Focus is on people, not political debate

This new museum in San Diego is dedicated to immigration and immigrants. Similar to the museum on Ellis Island. DP

By Leslie Berestein, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

signonsandiego.com: After years of operating out of a tiny downtown office and an exhaustive search for a permanent home, San Diego's first-ever museum dedicated to the topic of immigration is opening its doors in Point Loma next weekend.

The New Americans Museum will be one of a handful of such places around the world, among them the Ellis Island Immigration Museum and others in Paris and in Melbourne, Australia.

But unlike those, the San Diego space formerly known as the New Americans Immigration Museum will open with the word “immigration” conspicuously absent. Board members voted to drop it before the venue opened.

“I'd say, 'New Americans Immigration Museum,' and you couldn't get past 'immigration,' ” museum founder Deborah Szekely said. “When you bring up 'immigration,' the conversation turns to legal and illegal, and it never gets beyond that.”

Getting beyond the politically charged immigration debate is what Szekely, who struggled for seven years to house her museum in San Diego, intends to do. The idea is to honor the immigrant experience and the United States as a nation of immigrants, said Szekely, 86, the Brooklyn-born child of immigrants from Austria and Russia.

“We want to celebrate them,” said Szekely, who spent several years living in Tecate, Mexico, where she and her Hungarian-born husband founded a still-popular health spa decades ago. “We want for people to know their stories and how much they contribute.”
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