Curator Q&A: Why is the Exhibition in Both English and Spanish?

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The baseball exhibition is going to be the Postal Museum's first full scale and fully bilingual exhibit in both English and Spanish.

There were a number of reasons that we decided it was important to do this very early on in the exhibit planning process. First of all, Latino Americans are one of the fastest growing, probably the fastest growing fan base for professional baseball. But not just as fans in the stands, but also a fastest growing group among professional baseball players. Something like 25% of major League Baseball players now are of Latin American origin. So you know this is a community that's very interested and involved in this game and attached to it. And so by making this exhibition fully bilingual, you know it would both, we hoped it would both speak to that Community, but also bring them to the museum because they're they're not, you know, traditional members of our museum going public here at the Postal Museum. So a way to bring in new audiences with a topic that's very relevant and interesting to them in their own language, we thought, was a way to be very welcoming to this community. So we identified that as something we wanted to do very early on.

And it's not just in the language of the exhibition, but also in the content. So all throughout it, you'll see stories of Latin American baseball players historically, and as well as stamps from Latin American countries like the story of the issues from Cuba, and Panama, and Nicaragua featuring baseball. Some of these were issued even before the United States was issuing baseball stamps. Many of these countries had put out their own issues, and we we tell that story in the exhibition.

So it's both language and content that's designed to be appealing to that segment of our audience.