CREAKY WOOD PLANKS lead up the steps into a small cedar farm cabin, a one-room space with all the basic trappings of a home: a small bed, a wood-burning stove, other household odds and ends. Shelves on the walls hold dusty tins and bottles. Beside the cabin is a 1960s-era pickup truck with colorful stickers that read “Arizona” and “Texas” in the front windshield, and a cooler and tools in the back.

The cabin is one of two on exhibit at the free Sea Mar Museum of Chicano/a/Latino/a Culture, the first and only museum that explores Chicano and Latino history in Washington state. The museum focuses on a period that starts in the 1940s, when many Mexican farmworkers came to Central and Eastern Washington from other parts of the U.S. to fill labor shortages caused by World War II. Its focus extends through the late 1960s and early ’70s, during El Movimiento, the push for Mexican American civil rights started by the children of farmworkers.

The goal of the museum, opened in 2019, is to spotlight a significant part of state and community history, says Erasmo Gamboa, the museum’s curator and a University of Washington professor emeritus in the Ethnic Studies department.

“How many books on Washington State or the Pacific Northwest, and how many Pacific Northwest historians or Washington state historians, really devote much attention to the presence of Spanish speakers in our state, even though we were one of the earliest to arrive, second only to the Indigenous communities?” Gamboa asks. “Our presence was here before there was even the United States.”

Behind the nearly 100-year-old cabins, floor-to-ceiling images from El Movimiento rallies line the wall along a curving ramp that leads to the rest of the museum. The images prominently feature the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rep. Phyllis Gutiérrez Kenney, D-Seattle, one of the first Latinos to hold office in the state legislature. Kenney, who served eight terms in the House, grew up in 1940s Wapato, Yakima County, and worked in produce fields from a young age.

Located in South Park, a Seattle neighborhood with a vibrant Latino community, the museum organizes photos and artifacts into themed areas, such as community life, recreation and military service. A display of tools, including canvas belts that workers attached to bags to collect potatoes, explains how workers adapted available materials to suit their needs for long hours in the fields.

Also on view: Spanish-language album covers, military service ephemera and Spanish-language posters and flyers advertising products or promoting calls to action. Sea Mar staff, community members and Latino families east of the Cascades donated all of the items in the collection.

Gamboa, who grew up in Yakima Valley in a farm-working family, was part of the first cohort of students recruited for the University of Washington’s Special Education Opportunity Program. Known today as the Educational Opportunity Program, the recruitment effort was started in 1968 after the Black Student Union held sit-ins and protests to push for a multiracial and multicultural student body, faculty and curriculum.

The museum’s cabins are kits that were sold to Yakima Valley farmers from the 1930s through the ’50s; they were carefully deconstructed and transported from Sunnyside, Yakima County, with remnants of knob-and-tube wiring and other original elements intact.

“You see the rust, you see the dirt, and there’s a purpose in doing that,” says Gamboa. “I’ve been to many museums where the wood is clean, is freshly milled, cut, perfect angles. We don’t want to tell that story. We want to tell it as we saw it and we remembered it.”

Gamboa points out the grooves and carvings in the soft cedar. “There is almost like hieroglyphics there, and it tells so much about the people who were there.”

Immersive artifacts like the cabins can elicit strong feelings: UW president Robert J. Jones, who grew up in a sharecropper family in Georgia, told Gamboa that they reminded him of cabins there; a visiting former schoolteacher had herself lived in one in Eastern Washington, Gamboa says. “She was so traumatized to see it, she refused to go in.”

Designed by Bazan architects, the sleek Sea Mar building was constructed on land that had previously been a casino and restaurant; the museum’s ground floor covers 8,500 square feet. Above the museum, on the second floor, are an adolescent health clinic, community center and Spanish-language radio station KKMO El Rey. The museum will nearly double its capacity when it expands into an adjacent space, expected to open next spring.

The additional space will allow further consideration of the Latino presence in Washington, beyond the Yakima Valley, farm work and civil rights. “There is a very strong entrepreneurship that is emerging from our community, we’re going to explore that,” Gamboa says. “We have in the works a major exhibit being designed on the restaurant industry [that] will take it right up through taco trucks that tell an incredible story themselves.”