The exhibition “Culture and the People: El Museo del Barrio, 1969-2019” is a golden anniversary survey of wonderful art from the collection of a New York museum that is in the process of being torn apart.

El Museo was founded half a century ago, in a politically agitated time, in Puerto Rican East Harlem, the Barrio. It identified itself as a community art space. Its first shows were in a public school classroom on East 123rd Street and it stayed within the immediate neighborhood until 1977, when it moved to its present address, a city-owned building on Fifth Avenue at 104th Street.

That move to what is now called Museum Mile — the moniker was invented by one of El Museo’s early directors, Jack Agüeros — carried the germ of battles to come. An institution that had initially been a showcase for Puerto Rican art, which was unwelcome by other city museums, started to open its doors to a wider range of Latinx (the gender-neutral term for Latino/Latina) and Latin American art. Its board of trustees, once recruited from the working-class barrio, began to diversify ethnically, economically and socially. So did its administrators and curatorial staff.

For those who believed that New York needed a major platform for work from South America, which had gained an elitist cachet, the expansion seemed positive. But for those who foresaw that art by Latinx artists — particularly artists of Caribbean descent working in the United States and already marginalized along lines of class and race — would only be further pushed out of the spotlight, the shift in direction, which amounted to a change in institutional mission, felt like a betrayal.