move has a role in defining the American People.

In the wake of the 9/11 attack the U.S. passed the Patriot Act that broadened terrorism-related criteria for deportation and broadened inadmissibility rules for noncitizens. In addition it established a foreign student monitoring program.

A year later the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act streamlined electronic border control systems for those entering and leaving the country. In 2002 the Department of Homeland Security was created and established three new agencies to monitor and protect our borders: the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 added more reasons to not admit and to deport noncitizens and increased penalties for alien smuggling. The Border Protection, Anti-terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 criminalized violations of federal immigration law.

In 2006 the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill but the House refused to consider it. The issue of immigration reform has been simmering since then. But Congress did enact the Secure Fence Act that called for more than 700 miles of reinforced fence to be built along the Mexican border in places where there had been a high level of drug trafficking and illegal immigration. In 2006, 6,000 National Guard troops were sent to the Mexican border to assist Border Patrol agents.

After Congress failed to pass an immigration reform bill in 2012, President Obama announced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy to allow those entering the U.S. before the age of 16 to apply for a work permit and two-year protection against deportation. In 2014 President Obama took executive action to delay the deportation of 5 million undocumented immigrants after meeting various conditions and he broadened the DACA program.

In 2017, as one of his first acts in office, President Trump moved to impose new restrictions on immigration from several Muslim-majority countries in conflict regions. Starting in 2018, and continuing today, the President’s effort to build a significant border wall along the Mexican border has emerged as a major national issue.

When the National Museum of the American People opens it will mark all of our nation’s significant actions to determine who the American People are … and who they will be.

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on a host of NMAP topics, American ethnic group histories, related museums, scholarship centered on the museum’s focus, relevant census and other demographic data, and pertinent political issues. The museum is a work in progress and we welcome thoughtful suggestions.

Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People

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#30: Irish Americans Are the 3rd Largest Ethnic Group in the US

Irish Americans comprise a little more than 10 percent of the U.S. population and are the third largest ethnic group in the nation, and on St. Patrick’s Day it sometimes seems that half the nation makes a point of wearing something green to become Irish for the day.

At the National Museum of the American People the history of Irish Americans immigrating here and what they accomplished is one of the major stories that will be told.

More than 95 percent of the earliest immigrants from Ireland were Scots-Irish, essentially Scottish peoples who migrated to Northern Ireland before coming to America between 1717 and 1775. Their story will also be told in the Museum.

The first Irish Catholics to come in the 18th Century settled in Maryland and Pennsylvania. Later the Irish Famine of the 1840’s led to a much larger surge of Irish Catholics immigrating to the United States. They primarily settled in Northeast and Midwest port cities including Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Buffalo, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland and St. Louis.

In the early part of the 19th Century Irish immigrants were among the largest participants on large scale infrastructure projects including canals and railroads. They moved west as those projects extended the U.S. reach in that direction.

While there were about 50,000 Irish immigrants in the 1820s and 207,000 in the 1830s, about 1.7 million came during the 1840s and 1850s. Another 1.9 million arrived over the rest of the 19th Century. Fewer than 1 million came during the 20th Century.

During the Civil War some 38 Union regiments had the word “Irish” in their title.

By 1910 there were more people of Irish ancestry in New York City than in Dublin. In the 2010 Census there were 35.5 million Irish in America ranking behind only German Americans and African Americans as the largest ethnic groups in the nation.

The National Museum of the American People will embrace the immigration and migration stories of all Americans, including the Irish and Scots-Irish who have come to our shores.

We wish a Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all of those who celebrate it.

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on a host of NMAP topics, American ethnic group histories, related museums, scholarship centered on the museum’s focus, relevant census and other demographic data, and pertinent political issues. The museum is a work in progress and we welcome thoughtful suggestions.

Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People

 

 

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#29: After 1924 US Doors Closed, Then Opened; Today Immigration Laws Are on America’s Front Burner

In our last few posts we’ve talked about immigration laws before the modern era. This blog discusses immigration laws over most of the 20th Century that have shaped the country we are now. During this period, coinciding with the 4th chapter of the National Museum of the American People’s story, the doors to the United States were all but closed to overseas immigrants in 1924, though the Indian Citizenship Act of that year granted U.S. citizenship to American Indians.

In 1929 as the Great Depression set in, Congress tightened overseas immigration even more by cutting the number of immigrants allowed annually to 150,000. It also linked a 2% nationality quota to the 1920 Census, limiting immigrants from eastern and southern Europe even more than at the end of the Museum’s  3rd Chapter.

Even without these harsher immigration laws, the Great Depression in the 1930s was slowing immigration to a trickle. During the deepest years of the Depression there were more people leaving the United States than entering it.

The political leanings of immigrants became an issue in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1940 the Alien Registration Act required all immigrants above age 13 to register with the government and be be fingerprinted, while it banned “subversives” from immigrating at all. The 1950 Internal Security Act allowed the U.S. to deport immigrants who were ever members of the Communist Party.

During World War II, the U.S. faced a shortage of farm workers and the so called Bracero Program was instituted in 1942 allowing Mexican manual laborers into the U.S. to work on farms. Over the following 22 years, about 5 million Mexican workers participated in the program.

Also during World War II the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed though the annual quota was only 105 and in 1946 the repeal was extended to cover Filipinos and Indians.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the War Brides Act was enacted in 1945 to allow alien spouses, natural children and adopted children of members of the Armed Forces to become citzens. More than 100,000 entered the U.S. via this route.

The war also led to a massive worldwide increase of refugees and the U.S. passed the Displaced Persons Act in 1948 allowing up to 200,000 refugees into the country. In 1952 the Immigration and Nationality Act consolidated earlier laws and eliminated race as a basis for exclusion. However the quota system remained in place and immigration remained at low levels.

The Immigration Act of 1965 changed all that. While annual immigration from overseas was limited to 170,000 with a maximum of 20,000 from any one country, and immigration from the Western Hemisphere was limited to 120,000, a preference system was established for family members of U.S. citizens and immigrants with special skills. Those two features had no numerical restrictions and led to a major increase in immigrants over subsequent decades.

Special laws were enacted to facilitate refugees from Cuba (1966) and then Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (1975-76). In 1980 the Refugee Act was adopted to facilitate a variety of refugee issues around the world. Those fleeing their country on account of race, religion, nationality or politics were made a different category of immigrants and increased the number of people who could be admitted to the United States under this category.

A 1986 Immigration Reform Act gave those who entered the U.S. before 1982 a path to citizenship provided that they met a list of criteria. It also legalized certain seasonal agricultural undocumented immigrants, and made it illegal to knowingly hire or recruit undocumented immigrants.

Four years later, the Immigration Act of 1990 set an annual ceiling of 700,000 immigrants for three years and 675,000 after that. As the number of undocumented immigrants swelled during the 1990s, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 allowed deportation of immigrants for a wider range of crimes and applied the law retroactively. The number of Border Patrol agents was also increased.

Over the last two decades immigration has remained a major national political issue. The National Museum of the American People will be continuously updated to bring the story of the making of the American People up to date. In a future blog we will discuss immigration issues that have emerged in the 21st Century.

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on a host of NMAP topics, American ethnic group histories, related museums, scholarship centered on the museum’s focus, relevant census and other demographic data, and pertinent political issues. The museum is a work in progress and we welcome thoughtful suggestions.

Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People

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#28: US Laws and Constitutional Amendments Between 1820 and 1924 Govern Who Is an American

The National Museum of the American People’s third chapter covering the period from 1820 to 1924 saw a slow but steady stream of immigrants to the U.S. up to the Civil War, predominantly from Western Europe, especially from Germany and Ireland.

In the wake of the Civil War, the Constitution was amended to abolish slavery, make all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. citizens, and prevents the U.S. from denying the vote due to race, color or previous condition of servitude.

As the Industrial Revolution gathered steam during the second half of the 19th Century and early 20th Century, immigration soared. Newcomers were now arriving in large numbers from southern, central and eastern Europe as well as eastern Asia.

The first immigration law enacted during this period was the Naturalization Act of 1870 that allowed aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent to become U.S. citizens.

In 1875, the Page Act became the first immigration law to exclude a group from entering the country. In this case it was Chinese contract laborers and it was the first of many laws discriminating against Asians. Seven years later the Chinese Exclusion Act banned skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in the mining industry from entering the country for 10 years and denied Chinese immigrants a path to citizenship.

Then in 1888 the Exclusion Act was amended to ban Chinese workers from re-entering the U.S. after they left. For years after that Chinese laborers were required to carry a resident permit at all times or face deportation or a sentence to hard labor. The citizen ban was also extended for another 10 years.

In 1907 the so called “Gentleman’s Agreement” between the U.S. and Japan ended the immigration of Japanese workers. The Immigration Act of 1917 instituted still more restrictions of people from Asia and the Pacific Islands.

While these anti-Asian laws were being promulgated over a period of more than 40 years, the U.S. passed laws during that same period excluding people engaged in a host of activities including criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, convicts, polygamists, beggars, and those who committed crimes of “moral turpitude.”

Also excluded were persons with a range of perceived characteristics or conditions. Various U.S. laws specifically mentioned: lunatics, idiots, persons likely to become public charges, the mentally ill, those with contagious diseases, epileptics, imbeciles, feeble-minded people, those with physical or mental disabilities, tuberculosis victims, children without parents, homosexuals, insane persons and alcoholics.

In 1907 a law was passed that said that women must adopt the citizenship of their husbands thus losing their U.S. citizenship unless their husbands became citizens. That law was repealed in 1922.

The Immigration Act of 1891 created the nation’s first agency dedicated to immigrants, the Bureau of Immigration in the Treasury Department. It also called for the deportation of people who entered the country illegally.

Ellis Island opened in 1892 and became the nation’s primary immigration station until it closed in 1954. It is estimated that 40% of Americans have a relative who passed through Ellis Island.

The Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization was created in 1906 and placed in the Commerce Department and in 1924 the U.S. Border Patrol was created.

This chapter of the story told by the National Museum of the American People ends with major laws passed in 1921 and 1924 closing the doors to immigration. While more than a million immigrants arrived in the U.S. during the peak years of this chapter, the Emergency Quota Law of 1921 limited the number of immigrants to the U.S. to 350,000 a year and implemented a nationality quota of 3% of the population of particular nationalities based on the 1910 census. This greatly reduced immigration from eastern and southern Europe.

The National Origins Act of 1924 reduced the number of immigrants allowed to enter the U.S. each year to 165,000 and set the nationality quota at 2% based on the 1890 census. While this quota system did not apply to immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, new immigrants practically disappeared until World War II. We will pick up those laws in the next blog.

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on a host of NMAP topics, American ethnic group histories, related museums, scholarship centered on the museum’s focus, relevant census and other demographic data, and pertinent political issues. The museum is a work in progress and we welcome thoughtful suggestions.

Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People

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#27: Immigration Laws Between 1607 and 1820

As visitors walk through the story of the making of the American People, they will encounter unique markers along their chronological path that will touch upon laws made in national capitals — London, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, DC — or in individual colonial and then state capitals that affected who could be a citizen and how they would be eligible to become one.

While there are no such markers in the Museum’s first chapter up to 1607, laws passed in the British Parliament affected their colonial outposts starting in the 1600s. English persons and their children in the colonies were considered subjects of the king. It generally took an individual act of Parliament for a non-English person to be a subject and even that exception was strictly limited to Protestants.

In the meantime colonialists were pushing for more open paths to bring people to the colonies and to promote settlement in them. The Plantation Act of 1740 made it easier for aliens to apply for naturalization within their colonies, but that was still limited to Protestants with some exceptions for Quakers and Jews. New York, Georgia and Rhode Island made it a matter of policy to grant rights to Jewish applicants and those are the colonies where Jews settled in the largest numbers.

Several colonies issued their own naturalization policies until Parliament cracked down on that practice in 1773. Pennsylvania led the way in opening its doors to aliens.

In our Declaration of Independence in 1776 one of the specific complaints listed against King George was that “He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”

After the Revolutionary War, the Articles of Confederation in 1781 allowed each colony to pass its own naturalization laws with the understanding that all of the colonies would accept persons so naturalized. Those laws generally required an affirmation of allegiance to an authority and a period of physical residence prior to obtaining the right of citizenship.

The Confederation was superseded by the Constitution in 1789 which provided a stronger central government for the United States. Article 1, section 8, gave Congress the authority “To establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization” to cover the new nation.

The first naturalization law was passed in 1790. It limited naturalization to immigrants who were residents for two years and free white persons of good character thus excluding Native Americans, indentured servants, slaves, free blacks and later Asians. It also provided for citizenship for the children of U.S. citizens born abroad.

Five years later the law was changed to extend the residency period to five years for white persons of good moral character and to pledge allegiance to the Constitution of the United States. In 1798 the residency requirement was extended to 14 years, but that was repealed four years later.

The next major changes to the definition of new citizenship came in the wake of the Civil War. We will explore that period in the next blog which covers immigration laws during the National Museum of the American People’s third chapter from 1820 to 1924.

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on a host of NMAP topics, American ethnic group histories, related museums, scholarship centered on the museum’s focus, relevant census and other demographic data, and pertinent political issues. The museum is a work in progress and we welcome thoughtful suggestions.

Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People

 

 

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#26: 19 US Organizations Focused on Refugees, Immigrants and Immigration Reform Support NMAP

President George Washington and most of the founders of the United States envisioned the new nation as a haven for those escaping religious persecution and other forms of oppression in their homelands. In that vision they laid the seeds for America becoming the leading nation of the world economically, militarily, scientifically and culturally.

Today as the US and the world struggles with immigration and immigration issues, it is important to remember the history and impact of our nation opening – and closing — its doors to refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants from the nation’s founding through today. Future blogs will deal with immigration laws that affected the story about the making of the American people.

In recalling that history, the National Museum of the American People is proud to have the support of a broad range of organizations that focus on refugees, immigrants and immigration reform. They include:

In telling the story about the making of the American People the National Museum of the American People will be a home for all of these organizations and a beacon for the nation.

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on a host of NMAP topics, American ethnic group histories, related museums, scholarship centered on the museum’s focus, relevant census and other demographic data, and pertinent political issues. The museum is a work in progress and we welcome thoughtful suggestions.

Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People

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#24: More Than 140 Scholars Support NMAP

The National Museum of the American People and the story it will tell about all of the peoples coming to this land will be scholarly-driven and ensure that the highest standards of scholarship are met.

Historians, anthropologists, sociologists, archeologists, ethnologists, human geographers, demographers, geneticists, linguists and others will help develop the story.

We anticipate that a feasibility study that the Museum backers are seeking will provide an outline of the story that the Museum will tell. Then the Museum itself will develop a detailed book about the making of the American People that will guide the development of the Museum’s permanent exhibition.

The story would follow a consensus of the scholars’ views and significant evidence-based historic and scientific alternative views could also be included. As scientific and historic consensus changes, appropriate changes could be made in the Museum. With force and clarity, the Museum will examine the story of the making of the American People.

About 30 of the scholars backing the Museum focus on general issues of immigration, migration and refugee history while others focus on particular groups of people. These scholars focus on European Americans (23), African Americans (17), Asian Pacific Americans (18), Hispanics/Latinos (22), Native Americans (8) and about two dozen others who concentrate on other aspects or peoples in the Museum’s story.

A complete list of scholars supporting the National Museum of the American People is here.

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on a host of NMAP topics, American ethnic group histories, related museums, scholarship centered on the museum’s focus, relevant census and other demographic data, and pertinent political issues. The museum is a work in progress and we welcome thoughtful suggestions.

Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People

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#21: The NMAP Will Project the History of Our Nation’s Diversity from First Humans Through Today

“Our diversity,” according to Michelle Obama, “has been – and will always be – our greatest source of strength and pride here in the United States.”

What is now the United States has been diverse for more than 10 millennia. From the many tribal groups prior to first significant European contact to the migrations of different peoples here from all parts of Europe, Asia, Africa (predominantly as slaves at the beginning) our land and nation has always been a cauldron of diversity.

When the United States was instituted in 1789, its diversity was recognized by our founders. They opened the nation’s doors to the people of the world fleeing oppression. The map above demonstrates the modern face of that diversity. It shows the leading ethnic group of every county in the United States based on the 2000 Census.

The light blue color spreading from Pennsylvania across the Midwest to the Pacific shows German American dominance. It is the largest ethnic group in the nation. The pink color stretching across the nation’s southern border with segments running up though California and other Western states is, not surprisingly, Mexican American. In the Southeast and scattered large metropolitan counties, the dark purple color represents African Americans.

The light yellow color that runs through Appalachia and into the South are people who define themselves as “American.” This group is the only major group that doesn’t recognize an ancestry related to another area of the World or another epoch. Their ancestors are believed to have come primarily from England, Scotland, Ireland and Germany, generally during the 1600s and 1700s and totally intermingled so that when they are asked on a Census form 200 years later about their ancestry this is their correct answer. For them, America was a melting pot. This group, comprising about 10 percent of Americans, is the only group that doesn’t have a descriptive before or after their American identity

Looking at the map, you see that the other 94 percent of Americans, however, do recognize their ancestry. Up in New England you see English heritage as you might expect. But if you take your finger from there across the Mormon Trail you’ll see that Mormon Country in and around Utah is predominantly English heritage as well.

The golden color scattered about in Western states are counties where native Americans predominate on reservations. There are people with French heritage mostly in upper Maine and around New Orleans. And Irish and Italian Americans dominate in Boston and New York City and down though Long Island and New Jersey. Scandinavian and Dutch enclaves are scattered along the northern tier of the nation.

Cubans Americans are the leading group in South Florida and Japanese Americans hold sway in Hawaii. While Puerto Rico has its own color, that same color is growing in Central Florida.

This map, by just showing the leading ethnic group of every county in the nation, still only skims over the layers of diversity throughout the nation. In many cases the leading ethnic group of a county may be a small plurality of the county as a whole. Our large cities and metropolitan areas are stewpots of diversity where people whose ancestors came from everywhere on Earth mix and matchup in combinations to make new Americans combining gene pools from around the World.

While this map is a snapshot in time, the story of the making of the American People in all of our diversity has been dynamic over time. That’s the story that the National Museum of the American People will tell.

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on a host of NMAP topics, American ethnic group histories, related museums, scholarship centered on the museum’s focus, relevant census and other demographic data, and pertinent political issues. The museum is a work in progress and we welcome thoughtful suggestions.

Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People