This is a recorded session from the 2024 AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo. Panelists in this session share how they incorporate Spanish language into visitor and staff experiences. Featuring four case studies from a diverse set of institutions, this session explores the presenters’ motivations and approaches for incorporating Spanish into their work, successful strategies, and challenges they have faced. While the focus of this session will be Spanish, the lessons shared for creating access, inclusion, and belonging are applicable across languages and can shed light on how museums and cultural institutions can effectively communicate with diverse audiences, fostering a more inclusive and accessible environment.

Additional Resources:

Creating Access, Inclusion, and Belonging through Language slides

Transcript

Eleanor Hill: Good morning everybody, my name is Eleanor Hill, I am the Senior Evaluation Researcher at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and I am so excited to welcome you to this session today.

We’ve been working together on putting this together for the last few months and we’re really happy to be able to share with you some of our different ideas about how we can create access, inclusion, and belonging through language. And we’re also really excited to hear from you what you all have been doing as well. So, I will hand over to our first presenter, Melissa, and see you shortly.

Melissa Brito-Alvarez: So, I’ll be presenting on the bilingual initiative the Dallas Museum of Art has embarked in the last couple of years. I’m the manager of access programs and resources, so I develop programming and design accessible material for our museum goers and out in the community. Oh, let’s start here. As early as 2016, the Dallas Museum of Art launched its internal language inclusive initiative, dubbed the bilingual initiative. This initiative aimed to enhance the museum’s Spanish language offerings by developing actionable strategies.

The committee overseen this endeavor comprised of representatives from various departments across the museums, ranging from senior to newest staff members. The first wave of the initiative focused on recruitment. The museum aimed to enhance diversity in three primary areas by 2018, in exhibitions that involved improving diversity through label text and didactics through the galleries, necessitating in the creation of a new translator position.

In marketing and visitor experience, this entailed considering the overall experience of general visitors through the website, digital and flyers, I can’t remember the other media name, and then just general media presence out in the community, as well as enhancing our guest services by hiring more bilingual staff.

And lastly, education, this involved hiring more staff to facilitate in outreach programs that were culturally relevant throughout the Dallas Metroplex. These positions included a Spanish-speaking required director of community engagement and a Spanish -speaking required teaching specialist for school and youth programming. And that’s when I was hired. So I was the teaching specialist for family youth in school and access programming. And by 2019 is when I joined the committee.

And I just want to share some of the insights that we gathered. Just setting up for success. If your institution hasn’t had like any initiative of this point, these are kind of some of the points that I think are really important to consider. When I joined, I was the first Spanish speaking representative in the committee. So, you know, it takes time and hiring. I think the biggest problem I saw in the committee at the very beginning is kind of getting stuck on staff grievances and really trying to leveraging what those sound like. And it really takes a moderator to take those grievances and really strong feelings that staff feel, especially when your voice hasn’t been heard or, you know, just kind of the direction of some types of your programming is going, to really take those and kind of put them into action items and listen for most.

And then the — oh, I keep pressing the button, sorry guys. But the most important part that we really committed to was getting to know our city first and it really guided our purpose and goals when being the demographics of the city of Dallas.

So, one in four residents in Dallas are born in another country. The most common country of origin is Mexico followed by El Salvador, Honduras, India and Ethiopia. As of 2017, there were 6 ,000 residents who were immigrants. And 42 % of people living in Dallas speak another language other than English in their homes. And 67 languages are spoken in the homes of DISD students.

So, we really were trying to figure out what languages were spoken in the city. And then we were also guided by this really amazing cultural plan that our city had done. It had taken about a year of a reporting strategy. And it was really to get equitable access to cultural institutions. And in their report, they highlighted cultural relevance and how to gather community through the arts.

Also, they identified cultural deserts within the city and Highlighted where those cultural cultural deserts were located in the typologies of the city and this whole report can be found in the city of Dallas And I think it really helped us kind of gear what zip codes to hone in on for community outreach and Where where we would kind of you know, do all of our programming at Lastly a baseline evaluation to gauge Latinx community needs and perceptions. This evaluation took both onsite and offsite at other cultural institutions through educational programming.

So, we did, oh, I’m sorry. The thematic finds from the two focus groups conducted was non -attendance was deliberate and not default condition resulting from lack of awareness. Belonging is an intersectional, encompassing memories of past cultural interactions and sensitivity to feeling other due to linguistical, cultural, and physical differences. The discourse of control and regulation within gallery spaces makes people feel a sense of cultural dominance for both children and adults.

The opportunity to practice emerging English language skills was a big highlight for subgroup of participants who did not have young children, and the group emphasized in the importance of understanding cultural nuances and avoid the categorization of their experiences as belonging to a singular or homogenous group or subgroup.

And so, with that in mind, we created action items. A lot of the action items were created based on community feedback, feedback from staff, not in the committee, our personal anecdotes and grievances, and examples from other museums. During the development of this list, we realized that this really extended beyond a language checklist for translations. It was truly creating a sense of belonging, so the list had to include important elements like stroller parking and large print labels for the visually impaired.

We employed various strategies to organize the multitude of action plans developed by the committee. Initially, we had about 130 items, which needed to be condensed to fewer than 100. And we used guiding questions to really hone in on what can be done within the group and things like what departments would be needed in this project and is there a budget for it.

So, we ended up with about 70 action items after combining many of the broader themes together. So the action items are accessibility /mobility and seating, amenities, bilingual marketing content, inclusivity representation, community engagement, interpretive material for gallery spaces, membership opportunities, recognition and reckoning, signage, finding and graphics, staff training, staffing and hiring practices, visitor expectations and feedback and welcoming /creating access.

And with all these action items, we kind of had to decide, well, what do we do first? And so, we prioritized everything on a one to five scale using, is it family-friendly, is it welcoming and accessible, does it and tendons, and is there psychological safety involved? And one of the top– so this is kind of like a breakdown of some of the ones that I saw that kind of hit all of them.

Some of the top-rated action items were creating a land acknowledgement. English and Spanish content side by side in larger print and to expand the materials into the permanent collection. Non -binary restrooms, featuring, we would need to feature more local artists and cultural nuances within the gallery spaces and use imagery for more family friendly or like being able to use visual language for our guests to know how to interact and see themselves within the gallery spaces and our marketing materials.

And so, towards the end, it really, a lot of the 70 points didn’t all get, you know, done. Some are still in work in progress right now. Our land, culture, land acknowledgement is still in progress and, but we did increase the Spanish language programming.

We now have individual restrooms. We have changed the style of our social media. We have large print label books for all special exhibitions, but not permanent galleries unless they are being refreshed. And now all special exhibitions are bilingual. And as well as if we get a refresh, the refresh gallery gets bilingual treatment as well.

Something that I think was kind of jarring is that out of the 25 members of the group, five ish years later, ten are still with the museum, so it really, there is a lot of staff turnover, but with staff turnover, there was new ideas and new projects that came about, one of them being our new branding, which was to translate the museum’s and a slogan and so our slogan “Imagine Your Journey” was translated to “Imagina Tu Aventura” and which I personally like a little bit more. And yeah, it’s just been kind of a really interesting progress. I think early on in my career being part of this initiative has really guided my work. Again, when I look at where I’m going to be trying to go do outreach program I still look at that cultural plan that our city did and I think if anyone can take anything away is that it really does take time especially in within an institution that you’re just working in your department. Luckily my institution our director it was just a big initiative for all of us to work in so if you guys have any questions let me know.

Eleanor Hill: Hello everybody, my name is Eleanor Hill, I’m the Senior Evaluation Researcher with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. We are a large museum based in Denver, Colorado. We focus on nature and science and we have a lot of content.

So, when we’re thinking about integrating Spanish language into a museum setting, It is a very large project, as I know it is, for all of us. And so, we have been using research and evaluation as we think about that and try to bring more language into the museum.

So, I want to start just by telling you a little bit about how we think about having Spanish at our museum. We think about it in terms of access, so enabling people to actually come and access our content. We also think about it in terms of inclusion and belonging, it doesn’t matter if you can access it in English if you also want to access it in Spanish.

We think about it in terms of the whole museum experience, we don’t just want pockets of the museum to be available in Spanish, we want to have everything available in Spanish and it’s going to take a very long time. And we also think about it in terms of content translation, as well as translation, and I’ll say a little more about that shortly. The things that we have right now, and this is not a comprehensive list, but some of the things that we have right now are bilingual positions. These were introduced in 2018. They are positions where, as part of a person’s role, they are expected to use their Spanish language skills. This could be speaking with guests or Spanish speaking staff members, it could be translating content, it could be creating content, and staff are paid a differential for using these skills.

We also have several exhibit and programming elements available in Spanish. We have one fully bilingual permanent exhibit, and similar to what Melissa was sharing, we do have elements of other exhibits that have been refreshed that are now available in Spanish as well.

We have bilingual temporary exhibits, if they don’t come to us bilingually, we add some kind of guide to make them bilingual for our guests. We have a Spanish planetarium show, we collaborate every year with the Mexican Cultural Center and do a Dia del Nino event, and we have programming available that we use on our floor in schools and fairs and festivals that is in Spanish.

And then the third thing that we have is the language accessibility committee. So, this was established in 2022, partway through doing this work. We’d already started it and then decided we needed this committee. The focus of the committee is making the museum available in Spanish. However, you’ll notice it says language accessibility. That is because while right now we’re really focused on Spanish, we know that that is the need in our communities. We do recognize as our communities change and grow, there may be a need for other languages in the future. And through the work we are doing now we can learn how we can bring other languages in the future. We have a mix of bi-lingual and non bi-lingual staff and we have representation from across the museum. Different roles from facing back of house and also staff from different levels which is really important for getting the message around the museum and creating buy-in. And one of the things we have is the VP champion who really helps us take that message to leadership and create buy-in as well.

So, I want to share with you two pieces of research and evaluation that we have done to support this work. The first is, in 2021 we did an internal translation needs assessment. We went to 36 staff members to learn what translation services were needed across departments, what positive experiences they have had in the translation process, and areas for improvement. And I’ve pulled out just three of the findings from it that I thought would be interesting for today.

The first is we heard we need clear guidelines and processes because we just didn’t really have them at this point. We said, I guess got very excited. We wanted to produce things in Spanish and we needed to step back and put into place these guidelines and processes to protect our staff and to make sure that we were delivering the best content we could, the kind of standard that we expect.

So, to do that, we have created a Spanish style guide. We now have a page on our internal internet that shares how to do translations, and who you can speak to if you don’t have that capacity on your team and you need help. We’ve added more bilingual positions, and we have training for managers and supervisors in how to manage those bilingual positions.

The second thing we heard is that it’s not just about translating content. It’s also about creating bilingual and bicultural content. Some of the folks who had already been doing this work at the museum for a long time said to us, our very best experiences are when we are involved early on in the process and we get to design this in Spanish, not have it designed in English and then translate it to Spanish.

And so, the way we try to do that is by having a Spanish speaking staff member on content creation teams. It could be for a new program; it could be for an exhibit refresh or an exhibit redesign. And we make sure that those people are involved right from the beginning so that they can ensure that this content works in Spanish and it’s not just about being able to translate it, it’s also knowing if it is culturally relevant for our Spanish -speaking communities.

And then the third thing is that we heard this needs to be about the complete guest experience and I mentioned this at the beginning, but I think one of the best examples that I hear come up again and again is we have a Spanish planetarium show and this is fantastic.

And people can’t necessarily buy their tickets in Spanish. So, are we really meeting an access need without doing that? That is a huge job, it turns out. I am not a tech person, but it turns out it’s very complicated. So, we are working on that. And it’s going to be some time before we can truly say that you can have a complete guest experience in Spanish.

The second piece of research we did was a community needs assessment. This was a panel study. We worked with Alcama, who we use as our survey platform, and we took this survey off site. We didn’t want to speak to people who were at the museum. We wanted to make sure that we heard from some people who were not at the museum, because if they’re there, they’ve already made it. They’ve already overcome the barriers that we have put in place by not having things available in Spanish.

We heard from 316 respondents from English-speaking households, and 302 respondents from Spanish-speaking households. The survey was in English and Spanish. And we asked people, do you want content in Spanish? Why do you want content in Spanish? And how would you like to access Spanish content?

I’m going to just share with you the results from the respondents from Spanish speaking households today so just three questions. The first is that half of these respondents are more likely or will only visit a museum if content is available in Spanish. We already had a lot of institutional buy-in but it’s still really, really helpful to be able to say, people want this and this is why we should do it. We heard that the biggest reason respondents from Spanish speaking households wanted museum content in Spanish is because they would enjoy it and also because it would make them feel like they belong.

And then finally we asked respondents to share with us for various different offerings around the museum how they would like them to be accessible in Spanish. The one I’m sharing with you today is specifically for permanent and temporary exhibits and we heard from our Spanish speaking respondents that they would like a staff member or volunteer guide, a booklet, exhibition panels, and labels in Spanish. Those were our top three responses.

(audience member speaks indistinctly)

So, we had, everyone could multiple select. So we had, if you were in categorized as an English -speaking household, you spoke English at home, and English in another language excluding Spanish. If you’re a Spanish -speaking household, Spanish at home, Spanish in any other language including English. And then I also broke the results down by those who indicated that they had a preference for reading, speaking, or writing in Spanish. I didn’t share that with you because it’s kind of getting a little deep right now, but very happy to talk about it. Thank you for asking.

So, this question has been really, really helpful as we consider our next steps. One of the things that we have decided is that our ultimate goal is to have bilingual exhibit signage. And, as I’m sure you all know, this takes a lot of time and resources. We can only do that holistically when we redesign an entire exhibit. And we have a lot of them, so it’s going to take a long time. So, in the meantime, we’re leaning on these results that we learned from the survey and we’re trying out what we are considering secondary mechanisms to get content across to our guests.

So we’ve been testing Spanish guides which so far we have been using a QR code for people when they arrive at the exhibit. They can scan the QR code, they can either read the content or listen to the content.

We’re also going to try a paper version as well. And one thing that we really like about this is that it could be applied to other languages. And then we’re also doing something called notches in Español this summer. We’re gonna be testing our Spanish guides. We’re going to test a Spanish movie. And we’re gonna test what it’s like having additional staff and volunteers on the floor. We heard from folks that they would really like that.

And we also want to know from our side, what is that staffing model Like what are the things that because we’ve not really tried to put a lot of Spanish speakers on the floor at the same time, what are the things that we might not be thinking about that we need to consider to protect those staff and their time and make sure they’re not working loads and loads of shifts, and to make sure that our guests have a great experience.

So that is where we are heading next. I have put a QR code with some resources if anyone is interested in the survey questions and the interview questions that we used.

Thank you.

Kerry Butcher:- Hello, everybody. My name is Carrie Butcher, and I’m an interpretation associate at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. And I’m excited to kind of continue our presentation and speak to a project that a small team of us embarked on with 22 local artists with ties to Latin America.

Before I dive into the project specifically, I thought I’d back up and give a little bit of specific information about Spanish language in Kansas City, which borders the Kansas and Missouri metro areas. So being in the Midwest, our demographics, particularly with languages spoken in the city, are diverse, but much less so than some of my presentation colleagues from Dallas and Denver. Recent census data estimates that more than 50 ,000 Kansas Citians and speak a language other than English at home and roughly 20 ,000 people have a limited English proficiency. On the Kansas side of the city, 8 % of residents speak Spanish as their first language whereas on the Missouri side where our museum is located, it’s lower at only 3%.

So, when I started at the Nelson Atkins in 2022, there was a lot of curiosity about how to bring bilingual or multilingual content into our museum, which had been well on their way through programs and other initiatives.

When I moved there, learning more about my new cities worked some important questions for me and our team. If we did pursue multilingualism within our museum, what communities do we serve and how do we best serve them.

So, in the spring of 2023, I worked closely with the Nelson Atkins curator, Stephanie Fox -Nap, who’s the curator of American Art and Contemporary Arts, and she selected 22 local artists from across the Kansas City, Missouri -Kansas region, to be part of an exhibition umbrella that we call KC Art Now. The broader KC Art Now project started in 2020 to highlight the local talent in our community. And for this third iteration, our museum director asked that we bring together artists living and working in Kansas City who have connections to Latin America, a strong and growing portion of our community on both sides of the state line.

The artists Stephanie selected with input from our key members of the community had cultural ties to Columbia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Peru, Mexico, and Uruguay. And while some of the artists are second and third generation immigrants, many of the participating artists were first generation immigrants or DACA recipients. Another interesting component was the range of artistic practices and styles and generational representation.

So, while many of the artists had formal backgrounds in art and education, many of the artists were self -taught. Our first kind of huge priority before delving into any content was spending time with studio visits and in -depth conversations with each of these artists.

We understood very early on that there were a lot of anxieties and apprehensions about embarking on this project with the museum. We didn’t really know a lot of the artists, myself especially, and we knew we had a responsibility to dispel those anxieties as much as possible during these early visits.

We focused sessions less on our own priorities, but really treated these visits as a discovery, sitting less in sessions, and offered a space to hear their ideas and encourage them to really think big about what work they’d like to contribute or create brand new.

After we had a chance to connect with the artists on individually in their studios or homes, we organized a gathering in partnership with the Maddie Road Center, which is pictured here, of one of the participating artists as a founder and director. We made this decision very consciously as we wanted to gather in a space that was already comfortable and familiar for many of the artists.

During our roundtable discussion with the artists at the Maddie Road Center, I brought up our institution’s recent research and interest in wanting to build on and create further bilingual content, resources, and programming. While the artists already knew that they would be writing their own labels for this exhibition, the artists raised a lot of important questions for us. Some of those where has the museum traded translated content into Spanish before? We had a few artists note to us that while they felt comfortable speaking in Spanish They were not as comfortable writing or reading it themselves and how that would work during the translation process and Lastly and probably the most critical was that artists did not want that they’re authentic voices to be lost during the translation process So really paying attention to that was a critical part of this project. So after the roundtable, in kind of divesting– or digesting a lot of that information, the critical next step for me was to find a Spanish translator and editor for the project, as we did not have one already in house.

And while our museum had worked with larger translation companies like Erickson for things in the museum voice, the curator and I were conscious about really retaining the artist’s voice, particularly when we don’t speak or read vanish ourselves. I ended up finding a translator who had been professionally translating within the community for over seven years as a freelancer, but whose full -time work was as a UX designer. We both thought that he had knowledge and background of the arts, and he was really willing to take on this task to translate labels without really knowing what the work looked like, or knowing the artists themselves. I will note that our translation process and review process that you see here was a lot less linear than it appears, but we want to be sure that the artist had the opportunity to review and ask questions and make changes on their translation to make sure that they felt like their voice was authentically reflected. At the Nelson -Atkins we have a really long and lengthy editing and review process for labels including our museum director who reads every single label that comes through the museum. So, you can imagine how much more work that adds when you have a Spanish editor involved and also 22 artists that are looking at the labels individually.

Another key component of including bilingual text is the consideration of the design and space. For this exhibition, we were working with a really small space and tight exhibition layout with varying dimensions available. As many of the artists we’re still figuring out the final scale of their works. We worked closely with our graphic designers, I think one of whom is in this room, to consider the designs for both the wall and barrier labels. The designs often used a subtle color palette of pink and blue to help visitors understand the break between English and Spanish texts.

I wanna point out that Rodolfo’s label on the right is in Spanglish. This was a conscious choice of the artist shared in his words via email, it may be somewhat confusing, but so is being a Mexican and US American. And to honor that complexity, the translator, Rodolfo and I worked closely to translate the text fully into Spanish as another option, but not translating either back into full English.

So, while bilingual translation of the text and artist labels was a central part of this endeavor, we also wanted to continue to find further layers for people to engage with the artists throughout the long run of this 10-month exhibition.

You may have noticed on the previous slide that there was a small mobile icon and prompt at the bottom of the label. During these early studio visits, we realized during our conversations that each of these artists in the exhibition was an extremely nuanced individual and many layers beyond just their cultural identities informed who they are and the stories they chose to tell through their art, including their personal experiences. So, we used our mobile app called Smartify, which is a free app. Anybody can download it. I’m happy to chat more about it. We conducted individual interviews with each of the artists to provide a different lens or take on the work than what you just see in the label.

Visitors can use this app in the galleries to scan a work of art. So, they hold their phone up in front of the work of art, and it pulls up their label content and the audio content. Additionally, we hosted an opening celebration, as we heard from a handful of artists, that celebrations and gatherings with friends and loved ones was such an integral part of their shared culture. When the exhibition closes in September, we plan to host a similar closing reception. And of course, throughout the 10-month run, artists will have the opportunity to collaborate with other colleagues in our education department from drop -in talks and lectures, poetry readings, documentary screenings. The programming really speaks to the multidisciplinary talents of the group.

So I don’t have a lot of like in -depth findings like Eleanor had, but we are currently working with our staff evaluator to learn more about the value and impact of the exhibition, particularly the label content. We are in the early stages of that survey, but I’m sharing a few quotes here that I learned from our evaluator that I think really speak to the value of centering local community members.

My particular favorite is on the bottom right where a visitor shared that they made a connection to some of the pieces and gained a perspective on others. In my mind, this really reflects the core principles of the exhibition. So visitors might not relate specifically to the artist’s individual stories or experience and how they manifest in the works, but they can find appreciation in learning something new that they may have not thought about before.

Lastly, I’d like to share a few kind of takeaways that I’ve really tried to think about and move forward with in a lot of projects that I’ve taken on since this. The first one is really moving at the speed of trust.

I really keep this in mind in anything that I do. It’s one of my favorite sayings. So really thinking about how our role in dismantling the fears and concerns and apprehensions of people we work with in the community, particularly those we haven’t really worked with before, takes time and you can’t rush to achieve something that hasn’t been done before.

Embracing the unknowns is a really important one, despite the fact that we had done iterations of this project two times before, we had not done it with this group and this group of artists in this scale. So, there’s no way to know what you might encounter and so kind of listening to those artists was really important.

To piggyback on that, there’s no one -size -fits -all approach. Much of what we had done before didn’t really apply and we had to like pivot in terms of like what the artists were producing, how they wanted their labels to be done. There was a lot of unknowns and artists needed a lot of help in kind of like writing and understanding what visitors want to know about their art.

Lastly, I really want to emphasize that documenting your process is really important, particularly when you’re embarking on a new endeavor for the first time. There are so many different areas of museum work that are interested in doing bilingual initiatives. And I’ve had so many colleagues ask me even where to begin. So, I would really encourage you all to take the time to document the work and process. Not just for you or your other colleagues, but to share out in conferences like these.

Lastly, I’d like to share an image of the group of artists who are really lovely. And thank you so much for your time. I am here for questions. You can find me via email, but happy to chat more after.

Thank you.

Julietta Da Silva: All right. Hola. Hello, everyone. We’re Museo de las Americas, and we are a community -driven museum focused on creating inclusion and belonging through the Spanish language. My name’s Holieta. I’m a Community engagement manager.

This is Sean, our language and interpretation programs manager, which is really just basically fancy ways of saying that both Sean and I work with community here at Museo, and we’re excited to tell you a little bit more about that today.

Museo de las Americas was founded over 30 years ago to represent all of the Americas, todas las Americas, and with that we really believe that we serve as cultural stewards because we represent so many underrepresented cultural backgrounds.

We are focused on being the premier Latin American Art Museum in the Rocky Mountain region. And with that, we also are focused on making sure that we are presenting all of these different cultures in ways that honor and respect them. And so because of that, language is naturally a part of that process and naturally a part of who we are and the work that we do.

We truly believe that it is both our social and cultural responsibility to represent these underrepresented backgrounds and to be a platform for them by bringing them to the forefront of the Rocky Mountain community.

We really embrace the diversity that is the Americas. We really hope to be able to build bridges between these cultures and communities and through the programs that we offer, we hope to be able to foster community as well.

And today we’re going to talk a little bit more about how we do that with both our adults and our youth.

Now, I know many people in this room may have never been to Colorado, maybe have never been to Denver, so obviously I want to tell you a little bit more about what our community looks like to kind of contextualize our conversation. And as well, I come from a background in tech, so obviously I got to start with the data, I got to start with the numbers.

And so with that, in 2020 Hispanics and Latinos of any race made up about 21 % of Colorado’s population. And of that, just about half speak Spanish. And there’s a lot of reasons as to why.

We’ll get into that in a second. As well in Museo in 2020, we decided to issue a membership feedback survey because we wanted to understand who our members were, why they came to Museo, and what they were looking for from us from a program’s perspective. The number one takeaway that we found in our survey was that our community that came to us in order to get feel connected to their culture.

And again, like I mentioned earlier, there’s a lot of reasons why Latinos in the state of Colorado may not feel connected to the Spanish language. And in the survey, we found that they wanted to have a place where they could practice their language safely with their community.

And so, with that, we decided to create a Spanish Conversation Club.

I’m the host of our Spanish Conversation Club. You’ll find us at Cirveceria Colorado in Platte Street, if you ever in the neighborhood, stop by. My goal of the club is to be a lot less academic and a lot more based in community building. I want to create a welcoming space where we can practice Spanish, celebrate our culture, and connect with comunidad. And so, with that, we meet on a monthly basis. We have fun monthly themes that get us excited about speaking Spanish with one another. We ask each other icebreaker questions, whereas that’s my opportunity as the facilitator to figure out where’s your level of Spanish. And then from there, I break people out into small groups and we participate in a ton of fun, different activities. We’ve done things like popcorn storytelling, to reading news articles together, reciting recipes in Spanish, and even playing fun games like Cloteria.

I’m happy to say that this meetup is always sold out. I have a ton of regulars, and yeah, it’s just a lot of fun. You can see in the picture that I’m not lying. We have a lot of fun Spanish Conversation Club, but that’s just a little bit more about our adult programs and the programs that we do for them. To get more back into the Colorado statistics of things because I know y ‘all don’t know much and I’m excited to tell you more is that of Colorado’s Hispanic and Latino population the majority of this population is under 18 years old so that’s mostly our youth.

As well within this last year in Denver we’ve had a lot of Central and South American migrants move into the city which is naturally going to impact what our communities looks like and what their needs are and so with that I’m happy to pass it off to Sean who’s gonna tell you a little bit more about the programs that we create to melt these kids and their families feel more welcome as neighbors.

Sean Trujillo: Thank you, Julietta and hello everybody. Museo serves children in the Denver Metro area in three different ways and I’ll get to that here in a sec but first I want to tell you a little bit about the students that we serve and who teaches them from Museo.

So about 90 % of our students that take part in our programming go to dual language immersion schools, are enrolled in dual language immersion schools in the Denver Metro area, which is very nice. And about seven out of eight of my creative workshop teachers speak both English and Spanish and teach bilingual. And about half the workshops that I get requested are requested to be bilingual.

And 70 % of all the total students that we serve at Museo throughout the entire year speak English and Spanish, would Spanish be in the primary language spoken at home. And lastly, three of four of my summer camp teachers conduct summer camp classes in English and Spanish.

Now Museo has three different pillars to our education department in which we serve the children in grades K through 12 in the Denver Metro area.

Firstly, the first pillar is my cultural workshops and tours. Now these are hands -on immersive experiences that we host onsite or we go off -site and this is offered through for grades K through 12 and we serve about 4 ,000 kids annually and as I mentioned these are requested to be primarily bilingual activities.

My second pillar is our Los Juvenas Leadership Lab. Now this serves my 11 to 15 year olds. It’s an after school program and it’s an arts and technology based program and it has a separate youth council to where the youth meet to give input about the program to make it more youth led.

And we have three cohorts per year and about 15 students per cohort. And my last pillar to the education department is our summer arts and culture camp. Now this is our multidisciplinary arts integrated camp and it serves our youngest group of children, our four to 11 year olds, and we have this every single summer and serve about 65 to 70 kids per year. Now, my summer camp truly is the highlight of our education department.

We’ve been doing this camp for 15 years and every year we choose one country, one Latin American country of focus and we learned about the dance, the music, the visual arts, and the theater of that particular country and this year we’re focusing on Cuba which is going to be pretty fun.

So, after three weeks of camp the students put on a wonderful final performance for the community and for their families and they do also the visual arts show too which is really fantastic.

Now naturally, this camp is taught in English and in Spanish to meet the needs of the students and the families. And it’s very popular amongst our Spanish -speaking community as a form of cultural and language connection. And it’s very popular amongst our non -Spanish -speaking community as a form of cultural and language immersion for their students.

So, to wrap it up, our programming still the adapting. I’m very proud of our programming because we have been publicly recognized of having some of the best programs for children in the Denver Metro area. So, we’re very proud about that and we still keep adapting to the needs of our community,

especially as we welcome our newest neighbors, our migrant community. So thanks for listening everybody. I’ll give it back to Julieta.

Julietta Da Silva: Thank you, Sean. No, we really appreciate you coming and listening today. You were able to learn a little bit more about our work, not only as people that work at Museo de las Americas, but also as cultural ambassadors through language.

Museo represents Latino art and culture from many different countries, and creating this programming is for the betterment of our communities. As Sean has mentioned, we have been recognized publicly and Denver for having some of the most important cultural programming and being one of the most important cultural institutions in Denver. And we genuinely believe it’s because everything that we do is led by what the community tells us that they want to see. And so here’s some information for you to keep up with us. Nos y vitamos. We invite you all to come visit us in Denver, Colorado soon. That’s it.

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This recording is generously supported by The Wallace Foundation.