Both men have noticed a change in tone in the conversation about immigrants during the last year.

“My nephew came to me the other day and said: ‘Uncle, it’s bad to be Mexican. At school they’re saying this or that,’” Mr. Rivera-Barraza said. “That really hurt. That really scared me. I don’t want my niece and nephew to be ashamed because someone is saying they’re less than.”

For him, the need to provide role models in the creative industry for a younger generation of Latin American descent became a particularly important goal.

“A lot of these kids don’t know where to look,” Mr. Rivera-Barraza said. “They’re the first generation who are going to get educated. We want to tell them, ‘Don’t give up.’”

Dr. Pomeroy of the Frost Museum noted that showing young people what they can aspire to is part of the work of an exhibition like the one about Mr. Rodriguez. “It is imperative that children of Latin American descent living in the U.S. are exposed to a spectrum of futures through places like museums,” she said.

And what of the book’s subjects? Ms. Cornejo, a fashion designer whose story of leaving Chile when she was 11 as a political refugee, then moving to London, then Paris and finally New York appears in “Nuevo New York,” said she loved the sense of community participating in the book gave her.