By Peter Monaghan

The time has come for Latinos in the United States to receive their due credit, in the form of a museum on Washington's National Mall alongside the country's other great showcases of culture, says Emma Sepúlveda Pulvirenti, a professor of Spanish at the University of Nevada at Reno.

She was appointed in September to a commission to study the feasibility of such a museum. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid, Democrat of Nevada, who has long known Ms. Sepúlveda, named her to the 23-person panel. "Her commitment to improving the lives of Latinos in Nevada makes her an ideal pick," he said in an e-mail message.

Within two years, commission members must submit a report to Congress and the White House on a plan for the museum, which would celebrate Latinos' art, history, and culture.

"Latinos are 45 to 50 million people living in the United States today," says the professor. "That's a significant number of people, and they were here before the Mayflower. I will find it very difficult to believe that this museum will not become a reality."

Being named to the commission is the latest accomplishment in a professional life of teaching, artistic pursuits, and community activism.

Ms. Sepúlveda is the author or co-author of 22 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, in Spanish and English. One of them records her unsuccessful campaign for the Nevada State Senate in 1994; another collects her columns from the Reno Gazette-Journal. She also edited We, Chile: Personal Testimonies of the Chilean Arpilleristas (Azul Editions, 1996), a compilation of accounts by women whose family members "disappeared" during the Pinochet dictatorship.

In November she received an award from the National Hispana Leadership Institute, in recognition of her many roles as an academic and activist. She also directs the university's Latino Research Center, whose work includes studies of health and demographic issues. In one project, the center has distributed 500 cameras to Latinos throughout the state so they can document their experience.

Her colleagues depict her as charismatic and a talented strategist when it comes to getting things done. "She is very energetic, very passionate, and very active," says Darrell B. Lockhart, an associate professor of Spanish. "I don't know how she finds all the time to do it all."

For one thing, Ms. Sepúlveda says, she gets up early and writes, no matter what. "I'm a person who is extremely focused. When I get in front of a project, I don't stop until I get it done."

Her output is all the more remarkable given that she battles lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease. "I don't know how long my life is going to be," she says, "so I live every day like it's going to be my last."

She is, in any case, accustomed to adversity. Born in Argentina in 1950, she fled with her family to Chile after the fall of President Juan Domingo Perón, in 1955.

As Marjorie Agosín, a Chilean with whom she has collaborated on a number of books, relates in A Woman's Gaze: Latin American Women Artists (White Pine Press, 1998), Ms. Sepúlveda became involved in social causes and worked to influence the poor of Chile to elect Salvador Allende. The overthrow of Allende's socialist government, in 1973, disrupted her political work and university studies. Declared persona non grata, she made an arduous, overland journey to the United States.

At Reno she completed bachelor's and master's degrees in Spanish literature and received her first formal training in photography. Divorced, then remarried, she moved to California to complete a doctorate in Spanish literature at the University of California at Davis, became an American citizen in 1979, and began to make her mark in photography. She often explored the female form as a "subject of representation rather than mute objectified form," as Ms. Agosín notes in her book.

Back in Reno, Ms. Sepúlveda continued to pursue social causes, particularly immigrants' rights and the fate of Chile's political prisoners. She became the first Latina full professor at Reno, has served on more than 25 nonprofit boards, and in 1995 founded Latinos for Political Education, a get-out-the-vote group.

Her stands have sometimes brought hostile reactions. Callers to her home must get past a screening service. Most recently she has been criticized for her opposition to a campus speaking engagement by a founder of the Minuteman Project, which calls for strict enforcement of immigration controls.

"But I'm constantly the focus of hate mail and death threats," says Ms. Sepúlveda, who organized a separate campus forum on immigration at the same time as the Minuteman appearance.

"It must be very difficult to withstand those kinds of attacks, based in ignorance and racism and hatred," says Sheila Leslie, a state legislator, who has known Ms. Sepúlveda since they were in graduate school together. "But she has persevered."

Of her advocacy on behalf of immigrants and Latinos, Ms. Sepúlveda says, "It hasn't been easy, but it has been extremely rewarding. I'm happy that I've taken this road."