SAN ANTONIO – With hot pink carpet on the sidewalk and a 600-piece mariachi band, the city swung into fiesta mode this month to welcome the nation's largest Hispanic museum, a collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution.

AP

Photos by John Dyer, whose focus is San Antonio's people and culture, appear at the newly opened Museo Alameda, the largest U.S. museum for Latino culture and art.

Few American cities are more tied to life south of the border than San Antonio, where tourists flock to shop its Mexican markets, meander its River Walk and sip margaritas. But despite residents' efforts, no museum here showcased Hispanic arts. The new museum, the Museo Alameda Smithsonian, or MAS – "more," in Spanish – changes that.

"It's making history," said Rosa Rosales, national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, who came home to San Antonio from Washington for the opening. "Words cannot express the need. Our history has been ignored."

To many here, it goes beyond the art. "This is a piece of activism," said Henry R. Muñoz III, 47, an architectural executive and son of a legendary Mexican-American labor organizer, Henry Muñoz, who was known as the Fox.

The younger Muñoz began badgering the Smithsonian for help a dozen years ago and raised much of the $12 million construction cost from corporate donors.

More than half of San Antonio's 1.2 million residents are Hispanic, compared with about 14 percent nationwide, and their population growth shows few signs of slowing. Indeed, San Antonio, now the nation's seventh-largest city, grew nearly 10 percent from 2000 to 2005; a significant part of the influx were immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean.

The museum is in a 39,000-square-foot former food market, sheathed in Mexican pink panels and punched tin with pinpoint light holes recalling a giant luminaria. It joins a growing cultural zone that includes a 1949 movie palace, the Alameda, being renovated for stage productions shared with the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

The Smithsonian, which a study panel of Hispanic professionals condemned in 1994 for "a pattern of willful neglect" toward Hispanic culture, signed its first major affiliation agreement with the Museo Alameda, agreeing to loan treasures from its vast Washington holdings. It has since signed similar agreements with about 150 other institutions, including five other Hispanic museums, in 39 states.

For the opening exhibition, the Smithsonian loaned a 21.04 carat Colombian emerald ring owned by Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, who was placed on the Mexican throne in 1864 (and executed three years later), and a basketball-size 1958 Vanguard satellite from NASA with rays recalling ancient Mayan images.

The celebration began with a dinner in Market Square that raised $2 million, adding to the leading corporate gifts of $5 million from the Ford Motor Co. and Ford Foundation and $3 million from AT&T. Festivities ended with a concert by Linda Ronstadt and other performers, including the huge mariachi band, which hoped to set a world record.

Ralph Blumenthal, The New York Times