We are aghast that the Hispanic Society of America opened its doors to Ms. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the controversial far-right Spanish politician currently President of the community of Madrid. We are even more disappointed at the way in which the HSA has failed to clearly, unequivocally, and unapologetically disavow her offensive manipulation of history and racist rhetoric.

While the news media has not made clear who or why the HSA had decided to invite Ms. Díaz Ayuso, who met with her, or at what moment she made remarks to the press, the content of these statements has been well reported. Her ignorant and offensive statements were to be expected from someone who has consistently shown little regard for history and facts and who, in her cultural agenda, recently censured the words “racism” and “restitution” from the commissioned work of Peruvian artist Sandra Gamarra (Lima, 1972) in Madrid’s Sala Alcalá 31. Ultimately, and much to the chagrin of the international art community, Gamarra’s work was excluded from the Festival Hispanidad 2021. Díaz Ayuso’s ignorant and racist declarations, in the name of Spanish culture by way of “Hispanidad”, a term deeply enmeshed in the cultural doctrine of Spain’s fascist past and en vogue among the Spanish far right, are what motivate us to write this letter. We feel compelled to express our dismay and our rejection of the manner in which the Hispanic Society, as an institution whose mission statement declares to be “in the service of the public and in accordance with the highest professional standards,” has handled this situation.
 
We are scholars and students of the United States, Europe, and Latin America; we have conducted research on these areas in your institution and we have brought our students to learn from the materials in your collections. Many of us are Spanish, Caribbean and Latin American ourselves, and we also are your neighbors and citizens of New York City, where the HSA is surrounded by a most vital Hispanic community excluded from Ms. Díaz Ayuso's narrow view of "Hispanidad." It is not enough that the Hispanic Society has privately claimed to have been uninformed of the remarks, or that the Society supports other projects or other people who are of value to the Hispanic community, it is that as an institution you have yet to issue a statement to distance yourselves and effectively reject these remarks made in your building and, seemingly, at your invitation. This silence makes us wonder how the Hispanic Society can claim to be an institution of knowledge, of research, of education. As scholars and as Hispanics, as your neighbors and as your immediate public, the one in whose service you claim to work, we would like for the Hispanic Society to explain what role people like Ms. Díaz Ayuso have in the future in your institution. Based on that answer, we will decide the role we, as specialists who refuse to validate such loathsome ideologies, will choose to play in the HSA’s midst.

As scholars, teachers, researchers, New Yorkers, and community members, we want to see whether the Hispanic Society will continue to welcome supremacist and racist ideas, ideologies of exclusion and intolerance, ignorance and the dismissal of history. We would like to consider if it may no longer be an institution worthy of our support going forward.