Magdalena Garcia and the Vision Behind El Museo Latino

When Magdalena Garcia was 9 years old, she moved from Mexico City to Omaha, carrying with her a deep love of art shaped by her grandmother and aunt. Every summer, she returned to Mexico City, where museums, ballet and opera were part of everyday life. She remembers her grandmother cleaning on Saturday mornings with opera music filling the house. “Art was always part of our lives,” Garcia has said. “That’s why I believe it’s so important to expose children to different art forms.”

In Omaha, Garcia navigated school without English language support programs, relying on teachers who took a special interest in helping her succeed. Skeptical that she could make a living as an artist, she pursued art history instead, earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of Nebraska at Omaha while volunteering at Joslyn Art Museum and working full time in human resources for Northern Natural Gas.

When the company relocated to Houston, Garcia moved with it. Later, she used her severance pay to attend graduate school at Syracuse University in New York. While seeking internships in the early 1990s, she discovered there were only a handful of Latino museums in the United States. The question came quickly: Why not Omaha?

In 1993, Garcia founded El Museo Latino in South Omaha’s historic stockyards building, opening during Cinco de Mayo celebrations to draw community attention. She secured 10 months of free rent in exchange for cleaning and organizing the space. The first exhibition featured traditional Mexican folkloric costumes.

Today, El Museo Latino is recognized as the first Latino art, culture and history museum in the region and among the first in the nation.

“None of us really know when that last moment of our lives will come,” Garcia has said. “But I didn’t want to wonder: Could I have tried it?”

Read more about Magdalena Garcia here: Magdalena García: The Heart Behind El Museo Latino