Mariana Salem

December 18, 2020

Mariana Salem is an Assistant Director of Special Programming and Events at The Museum of Modern Art, where she organizes fundraising benefits and helps to produce events. Before MoMA, Mariana worked at The New Museum and El Museo del Barrio, two other storied New York cultural institutions. When I proposed this interview, I thought we would talk mostly about the mechanics of her job, one I had rarely considered but that is as integral to a museum as the art on its walls. But it was the more existential questions that Mariana raised in our conversation — questions about how the museum world, historically white, is grappling with calls to be more equitable and inclusive — that felt most urgent. In telling me her own story about growing up Mexican-American in Pennsylvania and Maryland, it became clear that, while many museums have yet to meaningfully engage with racism, Mariana is constantly thinking about the ways race, gender, and power shape everyday interactions. The discrimination she faced as a kid reinforced a sense of difference and “otherness,” while at the same time making Mariana feel unseen, invisible in the culture at large. When she entered the workforce, prejudice persisted in the form of microaggressions. Recounting her childhood and mapping the trajectory of her career, Mariana described instances of joy and beauty and triumph, but racism, overt and subtle, was the backdrop to many of her most formative experiences.

As Mariana and I talked in Fort Greene Park, protests coursing by, Instagram full of black squares and solidarity hashtags, a quote of Toni Morrison’s stuck in my mind: “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” Mariana attributes her empathy in part to dealing with racism growing up. In that sense, adversity fostered in her an awesome tool, the kindness which beams from her like a bright light. But Mariana also emphasized what racism has eaten up: her time, energy, and confidence. The cost of all that distraction — the indignity of justifying her presence, the discomfort of feeling unwelcome, the exhaustion of self-doubt — is immeasurable, an incalculable loss. Morrison made her point about racism in 1975. That it is still so relevant today is an embarrassment. Mariana’s persistence in the face of such insidious distraction is literally amazing, as in: I’m amazed at the disciplined generosity she practices, despite all the BS. Her determination to make the arts more accessible to future generations is inspiring. It’s also complicated. I’m so grateful that she chose to share her story here.

This interview took place in September and October of 2020. It has been edited and condensed.

Georgia Hilmer: You lived in Mexico as a young child, then emigrated to the United States with your family so that your dad could pursue higher education in the sciences. Where were you living in Mexico before you came to the US?

Mariana Salem: In a town called Jiquilpan in the state of Michoacán. My parents were from the north; my dad is from Monterrey, my mom is from the state of Sonora, which borders Arizona. My mom was the one who encouraged my father to go to Pennsylvania and focus on his graduate degree. He was a little uncertain I think, sort of lacked the confidence, being a thirty-eight-year-old grad student. But it was really hard for both of them. My father talked a lot about dealing with microaggressions and other levels of racism. My dad spoke English, my mother didn’t.

Was the area you lived in super white? 

It was predominantly white but I will never forget that when I first started preschool this young Jamaican-American girl named Michelle was the most welcoming and accommodating out of all the students — even though we didn’t speak the same language. Back then I could sense that I was different. In the apartment complex that we first moved to in Pennsylvania we dealt with our earliest incidents of discrimination; they used to call my family “Puerto Rican pop tarts,” which was confusing to me. We were there for three years and then my father got a job running a lab in Delaware, so I grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in a town called Salisbury, which is thirty minutes away from Ocean City, the Maryland beaches. In ways I feel like I acclimated but also was dealing with subtle forms of racism. When we first moved into town, we were renting a house and someone spray-painted a swastika on two signs in front of our home. 

Was that something your parents would talk to you about at the time? Or was it something you were processing as just ambient aggression? 

They were vocal about it, particularly my father. I remember there was a time when we had just moved to Maryland and I wanted to go back to Pennsylvania. My dad was raking the leaves in our front yard and he said, “You don’t know what it was like for me to be at school in Pennsylvania. I would lock myself in the bathroom and cry.” Because of the discrimination he dealt with. It was very sobering, which is a heavy feeling for a seven year old — to realize that racism was very much a part of living in that place.

Did you feel like you were living between cultures growing up? Did you feel either American or Mexican-American?

I never fully felt one or the other. I think there were periods in my life when I felt more American than Mexican or felt the need or want to assimilate.

Did that assimilation pressure create distance between you and your parents? Or was the assimilation project a whole family affair? 

No, I was always so glad that my parents made us speak Spanish at home. My mom would say, “Aquí se habla español,” and my dad would say the same thing: “Here we are going to speak Spanish.” It was important for my parents that we not lose that sense of our culture, especially because for them family was very important. Speaking Spanish was that link to our culture and our family. 

Did you go to Mexico to see family often?

Yes, we would try to go in the summer to see family. I remember it being very hard for my mom, she would cry when we would leave. It was very isolating to be in a foreign country where you’re just learning the language. I think she knew that Mexico would always be foreign to us, living in the US. With assimilation, my parents knew that it would be a process for us. As their children we were figuring out who we were. There was a period of time when we would speak Spanish in public and I would say, “Let’s not speak Spanish.” I think there was a sense of maybe shame about being different. I think a lot of it had to do with the rejection that maybe my parents experienced, or knowing that we weren’t fully accepted for who we were. When you’re that age, you just want to be loved and accepted. 

I have only recently started to understand and appreciate the difference between being Latinx and white and being non-white Latinx. I don’t think I recognized the racial hierarchy that exists, especially in American pop culture, when it comes to public figures who are Latinx. Did you understand a difference or distinction between being white and non-white Latinx at that time? 

I don’t think it was something I fully understood until I moved to New York. Even as a Mexican-American woman, I never thought about the spectrum of representation within the Latinx and Caribbean communities. The fact that I couldn’t even understand that makes me think about my own lack of cultural exposure growing up. The only experiences I had were through speaking Spanish with my parents at home and through family during our visits to Mexico. In some ways, having both European and indigenous ancestry, I can be both culturally and ethnically ambiguous. The fact that I grew up in a suburban  part of America that is fairly conservative meant that I didn’t learn how varied we — the Latinx community — are. We share the common bond of speaking Spanish but come from very different socioeconomic, ethnic, and racial backgrounds.

There are similarities between the Latinx and Black communities in that there is racial hierarchy within the community. There are white Latinos who are anti-brown and anti-Black. Yet, in my recent travels to Mexico, I’ve noticed that, after celebrating euro-centric lifestyles and images for a long time, indigenous cultures are being made more visible — but it’s usually white Mexicans who are capitalizing on the work of those indigenous communities.

The release of the movie Roma was a flashpoint for me. I’m thinking about when Vogue México featured the movie’s star Yalitza Aparicio on the cover — the first Mexican woman of indigenous descent on the cover ever. That was wild. As a white person, I take for granted so many things in my ignorance about the finer points of racism and history. 

I wish I could have had those images growing up. I don’t know if I can fully understand what it was like for me to see that the image of beauty was only about whiteness. What does it do for your self-esteem as Black and brown girls to see that every image and every cover is a white woman? I had to get rid of those preconceived notions of what the beauty standards are.

When did you realize you were internalizing those standards? And when did that getting-rid-of become an effort you were making consciously? 

Maybe in college? I went to the University of Delaware, where I got a free ride. I studied International Relations in college and for me the idea of globalism — maybe this had to do with me being young and feeling that the world was my oyster — meant that media could be a force of good and bring people together. Back then you didn’t have social media. We communicated through books, magazines, and television. I was curious about the world. I was hungry for understanding, to learn about other people from different parts of the world. That was my drive to study international relations. Then I was offered a job in a management development program that trained people to be executives at a bank. Looking back at that choice is crazy to me because that level of ambition is not in line with who I am. But at the time, pursuing that status level was a form of self-validation for me. 

Did they headhunt you?

I met a girl at school who was part of a Latina sorority, we had some classes together. She approached me to say that a bank was looking to hire — you could tell they were trying to fill a quota. I had no idea what job to pursue but they were offering a lot of money out of school and I think that part of being first-generation was feeling like I had something to prove. Having the title and the salary was my way of making it. 

I graduated from the program and was assigned to work in Newark, New Jersey. I was twenty-three years old and I was managing a team of twelve associates in a customer service call center. I had no interest in that line of work whatsoever! But I also knew that it was an opportunity for me to get closer to moving to New York. That had become an aspiration of mine around college. College was a bit of a wake-up call. Going to school was something I never took for granted. I knew the sacrifices my parents made to get to where we were at that point. I took it seriously. I wasn’t around the type of people I wanted to be and it wasn’t culturally diverse. The University of Delaware had a big fraternity and sorority culture. I had imagined college to be like an episode of Friends where people would sit around and talk about current affairs and drink coffee and exchange ideas. I was completely naive.

So that’s when you started thinking about New York? Friends takes place in New York so you’ll go there? 

There seemed to be opportunities for me in New York. Around the end of the time that I was at the bank, I became part of a Latino affinity group within the company. The bank would invest money to provide programming that would raise cultural awareness. (At the time they called us “Hispanic,” which is not the term you want to use because it means “person derived from the country of Spain.” That is not all people who speak Spanish. “Hispanic Heritage Month” — change the name.)

I was part of the group and it was Hispanic Heritage Month and we brought in El Museo del Barrio. The director of the museum and the director of development did a presentation on the museum and its mission statement. They did a slideshow of their permanent collection and I will never forget the surge of energy and excitement that came from the presentation. It was like, “This is what I’ve been waiting for.” All I could think about was the power of this cultural institution and how, if I had had this museum growing up, my confidence and sense of self would have been so different. I rushed to the director and the director of development and said, “I’m here if you need anything, if you need me to volunteer.” I exchanged business cards with them. I think they thought I was just being pleasant. 

Two months later I was laid off due to the 2008 recession. When I was let go, I felt all the long hours and effort I put into my job had come to nothing. I realized that I was motivated by the need for approval. That’s when I knew that I couldn’t continue to put all of my effort into an insecure job where I could be let go at any moment and none of it would matter.

But that period of being laid off was also wonderful because I suddenly had the opportunity to reimagine what my career could be. I was without a job for nine months, so with that extra time on my hands I volunteered at the Lower East Side Girls Club, which gave me a chance to think about something outside of myself and led to a valuable lesson about being engaged in my community and knowing the people who make the neighborhood what it is. Around that time I emailed the director of development at El Museo to let him know I was looking for a job and he responded to say that an opportunity had opened up in corporate fundraising and special events. I thought, “I could do that.” That led to my career as an arts administrator and working in cultural institutions. My education in what it means to be Latinx and a Mexican-American woman, and knowing that it can encompass so many things, I credit it to El Museo.

You worked at El Museo for two years and then at The New Museum for nearly five. What is your current job at MoMA?

My job in a general sense is arts administrator. My title is Assistant Director of Special Programming and Events. Now that we can't gather in person, virtually bringing people together for a shared cause and creating experiences that instill connection is important.

Before the pandemic, I’ve definitely caught myself in moments during a major event and been like, “Look at all the people we brought together!” I really take pride in how a space like the museum, which I feel at times I've taken for granted, can be transformed into the site of an experience that people will remember for a long time. 

A lot of my job now, during the pandemic, is helping with the production of our virtual events for donors and members of the museum. My team coordinates conversations between curators and artists or produces a behind-the-scenes program on the museum. Our team will work on the invitation copy, brain-storm with other colleagues about what conversations would be interesting to an audience. It's been about: How do we transfer the experience of what it's like in the museum into the virtual world? 

So my team and I are jacks-of-all-trades, whether the task is to fundraise, produce a benefit, or manage budgets. Working and interacting with the other departments in the museum is unique and one of the most rewarding things about my job. I can work with people from all different backgrounds — anyone from our security guards to exhibition managers and graphic designers — all to make certain projects and events come to life. The most valuable lesson of working at MoMA is that I'm learning to be an effective communicator in different situations and learning to speak the language of whichever person I'm working with to get things done.

Did you have a relationship to art growing up?

When we were new to Philadelphia and my mom was trying to find things for us to do as a family someone gave her a flyer for a kids’ day at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I remember what it felt like going inside the halls of the museum and being in a place centered on art and creativity. We were sitting there sketching or drawing and I felt such a sense of excitement. That was my first experience at an art museum. I think, for many people, cultural institutions can be very intimidating, as if they are an ivory tower, so I think that’s why investment in arts education is so important. One museum trip could have an imprint on a young person’s life.

What have the protests of this summer made you think about race and the art world? 

I was once at a gallery visit and the artist Rashid Johnson said, and I’m paraphrasing, “It’s not always about being a Black artist, it’s about being an artist.” It is great lately to see so many Black artists whose work is being highlighted in the art world but why wasn't the art world acknowledging the work of Black artists years ago? We have a lot of work to do as a society to get to where people are being celebrated for their work and not just fulfilling some sort of diversity quota. It makes me think about my role in working at cultural institutions. I want to make sure that I’m being hired for the work that I do rather than to be a brown person in an arts institution. 

Have you gotten the feeling in the past that you were being hired or asked to do something because you represented diversity?

At times I have; it's made me feel like I have to prove myself somehow. It brings me back to that feeling of being an impostor. Did I really get hired because I’m qualified or did I get hired for other reasons? It is hard to know. At the same time, I'm working to build the belief in myself that I deserve to be where I am today. I feel that a lot of the microaggressions that my father experienced I’ve experienced in my own way. I think that unconscious biases are real. There’s a language that is spoken with people who come from similar backgrounds. I have been very aware of moments where a person will choose to get someone else involved in a project, making me feel overlooked. 

When you think about who holds positions of power in curatorial roles or as executives, you don’t see that many people of color or women, but I think that is changing. I hope there is a point where hiring a diverse workforce is naturally part of an establishment’s culture. But as much as diverse representation is important within cultural institutions, it’s important to think about diversity within their audiences and potential donors. 

I think that in order for, let’s say museums, to be financially supported in the future, their donors have to reflect the cultural landscape of today. Art is more accessible than it ever has been but museums can still be intimidating to people of certain socio-economic backgrounds. You have kids who’ve grown up in the city and have never been to a museum.

Are there alternative funding models that you think do a better job of being equitable or supporting a diversity of artists? Are most museums wealthy-donor funded?

It’s going to take a really long time to turn the current model around. In the U.S., cultural institutions are dependent on individual donors with means to keep their institutions afloat, whereas in other regions like Europe, funding is subsidized by the government. So usually what happens when you have trustees or major donors that give money, there is an emphasis on serving their needs.

There is acknowledgement that fundraising structures have to change, or a least appeal to a broader audience. I can imagine you’re going to see more crowd-sourcing in order to make museums more equitable and accessible. Does it always make sense for us to have a ticket price that is $2,500 for a seat at the table? There is a bigger conversation to be had about how to create more equitable experiences. For example, you can have a fundraiser where donors pay $25 to view an event, while major donors who have the means pay significantly more to support it. 

How have the recent protests against police brutality and racial injustice affected your thinking about speaking up for yourself and others? 

For a long time I internalized what I was feeling and could only rely on a small group of people who could relate to my own experiences. Since June I feel like I’ve had more of a need to share my voice, one that I repressed for a really long time. I wish I had spoken up before this movement but the courage of others is giving me the courage to share my own experiences in the hopes of helping others.   

What, in jobs past, did you feel like the costs were of coming forward with complaints or raising concerns about unacceptable behavior? 

I think a lot of my fears were of gaslighting. If I were to say something, another person might feel like I was getting carried away or that I was somehow being delusional. I think a lot of that goes back to valuing another person’s voice, a person in power’s voice, more than my own. There were times where I felt like I was just getting carried away. But when you start to hear other people’s stories about what they’ve experienced, a lot of them are similar to what I’ve experienced, and you get the courage to speak up. 

Have there been mentor figures or colleagues who you could talk to and who made you feel less isolated? 

There were particular colleagues, they tended to be Black or brown colleagues, who shared an understanding or connection that meant I could go to them. Part of my life being a Mexican-American woman and something I feel proud of is this empathy that I have based on my own experience and my parents’ experience being discriminated against. Not even always being discriminated against but simply being ignored. I think it can be as simple as asking people about themselves. How are you doing? I think that is something that isn’t done enough. I’ve been in situations with people who don’t even acknowledge that you’re in the room. They’ll talk only to those that they feel closest to or that they are very similar to.

One of the things that I feel has been articulated very well recently is that it is not just aggressive, overt racism in the workplace that is insidious, it is also the racism that manifests as ignoring and invisibilizing other people, which can be really damaging. I don’t think people think of that first when they think of harmful behavior. 

Yes. It doesn’t have to be blatant racism, it can be subtle. Going into a space where you don’t feel like yourself and you feel small on a regular basis — where you don’t feel like enough, like you don’t live up to the expectations of those around you — that’s hard. 

What toll does that sort of environment of limitations take on your work performance? With a different workplace environment, would you be freed up to do more and better things?

It has affected my work in the past. If you’re in a place where you can’t be your authentic self, you’re constantly questioning any idea that you have, you’re constantly second-guessing yourself. The notion of feeling misunderstood is difficult. Sometimes I think people have a pre-conceived notion of who I am, maybe as a “fiery Latina,” and that often comes from an implicit bias. Sometimes me having to tone myself down is a result of worrying that I will come off as aggressive when I’m just trying to be heard. 

Have you talked to your dad about parallels between your work experience and his work experience? 

We’ve definitely talked about it and I’ve addressed it with my therapist [laughs] and some family members. It is almost like I am reliving what he experienced but thirty-five years later. In some ways things haven’t changed. It was hard for my father. A lot of his anger and frustration, he would take some of it out on us. He was powerless in some of those situations, the only Mexican man in his workplace with no one he could talk to about it.

What you’re describing makes it clear that racism is a chain of events that ripples out. Your dad’s experience affects you at home and then you carry it down the generations. What you have to deal with at work during the day is probably something you bring home and have to process in other relationships. It takes energy away from you that you could be using for other things.

For me it is like I’m in a constant state of anxiety. Those feelings consume you. It is really hard. It’s real. I know I am not the only one who has been in situations like this.

I’ve been thinking about my father’s journey a lot. I take it as a reminder that in ways I’m just getting started. He and I have had very similar paths. My parents came here because they really wanted us to focus on our education and to provide new opportunities for us. And they’ve achieved that.  Even though I’ve been fortunate to have many advantages, being a Mexican-American or Latinx person in this country is still not easy. I’m fortunate to live in a city like New York where being different is celebrated but the reality is that you go to a lot of other places in this country and they will have preconceived notions of who you are based on the way you look. 

My interest now is really in working to help others and provide opportunities for people who haven’t been given them. I can definitely advocate for that cause in the museum world. Like for example, why can’t more establishments hire more people of color who weren’t exposed to art at an early age or didn’t go to graduate school for art history? When I think about my own experience when I was at El Museo del Barrio, it was life-changing because I saw myself in the art and through the artists. That’s what I feel really passionate about: providing people with opportunities in the art world who wouldn’t normally have doors opened for them or have connections.