El Museo del Barrio is a museum on Manhattan's Museum Mile in East Harlem, founded in 1969 by artist and educator Rafael Montañez Ortiz in response to Puerto Rican and Latino parents, educators, and activists who sought an institution that reflected their community's heritage after being excluded from mainstream museum education programs. Ortiz described the effort as a response to the cultural disenfranchisement he experienced as a Puerto Rican unable to find an authentic ethnic experience in orthodox museums. The museum's permanent collection holds more than 6,500 objects spanning over 800 years of Puerto Rican, Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino art and culture, including pre-Columbian Taíno artifacts, traditional santos de palo carvings and vejigante masks, and twentieth-century painting, sculpture, and photography.