National Museum of Mexican American Art

 In Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, a neighborhood that the Czech immigrants who settled it named after a town from their homeland, there is the National Museum of Mexican American Art.  This strange confluence is a great example of the changing identity of both neighborhoods and people that is highlighted by the museum's permanent collection, Nuestras Historias; Stories of Mexican Identities.

Neighborhoods, like societies, are dynamic.  They are constantly developing and changing.  Every moment is different and being recreated anew. Pilsen which was originally a home to Czech immigrants who have been replaced by more recent Mexican immigrants who kept the name.  This is how immigrants add to and remake neighborhoods and how societies grow, evolve and change with their immigrant populations.

Similarly, individuals' identities grow and change and evolve and they are complex.  The museum highlights the complexity and changing identities of Mexican-Americans.

From the exhibit,

Nuestras Historias (Our Histories) highlights the Museum’s Permanent Collection to showcase the dynamic and diversestories of Mexican identity in North America. The exhibition presents cultural identity as something that continually evolves across time, regions, and communities, rather than as a static, unchanging entity, and features ancient Mesoamerican and colonial artifacts, modern Mexican art, folk art, and contemporary works from both sides of the U.S.–Mexican border.

The vast diversity of Mexican identities demonstrated in these works defies the notion of one linear history and a singular identity.