BETSY BROUN: Hello, I’m Betsy Broun. I’m the Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. I love this exhibition because it culminates years of effort and lots of excitement as we build what we hope will be one of the truly great collections of Latino art in any museum in America. We’ve had so many dedicated people working for a long time to make this happen. It’s hard to pick just one thing in the exhibition to talk about, but I guess I might pick a beautiful painting by Carmen Lomas Garza called “Camas para Sueños,” or “Beds for Dreams.” It’s actually a gouache on paper, maybe 28 by 20 inches.
For me, it is a kind of emblem of literally the hopes and dreams that animate the Latino community and, actually, immigrant communities everywhere in America. It tells the story of the American promise. It tells a story that is why people want to come here to try to create a better future for themselves, their children, and their families. It shows a simple house and, through a window, we see a mother of a family, and she’s shaking out the spread and making the bed, and up on the roof of the house are the two children lying up in the roof under a nighttime sky and gesturing towards the moon that appears in the clouds. In every way, you see the efforts of the family to create a good home, to provide the environment where their children can thrive, and then you see the children staring into the night sky as they imagine what they want to accomplish and achieve.
It’s an endlessly hopeful image. It seems so current today. It was done in 1985; already these hopes and dreams were paramount within the Latino community. In fact, we have a whole generation called “the Dreamers,” which are named for this phenomenon, and here it is now, roughly thirty years later, and still the same ambitions, desires, wondering what will come of your life, hoping it will be as good as you imagined it could be. To me, it’s just an exquisitely beautiful, simple image that says so much about this generation, about Latino immigration in general, really about all the communities that have come to America hoping for the promise of a better life for themselves and their families.
