At El Museo del Barrio, education is not a supporting function—it is the foundation upon which our institution was built. Founded in 1969 by artist, educator, and activist Raphael Montañez Ortiz and a coalition of community leaders, El Museo emerged from a belief that Puerto Rican and Latine communities deserved to see their histories, cultures, and experiences reflected in educational and cultural spaces.

Today, that mission remains as urgent as ever. Under the leadership of Director of Education and Public Programs Arturo Agüero, we are reimagining what museum education can be: community-centered, culturally responsive, and grounded in dialogue, creativity, and belonging.

In this essay, Arturo reflects on the traditions, values, and ideas across the Americas that will help shape the future of education and public programming at El Museo.

— Patrick Charpenel

Executive Director
El Museo del Barrio

Raphael Montañez Ortiz didn't wait for a building. In 1969, he was already in East Harlem classrooms, teaching Puerto Rican children about their own culture before there were gallery walls, before there was a collection, before there was an institution to speak of. Whereas most museums add an education department after the fact, El Museo del Barrio was an education department before it was anything else. I'm here, in part, to make sure we still honor that history.

That history raises a question: If the art on our walls reflects evolving conversations about Puerto Rican, Caribbean, Latin American, and Latine art, shouldn't our teaching practices evolve as well?

Lately, I've been returning to a handful of traditions that feel like the beginning of an answer. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, proposed “problem-posing education.” In his model, rather than depositing facts into students, a teacher and a community examine the world they share, name what's broken in it, and figure out what to do together.  In Chiapas, Zapatista autonomous schools put a related principle into practice by building an education system rooted in indigenous Mayan knowledge, governed by community consensus, and accountable not to the state but to the people it served. In Argentina, the libros cartoneros movement—in which artists, writers, and everyday people produced hand-bound books from recycled cardboard and sold them for next to nothing—turned publishing itself into a form of community education, insisting that literature belongs to everyone who can make it, not just those who can afford it.

And then there are the casitas of New York City. For decades, Nuyorican residents of East Harlem and the South Bronx built small wooden structures modeled on the island’s rural homes in empty city lots. These cottages served as gardens, gathering places during holidays, and centers of neighborhood life. They were also, in some sense, acts of community pedagogy: a community proactively sustaining traditions from their homeland, sharing them with their neighbors, and bequeathing them to the next generation.

These traditions, and many more from across the hemisphere, share some common logics. They invite learners to be active participants. They place a high value on hold high regard for the exchange between older and younger generations. And most importantly, they treat community members as coproducers of knowledge, not just recipients of it.

Over the coming years, I'll explore how these kinds of traditions might find a home at El Museo del Barrio, but I won't do it alone. I will be convening practitioners and educators from across the Americas: from community arts organizations and popular education movements, from peer institutions and art collectives, from classrooms and plazas and cultural centers that have been doing this work for years without the platform a museum can offer. We will learn together. We will experiment. We will ask hard questions about what education at a museum is for, who it serves, and what it should feel like. 

Many of the young people who walk through our galleries are the children and grandchildren of immigrants. In the current political climate, they are being told that their families don't belong here, that their cultures are liabilities, that their presence is a problem to be managed. A museum cannot undo that. But it can refuse to participate. It can say, through the seriousness of its educational practice, that these intellectual traditions are not alien or foreign. That they are rigorous ways of knowing. That they deserve to be at the center of how we teach. That they are welcome here.

Raphael Montañez Ortiz believed that a community that defines its own culture is a community that survives. El Museo was built on that belief, and more than fifty years later, it continues to guide our work. We are still that museo.

About the author
Arturo Agüero is Director of Education and Public Programs at El Museo del Barrio. A former bilingual teacher, he brings experience in museum education, libraries, and publishing, creating inclusive learning experiences that connect art, history, and culture with diverse communities.